I confess, this trilogy has me completely baffled. Half the time I’m beyond frustrated. The other half? I’m fangirling quietly and laughing out loud.
Thank you, Allen & Unwin, for the ARC! Ignite Me by Tahereh Mafi hit shelves on February 4th, 2014.
Juliette now knows she may be the only one who can stop the Reestablishment. But to take them down, she’ll need the help of the one person she never thought she could trust: Warner. And as they work together, Juliette will discover that everything she thought she knew-about Warner, her abilities, and even Adam-was wrong.
Tahereh Mafi is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the SHATTER ME series. She was born in a small city somewhere in Connecticut and currently resides in Santa Monica, California, where she drinks too much caffeine and finds the weather to be just a little too perfect for her taste. When unable to find a book, she can be found reading candy wrappers, coupons, and old receipts. SHATTER ME is her first novel.
Foreign rights have sold in 25+ territories to-date and film rights have been optioned by 20th Century Fox. Her work is represented by Jodi Reamer of Writers House, LLC.
I’m so confused about my feelings for this series! I didn’t love Shatter Me, but everyone assured me I’d like book #2, Unravel Me. They were right. I adored it! So I dove into my ARC of Ignite Me with grave happiness (mostly hoping for: Warner).
I happily give it 4-stars, but (to me) it had a lot of problems. What kind? Fundamental problems! Like the fact that this is a 400-page book the action doesn’t start until page 340! The politics have holes so large you could fall into an abyss and be lost forever. And the realism? It’s just not there.
Ignite Me is all about the adorable CHARACTERS. This is what cemented the series as being labelled “good”, for me. The characters are breathtakingly awesome! They are so well written, and so well developed. I’m just…floored. I’m 100% attached to all the main attractions in this book (one, er, cough, in particular).
Juliette?
She’s our faithful narrator from book one. I love how she’s grown up. N’aww! All big and strong and punching people now. Bless her death-inducing skin. She’s no longer the insane crying girl we met in an asylum. I love this about Juliette. She changed, but she kept who she was.
Kenji?
Kenji gets mentioned before the love interests because: he’s Juliette’s best friend. He. is. awesome. I’ve never read an epic series where there was a GUY who wasn’t attracted to the female main character. They stayed just friends! This is amazing and ground-breaking! It. is. possible! Woot!
Kenji is quite possibly my favourite character. His is drop-dead hilarious. I laughed out loud! I never do that when I’m reading. And not just once…every second chapter. Everything that pours out of his mouth is sassy and hilarious. He is brilliance. Pure briliance.
“Who? Kenji?”
Another nod.
“Oh,” I say, blinking in surprise. “He’s my best friend.”
Warner looks at me. Raises an eyebrow.
I stare back. “Is that going to be a problem?”
He stares into his hands, shakes his head. “No, of course not.”
(Psst! That’s how you know Warner is a keeper!)
Adam?
Weeell…hello, Adam. What happened to you? I feel so sorry for Adam. He’s the love interest in book #1, Shatter Me. He’s quite moody and serious. I love that. I love how the author hasn’t labelled the spontaneous “happy” people as the “good guys” and the moody and quieter people as the “bad guys”. This book breaks so many stereotypes! I feel sorry for Adam, but I don’t regret Juliette breaking up with him in book #2. I never regretted it in the entire book. Because…
There’s Warner.
Warner is the villain. Aw, no he’s not! I mean, he was quite villainous in the first book, but keep your eyeballs in your head, it was all a show! He had to be evil, but he’s not really. But pyscho? Oh, he’s definitely one little psycho lollipop. While he spent a lot of the book moping and being “wounded” (so unattractive, dude), he continued his smoothness. I have shipped Warner and Juliette since book #2. I shipped them SO HARD in Ignite Me I nearly drowned in my tear-induced ocean for their shipping to sail on.
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It’s a love triangle, yes it is, but it’s a fabulous love-triangle. I don’t usually say that! To date, the only love triangles I’ve read and liked (and I’ve read a lot of them) are The Hunger Games, Splintered, and Ignite Me. This series has renewed my faith in love-triangles. Yay!
I liked this triangle because both love-interests were well developed characters. I honestly couldn’t tell, at some points, who Juliette would pick! Although, in this book, I knew if she didn’t pick Warner I was going to toss her into said ocean of my tears and watch her drown. Gosh. Adam was a jerk. Kenji even said it! When Kenji says Adam is a jerk, you’d better believe it.
