Review: Restore Me

Restore Me by Tahereh Mafi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's a new Shatter Me novel, starting a new trilogy, no less.



Like Iron Gold, Restore Me - the latest in one of my favorite trends in YA and SFF and combinations thereof, the continuation of a series that reached its logical conclusion some years back - is more of a 4.5, but I'll round it up to a 5. Like with Iron Gold, Restore Me experiments with more POVs than any of the main novels of the original series - though Mafi only gives us two POVs as opposed to Brown's four. Those two POVs, Juliette and Warner, alternate long chapters throughout this book. Long, mostly. Not always. But often. And many times, when the chapters are shorter, it's because Mafi's employing some kind of weapons-grade cliffhanger, a very tantalizing hint about some dirty secret underlying Juliette's and Warner's post-apocalyptic life. These cliffhangers often take long enough to resolve that the novel tends to have a disjointed feel - quite appropriate given that the whole point of Restore Me is upending the balance left at the end of Ignite Me, the one book where Mafi didn't have Juliette's narration filled with numerous strikeouts. The strikeouts return here, in old diary entries, but they still make sense for making us return to Juliette's distressed POV.

I've seen a few readers complain that Juliette's and Warner's character arcs regress too much in this book - and since there's a fair few parallels between them and Mara and Noah in The Becoming of Noah Shaw, I don't blame people for making these comments. I also don't blame people for objecting to a certain blatant display of transphobia, in which an already-villainous character cements that status by doing just about everything transphobic you can think of - misgendering, deadnaming, the works. To Mafi's credit, though, said transphobic villain is called out immediately by just about every other character in the scene - including the trans woman she mocks, who tells her in Spanish, unless I miss my guess, something along the lines of threatening to take her body to her room and dismember it.

There are numerous pluses to Restore Me, though. Among them, the usual fast-flying prose, not unlike any of Mafi's previous novels. The aforementioned balance-upending for Juliette and Warner, proving that there's still so much more that they don't know about each other - and alongside that, some blowing-open of Mafi's world-building skills to King's Cage levels. Seeing more people coming in from around the world, we get racial representation all over the place - and many new characters make heavy use of their native languages, leading to a number of multilingual conversations using English, Spanish, Arabic, and more all at once. Mafi even throws in a few nods to present-day racial issues, to illustrate how the apocalypse essentially forced all those issues aside and led to a less bigoted world - though, unfortunately, not un-bigoted, as attested by the scene of transphobia. And going back to the balance-upending and character development, Adam makes it clear that he's recognizing the error of his ways and wants to redeem himself. He doesn't get to do much in this book, but there'll be two more, so I'm counting on Mafi to give him a little more attention further down the line.

My favorite parts of the book, of course, are the scenes between Juliette and Warner - maybe not quite as iconic as their love scenes in Books 2 and 3, but still pretty powerful stuff, especially given that it's erotic but not explicit. (Certainly not to circa-2016 SJM levels, lol.) Kenji, of course, is my absolute favorite character, and since I'm hearing rumors that he might be bi, this reader also hopes Mafi will give me a little on-page-confirmed rep to make this book officially #ownvoices reading for me.

And then there's that cliffhanger. Quite an Aveyardian one that still, nearly twelve hours after I finished the book, has me totally scratching my head.

Two more Shatter Me books? You know I'm ready to snap them up. I'll be buying them the second each one hits shelves!

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