By Tahereh Mafi
Hardcover, 352 pages
Published November 15th 2011 by Harper/HarperCollins (first published November 1st 2011)
ISBN 0062085484 (ISBN13: 9780062085481)


Blurb

Juliette hasn’t touched anyone in exactly 264 days.

The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette’s touch is fatal. As long as she doesn’t hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don’t fly anymore, and the clouds are the wrong color.

The Reestablishment said their way was the only way to fix things, so they threw Juliette in a cell. Now so many people are dead that the survivors are whispering war— and The Reestablishment has changed its mind. Maybe Juliette is more than a tortured soul stuffed into a poisonous body. Maybe she’s exactly what they need right now.

Juliette has to make a choice: Be a weapon. Or be a warrior.

The Good

  1. The end. I don’t say that in a necessarily mean way, this book was just not for me. I felt like the beginning drug a LOT, and once things really picked up and the plot got interesting, it was almost over. I wish Mafi had made the beginning of the book as fast-paced and exciting as the ending.


The Bad

  1. The Rambling.  My main problem with this book was the overuse of similes and metaphors. Mafi says the same thing fifty million different ways to make sure you REALLY get what she’s trying to say. Except in the many cases where her similes and metaphors don’t even make sense.  Here’s one of the best: “My heart fails for a moment. There are 400 cotton balls caught in my windpipe.”

  2. The characters.  I didn’t have any interest or sympathy for any of them.  At all.  The book could have easily ended in a huge fiery explosion in which every single person in the book dies and I wouldn’t have shed a single tear.  Mafi simply did not construct believable or likable characters.

  3. Trying too hard.  I think this is the overall problem with the book—the author was simply trying too hard to make a story poetic and artsy when it just wasn’t.  If you could chop this book up into pieces, the whole first half of it I would give a 1 star rating, the second half I would give a 3.5 star, so I’ve met in the middle with a 2 stars.  The main reason the second half of the book was so much better than the first is due to Mafi’s focus on the actual plot rather than the million literary and poetic devices she was attempting to cram into the first part of the book.


Favorite Quote

"Hate looks just like everybody else until it smiles."


Overall Rating