Adam said a lot of cruel things to Juliette because a) he was in love with her and she stopped loving him, b) she broke his heart, and c) she picked someone he hated over him. Adam had been abused all his life! I get why he was that way. But he was horrible to Juliette. You can’t claim to love someone and then be cruel to them when they don’t love you back. That’s not love. He wanted her to be a quiet sweet girl, and when she changed, he couldn’t let her go.
Sad. But suck it up, mate, THERE IS WARNER.
I’m sorry! I’ve only talked about the character so far…but in terms of everything else, there’s not much to talk about. And THAT is the problem, I feel.
There is no action. There is talking. Talk, talk, talk. Break hearts. Fix hearts. Argue. Break more hearts. Bond. Express feelings. Talk, talk, talk.
WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE GO BREAK SOMETHING FOR ME?
Less than 100-pages of actually doing stuff doesn’t make a “heart-stopping” conclusion as Goodreads declares. It makes a comfortable conclusion. The entire book was brain-numblingly comfortable! It was! If the author hadn’t hurt a main character up till now, I didn’t think she’d hurt anyone properly in the last book. I didn’t think the ending would be rainbows (and it isn’t), but I was safe in the fact that she felt like a “kind” author.
It was nice on my feels…buuut, my critical analysing brain worked overtime.
Plus, sorry, but the entire world didn’t have any concrete politics or backstory. The politics didn’t make sense. What was everyone doing? What did the soldiers do? Why didn’t people have electricity and food? What was happening? How can the mutants just pop up and say, “Sit tight! We’ll take over and save you!” and everyone believe them? Why did Juliette sometimes get shot and not others? Why was Warner “good at everything”? It’s not logical. Why did Castle ever have any influence on anyone at all!?? He was a snivelling scientist with not a political or leadership bone in his body.
Where did they get the Spandex to make their suits in this dystopian climate?!
The ending basically looks like this:
With more of this:
And I kind of wish it’d done this:
Ignite Me is definitely an amazing book with truly fabulous writing and TO DIE FOR characters. Add in a bit of plot and it would have knocked my socks off.
Cait thinks Ignite Me should have used the phrase, “We have a Juliette”…instead of, you know, the “we have a Hulk”. It would have worked. She has taught her 3-year-old nephew to say say, “Mime is a Hulk.” She considers that good aunty-ing. Currently she’s reading FALL FOR ME in which angels kiss vampires. (Can you imagine their children?)
YAAAYYYYY IM SO GLAD YOU LIKED IT <3 Now that I think about it, its definitely true that there's not enough action. I was so caught up in all the characters and their relationships that I just totally forgot about everything else. I definitely would've loved to have seen more about how the world came to be as well but that's like a common mishap in Dystopians >< Loved your review as always! Wishing for more Tahereh ~
It's becoming more and more common for dystopians to skip all that world building stuff, eh? *sigh* I LIKE that stuff! It makes it seem more real for me. Buuuut, I mean, who can complain when they're reading pages of Kenji/Warner/Juliette? Not me. Noooot me.
It's so hard to end a series properly, most authors bugger it right up. At least this one sounds like it's done the series justice. Let's face it, who cares as long as there's Warner. I haven't read it yet, but if Warner gets shut out, I'll go off my nut. I rarely fan girl, but holy crap his character is all kinds of knicker dropping hot. Awesome review, seen Warner and had to rush right over.
OHMYGOSH YOU MAKE ME LAUGH SO HARD!!! YES. The characters were fabulous. I think without Warner I wouldn't have been such a fan. That's villainy done right. (But, seriously, he was never a villain. It was debunked!)
I've never read the book, but I just might! The cover looks gorgeous.
I'm absolutely in love with those covers.
Perhaps spontaneously, I picked up a copy of Shatter Me at the library. Needless to say, I was both disappointed and in love. Was I surprised? Uh, yes. I'm not sure if I will be reading the rest, but… For research purposes… You know, characters… And love triangles…But then again, I'm reading Delirium and Starters (the former, eh. The latter, UH YES PLEASE!) and I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to reading the last two in the Juliette Chronicles.But I did read the end of Ignite Me.- Tabby
YOU MUST READ THE REST! I was exactly the same after Shatter Me…I kind of thought…meh, I won't bother. But my friends told me to and I'm SO glad I did. So I'm passing on the advice…the rest are better. 😉 I haven't read Delirium yet! I want to, although after Panic I'm not so big on Lauren Oliver at the moment. I didn't like Starters. >_<
It's is kind of disappointing when the amazing characters don't ever do anything. . . amazing. But they sound awesome, I'm tempted to read the book just for them. 🙂 Kenji sounds so cool! I want to do that one day. Write a guy/girl best friends relationship that remains that way. Like, "What?! He's like. . . a brother. . . or weird cousin. That would just be gross."By the way, I love the Hulk gif and the last Spiderman gif. Now I really want to see Spiderman 2. . . .
