65 pages • 2 hours read
Unravel Me
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Background
Authorial and Series Context: Tahereh Mafi’s Shatter Me Series
Tahereh Mafi is an Iranian American young adult and middle grade fiction writer based in Santa Monica, CA. Her husband is young adult author Ransom Riggs. Shatter Me (2011) was Mafi’s first book. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller, paving the way for the immensely popular series.
Originally billed as a trilogy, the Shatter Me series contains six novels and five novellas. The novellas, released in electronic format, take place between the events of the main novels, often exploring the viewpoints of other characters. The first two novellas were also released in 2014 as a collection entitled Unite Me. The third and fourth novellas were released in 2019 as a collection entitled Find Me. The full series was completed in 2021.
Book 1, Shatter Me (2011), is accompanied by the novella Destroy Me (2012), which is told from Warner’s perspective. Book 2, Unravel Me (2013), pairs with the novella Fracture Me (2013), which is told from Adam’s perspective. Book 3, Ignite Me (2014), does not have an accompanying novella while Book 4, Restore Me (2018), pairs with the novella Shadow Me (2019), told from Kenji’s perspective. Book 5, Defy Me (2019), is accompanied by Reveal Me (2019), which is also told from Kenji’s perspective. The final novel, Book 6, Imagine Me (2020), pairs with the novella Believe Me (2021), told from Warner’s perspective.
The series is a dystopian thriller focusing on Juliette Ferrars, who has a lethal touch as well as super strength. Throughout the novels, she experiences alienation and trauma from her time spent in prison and her inability to form close bonds with others. Her ongoing love triangle with Adam and Warner is the subplot to the main plot of the rebels trying to destroy The Reestablishment government. In the novels’ dystopian version of North America, disease is rampant, food is scarce, and the environment is damaged beyond repair. The scenario follows the dystopian structure of a totalitarian government seeking to restore order in a post-disaster setting and instituting policies of inequality. Juliette embodies “The Chosen One” trope, as she is the only one who can defeat The Reestablishment.
In Restore Me, Juliette is named supreme commander after taking Sector 45, but this tenure is short lived. In Defy Me, she learns troubling family secrets that lead her to question her identity, and this continues in the final novel, Imagine Me, in which Juliette is forced to choose sides. The novels are primarily fantasy but contain elements of the action-adventure and psychological thriller genres, as the plots are fast-paced, and truth and lies are a prevalent theme. The series’s tone is erotic—though appropriate for teenage readers—and defiant, as reflected in the titles, which are phrased as commands. The main characters are 17-20 years old, so their relationships and conflicts straddle late adolescence and early adulthood.
Mafi has additionally written two other series: the middle grade Furthermore series, which includes two installments; and the young adult fantasy series This Woven Kingdom, which includes two installments with a third anticipated in 2024. Mafi has authored two standalone titles, including 2018’s A Very Large Expanse of Sea, about a Muslim girl facing prejudice after 9/11, which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature.
Genre Context: Young Adult Dystopian Literature
Dystopian literature is a form of speculative fiction that addresses large-scale failure of sociopolitical institutions, typically as a commentary on some element of social or political life contemporary to the text’s author. Dystopias emerge in literature as the opposite of utopias, a term first used to describe an idealized society by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 fictional satire Utopia. The term dystopia traces back to the mid-18th century. Some novels from that time period, including Jonathan Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels, have been characterized as dystopian, as they are social commentaries set in a satirized version the societies they critique. Dystopian narratives gained popularity during the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century and grew exponentially in the 20th century, as natural and human-made disasters increasingly threatened the world’s populations.
Dystopian fiction for young adults emerged as a genre in the late 1990s, with Lois Lowry’s 1993 The Giver, which won the 1994 Newberry Medal. The Giver depicts a society in which “Sameness” has eradicated all emotional suffering, but also all emotional depth. The novel, which warns against the danger of privileging security over freedom, remains a frequent subject of proposed book bans, due to its dark nature.
Young adult dystopian literature increased in prominence in the 21st century, warning readers about the potential perils of current societal issues by casting them into the future. Prominent titles include Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses (2001), which warns about the perils of structural racism, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies (2005), which depicts a society obsessed with physical appearance, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008), which shows extremes of income inequality that leads to disadvantaged children hunting one another for the entertainment of the rich. Dystopian YA remained prominent throughout the 2010s (including Mafi’s series, Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, and Kiera Cass’s The Elite series) and continues, though with somewhat lessened frequency, in the 2020s.
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