Review: Ignite Me

Ignite Me (Shatter Me #3)
Tahareh Mafi
Fantasy, dystopia

With Omega Point destroyed, Juliette doesn’t know if the rebels, her friends, or even Adam are alive. But that won’t keep her from trying to take down The Reestablishment once and for all. Now she must rely on Warner, the handsome commander of Sector 45. The one person she never thought she could trust. The same person who saved her life. He promises to help Juliette master her powers and save their dying world . . . but that’s not all he wants with her.

You can read my reviews of Shatter Me and Unravel Me here.

Shatter Me - a promising debut series off to a really strong start, and like most promising debut series, falls to a disappointing end.

If Unravel me was annoying, Ignite Me was pretty pathetic a lot of the time. 250 pages in, and we're still dealing with Juliette/Adam drama. The war? The big, epic battle we've been building up to for 3 books? Only started at page 369. Out of 408 pages total. Which is to say, nothing actually happens for most of the novel. 

Spoiler + Rant: The character of Adam is completely destroyed in this installment. And despite the fact that I was team Warner, this royally ticked me off. I HATE IT when authors do this- making a totally lovable character become a jerk just to solve a love triangle. It's cheap and crowd-pleasing, not to mention unrealistic. If Adam was a sweetheart for two books straight, he would not become a total ass at 20 something years of age out of nowhere.

It would seem that the whole focus of the story was Juliette's love life drama - the book didn't even pretend to care about defeating the Reestablishment. It was done at the end as an afterthought, and not even properly. Yup, the job wasn't even finished. In Unravel Me, the only reason they didn't kill Anderson was because of the other Supremes, and now they just kill him in 5 seconds flat without a care in the world. Ooooooook.

Oh, and Juliette decided she is qualified to run the world. She makes this decision all on her own, with no plan or something resembling a justified reason to do so. AND EVERYONE JUST ACCEPTS THIS. The entire sector just follow her unquestioningly when she says, let's just kill the ruler and I'll lead instead. WHATEVER. 

Warner explains himself a lot, which is nice, as I always thought he was better than Juliette thought him to be. However, he never DOES answer Adam's totally legitimate accusation of WHY (if he is not evil) did he torture Adam. And no one tells James the truth, nor is the Warner's mother's death addressed by Anderson. In fact, NOTHING is addressed by Anderson. Juliette walks in, shoots, book over. Why does JULIETTE get to kill him? I felt that both Warner and Adam had better claims, and usually in books this kinda thing is symbolic. 'Cuz honestly, Anderson had nothing to do with Juliette's tough life. He never hurt her directly at all...

I did like Warner a lot in Ignite Me (which reminds me- the tattoo was never explained either!!), and Kenji, of course, was the love of my life. The book overally was stupid, but I guess I had a good time reading it. Rating:

Happy weekend!
Love,
Esty