Synopsis:
I have a curse
I have a gift
I am a monster
I’m more than human
My touch is lethal
My touch is power
I am their weapon
I will fight back
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.
My thoughts:
5/5 stars.
If you follow me on any of my other social media handles, you’ll know how crazy obsessed I am with this series. Re-reading was amazing, I attempted to re-read this back in 2017, about 3-4 years since I read it for the first time, and I never finished my re-read. I read it yesterday for the first time in its native language, and I got completely blown away again by how immensely unique this book was. While reading it, I had constant deja vus to the first time I read it and how completely mind blown I was with every single thing about this book.
Let’s start off with the characters. The characters in this book, Juliette, Warner, Adam. They’re all so incredibly flawed in one way or the other and it makes them in the weirdest way the most relatable.
Juliette’s very well portrayed, her voice is very grounding. Althoug she is facing her fears and has been put in solitary confinement for 264 265 days, she stays sane and human and honestly I love her so much. She cares too much about stuff. I used to do so as well. I still do. It’s very interesting to read about your own emotions through the eyes of another.
Warner is the embodiment of perfection. Seriously, this guy takes the term ‘control freak/perfectionist’ to a whole new level, and if I’m being honest, I kind of really love that about him. It’s rather refreshing to see such an inhumane character still display raw emotions and the way he calls Juliette ‘love’ and ‘my dear’ honestly makes me melt into a puddle and then solidify so I can beg him on my knees, if he could please love me. I remember falling for him, so immensely hard, the first time I read it and he called her ‘my dear’. (It was translated into ‘lieverd’ in Dutch which is my favourite term of endearment in Dutch)
Adam, I have never really cared about Adam, but after all of these years spent re-reading the other books, going into this one I wasn’t as spiteful towards him in my mind as I usually am. And what do you know, he actually kind of grew on me. Who would have thought? Adam is the mix between Juliette and Warner. He reveals nothing but on the inside he cares too much, just like Juliette does.
Readers have been calling this a love triangle, and I have never really seen it since I have always had my heart set on Warner but I finally noticed it. There is a slight love triangle. However this love triangle isn’t all that big in the first book so it is very easy to mistake it for jealousy or possessiveness.
The writing style of this book. Hell, the writing style of Tahereh Mafi overall is wonderful. I read the first page yesterday morning and it made me yearn for a marker. I want to annotate and highlight almost every page in this book. Her writing style is poetic, lyrical. It’s insane how obsessed I am with it. It’s truly a work of art. Prose at one of its finest. I am jealous, I wish I could write like that.
I want to recommend this book to a certain type of reader, but the thing with this book is, that you either put it down because of the writing style/Juliette or you keep reading, like me, because you’ve become strangely enamoured by it.
This book; you either love it, or you hate it. There isn’t necessarily an inbetween.
ReadingInsideaBellJar 