Defy Me

Defy MeShatter MeTahereh Mafi

Jun 4

Written By Ally Talley

Shatter Me #5

By Tahereh Mafi

TheStory

On the heels of the events from book four, everything is now an absolute shyte show. Essentially everyone is in their own personal hell after having been captured.

TheReview

I mean… that’s basically it…

We have perspectives from Kenji and Warner now, as opposed to strictly Juliette. Juliette and Warner’s “perspectives” are mostly just them remembering stuff from their pasts. Which was very interesting and so worth it, considering that not much happened to Warner during his captivity.

Juliette on the other hand also experienced atrocious torture at the hands of her captors. My goodness… everyone was so awful to her. Her torture wasn’t super graphic, but it was gnarly.

Yet another perspective - Kenji’s. I was so happy to get inside his head. I’ve always loved him so his viewpoint was fun for me. And only made me love him more.

Now saying, “that’s it,” for the storyline should not be misconstrued for me not liking the book. I loved this one, just like all the others in this series. That being said, for the most part, everyone is just stuck in their own personal captivity-torture-hellscape til about page 215 (maybe the first 2/3 of the book?). The ending was fire and had a big surprise and the storyline moved along about the 2/3 mark.

I feel like this book’s purpose was to show the abominable corruption of The Reestablishment and the detestable lengths they will go to to secure their power. The major theme here was - absolute power corrupts absolutely. And once that theme is clearly laid out and examined, we can move our story along with our MCs.

While this wasn’t my favorite book of the series, it served an important purpose to the overarching purpose of the entire storyline. If you didn’t hate The Reestablishment enough before, this book made it personal.

ONWARD!