I went into this book with high expectations and it didn’t disappoint. Very excited to continue the series. Age 15+

Really interesting premise, love the dystopian future and limited abilities setup. The beginning really drew me in and I am excited to see what happens in the next book. I’ve seen spoilers online for elements of the series so I am very keen to understand how things develop from where we’ve been left in book 1! Cool writing style and well written. 

I’m so confused on who the target audience is for this???? There’s scenes like

Warner making Juliette torture that baby

but then it’s written so much like a child 😭😭 The writing is seriously so underdeveloped and irritating, like with the weird repetition of words with no commas like “I want to be angry angry angry” or similes and metaphors that make no sense (not to mention the sheer amount of times the word shatter was mentioned dude) and it all took away from an admittedly promising premise of a story but just with poor execution. Like the concept of this 1984-esque dystopian world and Juliette

among many others

having this dangerous condition and a traumatic upbringing and her whole experience in the asylum was all very promising, like I loved the beginning of this book. I really just think the romance ruined it a bit. I feel like the book would have really benefited from the delving into and working on of Juliette’s trauma and that she recovered her sense of self independently from others before diving into romance. It was just very strange to me to have these raw and emotional scenes with Juliette and Adam and then

having near-sex scenes in a fucking tank or in the very next room to Adam’s ten year old brother???? I especially found that shower scene so incredibly strange because of how quick it escalated from Juliette baring so much emotion and trauma to then Adam picking her up and putting her in the shower and then kissing her?? Like I do think Adam all in all is an ‘okay’ guy, apart from him ignoring Juliette’s consent to not touch her several times but most of their romance scenes were just so off putting in context.

And let’s talk about fucking Warner. I’ve read the descriptions of later books in the series and have seen him alllllll over tiktok so I know how things with him end up going, but right now he is anything but redeemable in my eyes. He’s psychotic and creepy, and his advances towards Juliette are nothing but rape-y.

Juliette accepting his advances before shooting him was assault. She didn’t have any choice at all; it was either let Warner…do that, or she would die. And I fucking hate that in that scene, Juliette starts to enjoy it, that she hadn’t, what, realised that she wanted it? That’s a dangerous thing to portray for sure, because that’s how rapists think! In my eyes, there is so way in hell their relationship can develop to be something where they can end up together in a healthy manner. I don’t care if he’s traumatised or has the ability to “change”, there is no coming back from that. He’s scary and I probably will be dropping this series because I cannot even handle that happening.