I recieved an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

It’s always disheartening reading a book you are excited about, only for it to fall flat. Shattered is a fantastic concept that could have delved into some interesting themes in a complex, nuanced way, but it utterly fails to deliver on any of them. I wavered on whether to give this a two or a three star rating, because I think there’s some wonderful ideas here, but ultimately, seeing great ideas dissolved in this narrative like wet cardboard in the rain was arguably a significantly more frustrating experience than seeing a shallow story badly executed.

Shattered pretty much disappointed me on every front. The dialogue and prose were fairly rote, and the latter was bogged down by excessive rumination from both PoV characters. It’s absolutely not necessary to have them rehash every conversation in their heads after it's occurred, re-explaining to the reader how they feel and how terribly conflicted and/or affected they are. It got tedious extremely quickly, which was a real shame, because these characters could’ve been fantastic. I loved Lena’s introduction and was very excited to have an unapologetic bastard as a female lead, but by the seventh time she exposition-ed at me about how very tragic and repressed she was I had lost patience with her. Similarly, Nyah’s character feels inconsistent- I appreciate she’s in a difficult position with conflicting feelings about her role- but her complete abhorrence for being put on a pedestal does not seem to mesh with certain twisty elements of her backstory.

The vast majority of Shattered is that cookie-cutter dialogue I mentioned earlier, which simply isn’t strong enough to support the narrative. This was an unwelcome surprise after the story opened with a dramatic (and engrossing!) action scene, only to a grind to a halt, interspersed with a couple of less relevant action scenes with less compelling stakes.. Lots of the arguably most interesting parts of the central conflict are hand-waved in a slew of exposition at the end, and I couldn’t help but desperately want a book that actually tackled the subject of a burned-out population of superheroes trapped in oppressive contracts head-on. It wasn’t credible that the changes would take place as quickly and smoothly as the narrative implies, and I felt it did the themes a disservice. The characters also felt pretty one-note: particularly the villain, which was another big disappointment for me, given the strong foundation of an interesting and complex motivation. When the protagonists did have shifts in ideology or outlook, it didn’t feel believable- just that it was time for them to change their mind. The twists that were in this narrative felt stale and predictable, and I was in that unhappy position of feeling irritated at the characters for not being smart enough to cotton on to what seemed so obvious. I actually felt like this read like the lower-aged end of YA, apart from one fairly forgettable intimate scene and a quick stopover into some very heavy themes, which I don’t feel were included with much thought- more so as fuel for Nyah’s angst, which didn’t have the desired effect, at least for me. (Nyah is almost a hundred years old and has been all over the world, reading people’s minds as she goes: she’s come across this before. Why was this particular case so affecting for her? I didn’t feel like that was demonstrated to the reader.)

I wish I could say that I was at least invested in the romantic tension between Lena and Nyah, but unfortunately, they just didn’t compel me. I wanted to root for them desperately, especially given that it’s refreshing to see a sapphic couple in fiction who are both on the butcher side of gender presentation, but I just couldn’t click with them.

Sadly, I wouldn’t recommend Shattered- even though it is bursting with interesting ideas, I just don’t feel like it makes good on any of them.