Shatter Me by Taherer Mafi(Unravel Me & Ignite Me, plus novellas Destroy Me & Fracture Me)As
Shatter Me by Taherer Mafi(Unravel Me & Ignite Me, plus novellas Destroy Me & Fracture Me)As a rule, I don’t read books with girls in fancy dresses on the cover. It’s been a good rule, thus far. So if my edition of Shatter Me had pictured its other cover, I would not have read it. In a day. It was a $1.99 download on BoobBub and there was an eye on the cover - that’s safe territory for me. (See Lexicon, Wonder, Welcome to Nightvale, 1984, Before I Go to Sleep, See Jane Run, and Archetype among others. For more info on “judging books by their covers,” see my 20s.)I completed the main three-book series in three days. I stayed up until 7:58am to complete the first book. My only thought was “Huh, I haven’t seen the sun rise in a while.”If The Gone Series by Michael Grant and The Trylle Series by Amanda Hocking had a baby that was raised by Pittacus Lore’s I am Number Four and babysat by X-Men in a neighborhood created by Julianna Baggott (of The Pure Series), that’s a pretty good description of baby Shatter Me. Shatter Me follows Juliette, a teenager with a “killer touch” who is isolated because of her maleficent gift. Be warned: there is an inordinate amount of teenage angst and libidinous romance. To my adult-self, this is deliciously satisfying because: 1. I once was a teenager and 2. I am not a teenager anymore. I read about a study, probably in Psychology Today (because that makes me a psychological authority), about the contrasting responses of children, teens and adults regarding rewards. The subjects played a video game and when they scored, they could win one gold bar, two gold bars or three gold bars on the screen. When they scored in the game, the brain reward center of the children and adults was proportionally lit up. One gold bar lit their brains a little bit, two bars, more, and three bars a whole lot. Which makes sense. The teenagers’ reward centers, however, only lit up when they got three bars. It was all or nothing with them. I like to keep this study in mind when I’m teaching teens and reading YA literature. Because everything is life and death in their books and in their lives. But in a way, I suppose that’s why we enjoy YA fiction so much as adults. Not because we want to be 16 again, because, I assure you, we don’t. But to vicariously visit a time when our rational and emotional selves were in their nascent stages, before right and wrong were diluted by shades of gray. Because in a world of all or nothing, there was a time when we really could have it all. -- source link
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