One of the popular dystopian books of 2011, Shatter Me follows seventeen-year-old Juliette, an imprisoned teenager with a power so deadly that it terrifies even herself. Juliette lives in a world destroyed by war and waste, and run by a regime called the Re-Establishment. A familiar but unfamiliar boy comes to her in prison, starting a chain reaction where Juliette gets pulled into the violent world of post-apocalyptic warfare. The Re-Establishment wants her to be a weapon. She just wants to be free. With its dystopian elements and romance, Shatter Me will appeal to fans of the The Hunger Games and Scott Westerfield’s Uglies trilogy. However, the real appeal of this novel is the prose. Written in a journal form that features all of Juliette’s crossed out sentences and wandering thoughts, the author pushes the boundary of poetry and prose with sentences so lyrical they beg to be read over again. “I always wonder about raindrops,” Juliette says. “I wonder how they're always falling down, tripping over their feet, breaking their legs and forgetting their parachutes as they tumble out of the sky toward an uncertain end...I am a raindrop.” Lines like that underscore that Shatter Me is less about dystopia and more about finding the extraordinary beauty in an extraordinarily dark world.