Tahereh Mafi’s Shatter Me series has walked alongside me through every step of my life, and Release Me, the second book in the spin-off series The New Republic was no exception. It was published on April 7, the exact day I left my first corporate job of four years through no planning of my own.
As always, I devoured it in one day, this time without the pretense of savoring Tahereh’s most recent book. It was a time to celebrate. To reflect. To process a milestone yet again with the characters that have held me for over a decade.
I remember finding Shatter Me at my local library, when the cover was still a dark-haired girl in a white dress. It was 2014, and the first trilogy was fully released. It was the first book I ever checked out, as my parents recently left the Jehovah’s Witnesses and now I could read any book in the library. Books with magic, with powers, with women who could stand on their own two feet and defy.
Yet, the first book I ever truly loved was one about a woman in confinement. Juliette’s voice resonated with me strongly and grew with me as I went to high school. As I lost friends, family members, partners, I had Juliette, Kenji, Adam, and Warner, and by the end of the trilogy, they were happy. They had survived. They were ripe with hope. My copy of Ignite Me attended so many beach trips that its pages are full of sand and its cover has fallen off (yet I still keep it, wedged between the other books).
When Tahereh announced Restore Me, I immediately preordered it for its 2018 release, and for three years, I did the same with each new book in the series. I remember reading Defy Me in the middle of the night in 2019, when I was too scared to sleep and too ashamed to seek comfort from my parents, who were separating at the time. I read Imagine Me in the height of COVID-19, when I was sent home by my college. I reread the entire series before the new book was delivered on my doorstep and disinfected by my mom.
I sobbed while Juliette found Emmaline in the tank, and I dreamed of the two sisters while my own twin slept softly across the room. When Juliette’s mind is wiped by Anderson. When we learn that Aaron and Ella loved each other since they were children. That no matter how many times his memory was erased, Aaron always loved her. I feel as if I can still see the polaroid of them, a photo I never truly saw, burned into my memory.
For a long time, I held them privately in my heart, scared to share with anyone else how much I loved the world Tahereh Mafi created. How much hope it gave me as a child who felt an incredible weight. Aaron and Juliette became an aspiration, a dream I couldn’t tell anyone, until I met a man with green eyes and blonde hair who loved me and who listened enough that I could tell him about the world I guarded closely and fiercely with my soul.
When I applied for my senior thesis in poetry, I had to write about a piece of literature that influenced me, and Shatter Me felt most genuine. So, I wrote about Tahereh Mafi’s words, how they have followed me everywhere I’ve went with their lyricism, their angst, the way they broke convention. I shared a little piece of my heart and was given the opportunity to write my thesis, to write poems that felt as close to me as the characters that followed me through it all, my life-long friends.
After voraciously reading Release Me in this new season of life-change, I can only say I am excited to see where the story goes, and I feel honored to see the world Juliette and her friends envisioned come to life. To follow James, who is the perfect blend of Warner, Kenji, and Adam with the angst of a young man with everything to prove. To see how Rosabella continues to be a mirror of Warner. A mirror of the entire series, with her unconditional love for a sibling, her surveilled mind, and her endless sacrifice. To watch Juliette give birth and hope she and her baby (and Warner’s heart) survives.
All that to say, I could never write a genuine review of Release Me. I opened the first chapter, and there was Warner. Adam. Kenji, Juliette, and James. It feels all too much like coming home, like opening a door I can never fully close. I can only hope that these characters continue to walk with me, book by book, as I grow older and so do they.
Autumn Rose Bellan 