Shatter Me Series by Tahereh Mafi

Once again behind on everything, I finally finished the Shatter Me series by Tahereh Mafi! Before I got onto this bandwagon I remember seeing a lot of posts on Instagram with the divide between Team Adam or Team Warner. IT ALL MAKES SENSE TO ME NOW. Okay first off, I wish I had some crazy super power that I never knew about that I could learn to harness and control. Second off, I loved the series. I never want to go into too much detail because I'm always afraid of giving spoilers and I would hate to do that.

Throughout the whole series I definitely feel for Juliette and all situations she gets put into along with the things she has to deal with. Living your life feeling one way and knowing only that feeling is a hard place to be especially when life is changed drastically. I do wish I could see this huge military base in Sector 45 just to see how it works outside of my head. Pretty much in Shatter Me I'm all for Team Adam and I can't see why there would be any person to be on Team Warner.

Can I make a quick comment about how much I LOVE the covers of the books? I feel like it's a cover I have never seen before and it's such a great idea. It makes you more interested and intrigued to pick the book up and start reading it whether or not you know what it's really about. Reading Shatter Me left me wanting more and even though it took me a while to get to Unravel Me, I got there. For me I felt like Unravel Me was that in-between book in where you thought you knew what you wanted but then you start questioning everything. It's pretty much starting over for Juliette and I felt bad for her being stuck in a new place and not adjusting well. Though in this book I could feel the riff opening up between Juliette and Adam which really makes me sad and of course Warner pisses me off anyways. The end of the book actually really surprised me and that along made me NEED to finish the series. However..that had to wait for a while because, you know, SCHOOL HAPPENS. And I wanted to wait for the paperback to come out to keep with the theme.

Ignite Me is where I FINALLY understand the shift that a lot of people made and I'm pretty sure that if I was Juliette, I would have made the same move. Warner surprised me a lot which I wasn't expecting because I was pretty sure he was just crazy anyways. I was really glad and excited to see Juliette start to come into her own with being able to harness her ability and use it for good. The ups and downs between her and Warner definitely worried me making me wonder what was going to happen in the end. Adam wasn't being the Adam that we knew from Shatter Me which upset me but hey, when things get tough you start to see the real person. I feared for the rest of the group when they were going into their second battle since the first one proved to not go very well. I was rooting for the obvious team to win and there were many parts where I read faster than normal just so I could get past the intense feelings. I'm pretty sure I almost cried at the end of the book when I wasn't sure of the outcome but thankfully, my feelings of defeat were saved.

Overall I give the series 5 stars because it was enjoyable and definitely wasn't boring at all! I wish that it didn't have to end but sadly, all good things must come to an end, at some point. I'd recommend the series to everybody because it just sucks you in and tears you apart a little bit at some parts.

If I Stay by Gayle Forman - Book, Movie, and Life Wisdom

Last night I decided that I had enough guts to sit down and watch If I Stay again and after the crap I've been dealing with the last month or so, it kind of hit home in a way. First off, I read the book last year and loved it, almost shed a few tears while at work but I made it through. Second, I saw the movie when it came out and was SO unprepared it wasn't even funny. Read the book, was fine, the movie? BLUBBERING MESS! I didn't even bring any tissues because I figured since I didn't bawl through the book that I probably wouldn't through the movie but boy was I wrong. Either way I think the overall message that I personally received from it didn't really occur or hit me until last night. I've been going through a lot lately and I can definitely relate to all the relationship happenings in general that Mia and Adam went through. I think that's why it hit me so hard because I know what feeling like someone ripped your heart out feels like and it's not a good feeling. Also, the actor who played Adam..DAMN..okay moving on!

“I have a feeling that once you live through something like this, you become a little bit invincible.”

So onto my message right? I sat there thinking to myself that one snow day going out with your family and then out of nowhere your entire life changes. When you think about it we all go out every single day to go to work, school, a movie, the mall, dinner, whatever it is. And every single day we get up and take the risk of something happening to us and it could be something so awful we thought it would never happen to us. Doesn't thinking about that just make you wanna go "DAMN"? I'll admit that I've been one of those people who thinks something won't ever happen to them and then it does. It's a horrible feeling let me tell you. To me it always feel like every day gets a little worse where people are too busy being busy and not paying attention to notice things. I know I've been like that where I'm too caught up in all the work for school I have to do and making sure I get up and go to work on time or make sure I'm being somewhere when I'm supposed to. There have been more times than I care to admit that I've been so mindless and careless about myself and the other people around me to notice that anything is even going wrong. There have been so many times that I've just reacted and acted on my emotions rather than making myself stop to think about the situation beforehand.

"Sometimes you make choices in life, and sometimes choices make you."

The movie really made me look at life, the relationships that are involved in it, and all the things that we really have no control over. Honestly that's a scary thing for me to think about it. I know that I'm nowhere near perfect nor will I ever be but that doesn't mean that there aren't a million things that I'm good for or good at or that I'm worth much more than I think I am. If I Stay makes you look at life and see all the things that we've taken for granted and how it all can be taken away from us at any point of time whether or not we expect. That's the thing about life sometimes, it doesn't care about what your future plans are, what you're doing, who you love and care about, how something will effect you or the ones around you....it chooses to just happen. This movie has so many good quotes and I know I put a couple up on my Facebook last night because they make sense and I think that it's something part of life, things that happen.

"Isn't it amazing how life is one thing then, in an instant it becomes something else."

If you looked back on all the choices you've made, do you think if you had a chance to redo those choices, that you would make the same ones? I've thought about this one before and I've always said that I wouldn't because everything I've gone through has made me who I am today. But in reality and when I think about it now, there's so many things I wish I could go back and change where I wonder how my life would be now. Would it be better than it is? Worse? Would I be alive or would I be dead? There are many things in which I wish I had the chance to go back and change so I could have fixed a problem before it became so big that it became something irreversible. But that's life I suppose, right? You live and you learn and thankfully there are many of us who are given that chance to learn from our mistakes but sometimes, some people don't get that chance.