The Book That Made Me Root for a Villain Named Warner

A girl who can’t touch anyone, locked in a cell, being watched

Here’s the setup, and it’s genuinely a good one even if the execution wobbles. Juliette has been locked in an asylum cell for 264 days because her touch kills. Not metaphorically. She touches skin, something happens, people die. She hasn’t touched another human being in almost a year when the story opens, and Mafi spends that opening stretch inside Juliette’s head so tightly you can feel the walls. Then she gets a cellmate, Adam, who she recognizes from her old life, and then the Reestablishment (the vague fascist government running what’s left of the world) pulls her out of her cell for a very specific and very bad reason: they want to weaponize her.

Enter Warner. Blond, terrifying, a sector commander barely out of his teens who is obsessed with Juliette in a way that should read as deeply alarming and does, and also somehow works. I want to be honest about this because it’s the thing everyone actually talks about when they talk about this book. Warner is a villain for most of book one. He is manipulative, he threatens people, there’s a whole moment with him and a gun and Adam that is genuinely disturbing. And people, myself included eventually, ended up rooting for him anyway. I don’t fully know what that says about me. I do know Mafi built him that way on purpose, and it worked exactly as designed, which is either impressive craft or a little bit of a trap, depending on your mood that day.

The strikethrough thing, and why it’s not just a gimmick

Let’s talk about the prose, because it is the whole conversation around this book. Mafi writes Juliette’s narration in these long, tumbling, metaphor-drunk sentences, and she uses strikethrough text constantly, showing you the thought Juliette almost had before she second-guesses herself. Something like her wanting to say one thing, striking it out, and saying something smaller and safer instead. On the page it looks like this: I want to touch him ~~I want him to hold me~~ I take a step back. (Not an exact quote, just the rhythm of it.)

The first time I hit one of those strikethroughs I was sitting on my kitchen floor because my apartment was too hot to sit anywhere else, and I remember laughing out loud, not meanly, just surprised. It’s a genuinely clever way to show a character who has been taught her whole life not to trust her own feelings. It mimics dissociation. It’s a formatting trick doing real psychological work. And then it happens again. And again. By page 150 I wanted to scream a little, because Mafi does not know when to stop pulling a lever once she knows it works, and this book is guilty of that same overkill everywhere, not just the strikethroughs. Fingers described as birds. Eyes described as oceans, weather systems, doors. If you have low tolerance for that kind of thing, and plenty of readers legitimately don’t, this book will exhaust you by chapter ten.

Here’s the thing though. I let it exhaust me and kept reading anyway, because underneath the excess there’s a real central question: what happens to a girl who’s been told her whole life that she’s a monster, the second someone treats her like she isn’t. That’s not a new YA question. But Mafi commits to it hard, and Juliette’s arc from someone who apologizes for existing to someone who starts to test the edges of her own power is legitimately satisfying, even when the plot around her is thin as tissue paper.

Because it is thin. The worldbuilding is vague to the point of frustrating (what exactly is the Reestablishment, how did the environment collapse, what do the “sectors” actually look like day to day), and a lot of the middle of the book is Juliette having intense feelings in a room rather than anything happening. I’m not going to pretend that’s a strength. It’s the book’s biggest weakness, and the sequels only partially fix it.

This is a book about a girl learning that the thing she was taught to fear in herself might actually be the thing that saves her, and Mafi never lets you forget that lesson costs something.

About Tahereh Mafi

Tahereh Mafi was in her twenties, unpublished, an Iranian American writer living in Southern California, when she wrote Shatter Me after a string of rejections on an earlier manuscript. She’s talked openly about writing it in a kind of controlled rebellion, throwing craft rules out the window on purpose after being told to write more conventionally. Since then she’s built a genuinely substantial career, the Shatter Me universe alone is six books deep, plus she’s written other YA fantasy series and a picture book about wearing a hijab that came out of her own experience as a kid getting asked invasive questions about it. She’s not a one-book writer who got lucky. She’s someone who found a voice nobody asked for and made people care about it anyway.

If Warner wrecked your judgment too, read these next

If you want your own copy to argue with, grab one, because this is a book you’ll want to underline and complain about in equal measure.

• Legend by Marie Lu, for the same dystopian-with-a-morally-grey-boy energy, but with actual plot momentum
• The Selection by Kiera Cass, if the romance-first pacing is what you’re really here for
• Divergent by Veronica Roth, for the government-testing-a-girl’s-powers setup done with a bit more world logic
• Cinder by Marissa Meyer, if you want the dystopian-fairytale mashup without quite so much strikethrough

For your book club

1. Does Warner’s arc earn the redemption fans give him, or is that mostly readers filling in gaps Mafi left deliberately open?
2. How does the strikethrough narration change how you trust Juliette as a narrator?
3. Is the vague worldbuilding a real flaw, or does it work because the book is really about interior experience, not politics?
4. Would this book land the same way if Juliette’s power were less obviously a metaphor for female rage and touch-starvation?
5. Did your feelings about Warner change your feelings about the book itself?