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বাংলা E-Paper 📍 Dhaka 📅 Saturday | 10 October 2026, 25 Ashswin 1433 PID registration number 06

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Shatter Me

Published : Saturday, 10 October, 2026 at 12:00 AM

Tahereh Mafi

One gloomy morning, I was staring at the raindrops falling onto the glass panel of my bedroom window. While watching the droplets race one another, I thought about reading something dystopian. The first book that came to my mind was “Shatter Me” by Tahereh Mafi. So, with that thought held up in my mind, I decided to leave the comfort of my bedroom and go towards the drawing room, where my English cubicle bookshelf sat. The shelf held all my English books and a few Bangla books belonging to my father.

I picked up Shatter Me and sat down on the sofa. But just when I was about to read it, Piku, one of my cats, started meowing at me, indicating that my feline friend was hungry. So I had to put my book down and feed him first.

After he was satisfied, I finally opened my book.

The story was rich and full of plots. It is a story about a girl whose touch can kill. The world where the story takes place is a dystopian one, where children with extraordinary abilities exist. The old world has been almost completely erased. Culture, literature, history, and even religion have been targeted by the new government, which attempts to reshape society according to its own ideals.

At the centre of this world is Juliette Ferrars, seventeen years old and locked away because of her ability. She has spent so long isolated from everyone that her own thoughts have practically become her only companions. Through her perspective, we get to experience just how frightening and lonely her world is.

One of the things I found particularly interesting about Shatter Me was its writing style. Tahereh Mafi uses a very distinctive way of portraying Juliette’s thoughts. Words and sentences are sometimes repeated or crossed out, which gives the impression that we are reading her thoughts exactly as they occur inside her head. At first, the style felt unusual to me, but eventually I began to understand why it suited Juliette so well. Her narration feels fragmented because she herself is emotionally fragmented. The dystopian setting also raises some interesting questions about control. The government does not merely control food, resources, or the military. It attempts to control knowledge itself. When a government destroys books, history, culture, and religion, it is not simply removing objects from people’s lives. It is removing pieces of their identity and their understanding of the world.

Reviewed by Zareen Maria

Juliette herself is also an interesting protagonist because her greatest fear is not necessarily what other people can do to her, but what she might do to them. Her ability makes physical contact dangerous, leaving her terrified of hurting anyone who gets too close. That creates an interesting conflict because the very thing that makes her powerful is also the thing that isolates her.

And then there are the other characters, who make the story considerably more complicated. Warner, in particular, brings a very different kind of tension to the story. His fascination with Juliette and his views about her ability create an uncomfortable but compelling dynamic. Adam, on the other hand, provides Juliette with someone who makes her feel less like a monster and more like a person.

Overall, Shatter Me was an interesting introduction to the series for me. The premise immediately caught my attention, and the unusual narration made the book stand out from other dystopian stories I have read. It combines superhuman abilities, government control, romance, psychological conflict, and a world that has been stripped of much of its past.

I also appreciated that the story does not simply present Juliette’s ability as a cool superpower. Her touch is something she has been taught to fear, and that fear has shaped almost every part of her life. The story therefore becomes partly about discovering whether she really is the monster everyone has told her she is.

And that was my experience reading Shatter Me on a gloomy, rainy morning, with a cat who apparently believed that the dystopian fate of the world could wait because his breakfast could not.

The reviewer is a Class XII student at Greenfield School and College