Shatter Me

Shatter Me was published on 15 November 2011 and became the first book in a series that now runs to seven novels and a set of novellas. Tahereh Mafi wrote it in the first person and printed the text with lines struck through and sentences repeated, so that the page reads as a diary kept by someone who has been alone for a very long time. That presentation, rather than the plot, is what readers tend to remember first, and the publisher kept the device through the rest of the series.

The world is a dystopia built on a simple piece of speculative biology: a handful of people have been born with abilities that the government classifies as weapons. Juliette is one of them, and the story moves from her isolation to a compound where she is offered both protection and a use. Warner, the officer who runs her case, and Adam, the soldier who shares her cell, are the two poles of the first book, and the loyalty both of them want from her is the conflict that carries the series into the later volumes.

Mafi's fiction sits with the young adult dystopias that followed The Hunger Games, and hers is the most romantic of them, with the romantic plot and the political plot sharing the same pages. The author has said the book came out of an interest in human nature and in how people overcome obstacles, and the series was reissued in collected editions after it found a second audience online. A television adaptation has been in development.