Book Review: Unravel Me

Unravel Me (Shatter Me #2)

By: Tahereh Mafi

Published By: HarperCollins

Publication Date: February 5, 2013

Page Count: 461

Buy it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or IndieBound

Source: Purchased by Reviewer

Audience: Young Adult - Dystopian

This is a book which tore me. I thought the writing was flat out amazing in parts; some of the passages were literally so beautifully crafted I wanted to wrap them in tissue paper to keep forever. I have never highlighted so much on my Kindle!! However, I felt that nothing much happened for most of the book. If I split my rating I'd give it a 5 for writing but a 2 for plot... I can't bring myself to give the overall rating higher than 3 birdies because I really had to push myself through this one. 

In Unravel Me, Juliette has a number of things to think about. She is free, but also not free at all as she has traded imprisonment for obligation. She can’t spend as much time with Adam as she would like because she has to train and try and develop her gift. He is also maddeningly absent at other times, and she has no idea what is going on. This summarizes perhaps a good two thirds of the book; she tries to work stuff out, thinks she might have got it, and then collapses back into confusion. Sometimes her emotions fly out of control, and it is during those times that her powers present themselves, and she realizes she is a serious threat to everyone.

 

Happily, Juliette starts to get a grip towards the end of the novel, but not until she has become thoroughly conflicted by her feelings about Warner. He was her captor in the first book, he can touch her without pain and death, and now he says he loves her. If I hadn’t read Destroy Me, the novella which falls between Shatter Me and Unravel Me, I might have been a bit confused or disbelieving about that, so I would recommend readers to ensure they check that out before diving into Unravel Me. I actually found myself much more interested in Warner than Adam by the end of this book, but honestly, neither of them seems right for Juliette. The character I most enjoyed reading about was Kenji. He is cheeky, full of himself and has a well buried mysterious past, which is clearly supposed to be horrifying. I could have read a lot more about him, and hope that in the future he will play more of a role. Sadly, as he is an accessory character, I expect to be disappointed in this respect.

 

All in all I found Unravel Me a bit of a disappointment, despite how well it was written there was too much angst and not enough actual action to keep me interested. It took me quite a while to read and I really thought about putting it down once or twice. It was only the writing which pulled me through – I have never read such delicious passages written about so little before. I hope that this is just a symptom of being a middle book in a trilogy, as by the end Juliette showed some very real signs of becoming feisty and decisive... a change which I relish and look forward to reading about in the next installment of the series, be it a 2.5 novella (please be about Kenji!!) or the final book of the trilogy.

Summary:

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it's almost
time for war.

Juliette has escaped to Omega Point. It is a place for people like her—people with gifts—and it is also the headquarters of the rebel resistance.

She's finally free from The Reestablishment, free from their plan to use her as a weapon, and free to love Adam. But Juliette will never be free from her lethal touch.

Or from Warner, who wants Juliette more than she ever thought possible.

In this exhilarating sequel to Shatter Me, Juliette has to make life-changing decisions between what she wants and what she thinks is right. Decisions that might involve choosing between her heart—and Adam's life.