I want to see Spiderman 2 as well! Okay, totally side-tracking there… XDI just wanted to learn more about the world! It never went into it, and I just never felt blown away at any stage. Huge disappointment to me. But the characters, weeeell, I'll probably overlook anything for these adorable characters.
I had to stop reading this post because it's sort of spoilery (which is not big deal because spoilers don't bother me much), but I now know I need to get my act together and reread SHATTER ME then read bk 2 and 3. I had no idea the love interest changes! I love that! I seriously want to ignore my homework and just read these books. Sigh.(P.S. thanks for stopping by The Hiding Spot!)
It's not so spoilery for Ignite Me, but it's DEFINITELY spoilery for Unravel Me…so I totally understand! I was pretty surprised myself that we didn't stick to the same dude from book 1, but that in itself I think is pretty revolutionary.
Yeah…I felt the same way….I didn’t dislike this one by any means, but it definitely wasn’t my favorite book of the series. I felt like Tahereh wanted us to be Team Warner the whole time through, ya know? Even though I’m completely team Warner, I have to admit that she never really gave Adam at least a viable chance, and that bothered me. At least there were a lot of Kenji moments to make up for that though!. And, yeah…the ending was a bit rushed in my opinion, and I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought so. Not only was it rushed, but there were so many unanswered questions…Anyway, as always, brilliant review Cait! Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts! Glad you liked this one overall!
Oh…by the way I LOVE your banner! It's AMAZING!
I totally didn't make that banner! Oops…I probably should have mentioned that, right? I just fond it on the internet somewhere…I do feel like the only option was really Warner, but at the same time, I felt she did dive into Adam's character. He just was so immature at times! I also didn't really understand how Adam's image of his abusive dad could match Warner's military dad. That dad sure was getting around and doing stuff really fast…
This book is just so character driven! The characters are so damn strong and AWESOME! I loved this book, and thought it was a pretty good ending to this series. Though I had some problems with the ending as well (WHO CARES? WE HAVE WARNER! and swoony sweaty scenes!)I thought the action at the end of the book was over too soon and too easily over and won (don't I sound like a brat?!), I felt like there was this big build up to the final battle and then it was like a freaking whirlwind and it was over… definitely rushed 🙁 BUT WE HAD WARNER! (<- I always find myself getting back to this point…) I love warner, I loved him in Destroy Me and in Unravel Me (Fracture Me only put emphasis on what I already knew… that Adam just wasn't the guy for Juiliette) Great Review!
I find myself always back at the BUT WE HAD WARNER point…but it's really bugging me that that's the like a loop-hole! When normally I'd have sooo much to say on how the ending (you are totally right) WAS so fast and easy. I never for a moment thought anything would go badly wrong.
Oh my god, I love this review!!! Even though I haven't read this series yet, it's still super entertaining to read. Now you really made me want to start a new series. Good work Cait 😛
Eeep! That makes me haaaapy! I hope you do read it…I want to know what you think!
Yep, everyone pretty much says the same thing about the pacing. Mostly drama and not action. But yay-Warner 🙂 I'm really happy with the way this series ended.
I am too. It leaves me feeling very satisfied, like I know everyone can go off and have happy lives filled with cake and have babies that disappear and blow-up like Jack Jack or whatever. It's nice. Comforting.
I've read part of Shatter Me, but ended up giving up on it. I honestly wasn't feeling it at all. I've heard that this series does improve though and your review supports this. Warner also sounds quite wonderful ^.^Amazing review!
I know how you feel about Shatter Me! I struggled with it A LOT. But, honestly, if you have the time and like super-heroes it's worth going to the end. The characters are excellently written.
Sounds wonderful, I'm a fan of love triangles but the villain here sounds interesting 🙂 Those superhero graphics for the ending looks really promising! I still have to get into this series. Lovely review Cait!Jeann @ Happy Indulgence
I haven't read the series yet – and I feel like I'm repeating a lot, XD – but I think it's on my TBR list and one of my friends is officially bugging me to read it. I just forgot about it….But who wants to remember over 2K books and growing? :p~Sophia @ Bookwyrming Thoughts
I also thought that this installment was way more character-driven than action-based, but I like that in a book most of the time since the characters can make or break a story for me. I do think that the ending was rushed and wished a little more attention had been paid to the actual revolution, but I'm pretty satisfied with this conclusion. And I loved this triangle, too, because it does what I'm always stressing that YA romances should do and it shows that your first love doesn't equate to your forever love, you know what I mean? Great review…so happy to find someone else to squee with over this finale!