“It's not insane to imagine that sometimes even horrible people are searching for a way out of their own darkness.”

Defy Me is the latest installment in the once again ongoing Shatter Me series. It continues the story of Juliette and Warner in Sector 45, and now adds the voice of Kenji to the mix.

God I wanted to love this book. I was so excited for the addition of three more books to the series, as it's one of my absolute favorites. So I'd thought I'd be the last to ever say this, but Mafi should've stopped the series with Ignite Me.

Mafi has a lot of strengths in writing, ones I've loved in all her works so far. She is magnificient at writing emotion, at fully showing what's going on in a character's head and the depth of what they've gone through or are going through. Her description, no matter the style she writes in, is always fantastic and heartfelt, and is great at imparting scenes, imagery, and emotion on to the reader. Her characters are also amazing, they feel real and heartfelt, full of motivations and emotions and histories. It made me fall in love with the original series as well as her middle grade Furthermore series. The latter also showcased her talent for imagination and the creation of wacky worlds.

It seems, after reading Defy Me, that I may have discovered one of her weaknesses. Plot. I've never really had issues with it before, but that's mainly due to the fact that it's not always the focus of her novels. It's either emotion, romance, or a magical world that is at the front and center of the novel, so when Restore Me and then Defy Me brings the plot to the forefront, you start to see the cracks in Mafi's writing and planning. I don't think I can even get into all the holes that seem to occur in the second trilogy of books being added to the Shatter Me world. It would take too long and I just don't have the energy for it. Mafi just tries to add way too much in both this book and already in Restore Me, and it just feels false. It seems to destroy or replace everything said in the first three books, blamed on things like memory manipulation, lies, and withheld information on every side. It just makes it feel like everything I read before didn't matter, and I just don't like that.

Additionally, by bringing the plot to the forefront, the series loses what I loved about the first three books. Yes, there's still beautiful writing and scenes of utter emotion, but that's just not what the book is about. There're more descriptions of just events and scenes, less of the emotions surrounding it. There's also just less of the character interaction that I loved, as the story seems to keep adding in more and more characters and adding distance between the friendships and relationships I loved, whether it be literal distance or purely mental/emotional.

I also feel like this book was just too depressing. Yes, this series has never been light, but it feels like this book has no hope until the very last few pages (which were just pure fanservice and utter bullshit, just saying). It just made me way too sad? And not in a way I enjoy at all. It was just a lot of missing and losing and torture and pain with no light at the end of the tunnel. No thanks.

I'll be finishing the series of course, I've come this far. But if I ever reread the series again, I think I'll be stopping at Ignite Me.