YA A to Z: Tahereh Mafi

We are now half way through the YA A to A alphabet and at the letter M. Like many of the letters before it, this was a hard one to pick. So I opted to highlight an author that I haven’t talked a lot about, although I am a fan of her work. Who is this mysterious author?

Tahereh Mafi

Oh look, here’s her Twitter pic. You can follow her on Twitter.

Mafi is the New York Times bestselling author of the Shatter Me series. She currently resides in California where she is married to another bestselling author, Ransom Riggs. According to her Epic Reads bio, she can speak 8 different languages with varying degrees of fluency.

Shatter Me is the first book in a dystopian trilogy that features the character Juliette, whose touch is lethal. When you read the book it is full of lines and passages that have been struck out, indicating the difference between what is happening in the real world and what Juliette is thinking in her head:

“I have a curse
I have a gift

I am a monster
I’m more than human

My touch is lethal
My touch is power

I am their weapon
I will fight back”

The Shatter Me trilogy continues with Ignite Me and concludes with Unravel Me. In between there are two novellas, Destroy Me and Fracture Me which can be found combined in the work titled Unite Me. Once you read the entire series you can join the online debate about whether or not you are team Adam or team Warner. When I first read Shatter Me the thing I liked most is how I thought one thing was happening but by the end of the book we meet a variety of people who have similar issues as Juliette and it kind of became a very different thing, in many ways comic book in its origins.

She has an upcoming book titled FURTHERMORE coming soon from Penguin, which has this book description on Goodreads:

“Once upon a time, a girl was born. It was rather uneventful.

Her parents were happy enough: the mother glad to be done carrying it; the father glad to be done with the mystery of it all. But then one day they realized that their baby, the one they’d named Alice, had no pigment at all. Her hair and skin were white as milk, her heart and bones as soft as silk. Her eyes alone had been spared a spot of color: only just clinging to the faintest shade of honey. It was the kind of child her world could not appreciate.

Ferenwood had been built on color. Bursts of it, swaths of it, depths and breadths of it. Its people were known to be the brightest — modeled after the planets, they’d said — and young Alice was deemed simply too dim, even though she knew she was not.

Once upon a time, a girl was forgot.

Twelve-year-old Alice Alexis Queensmeadow has only three things in the world that matter: Mother, who wouldn’t miss her; triplet brothers, who never knew her; and Father, who always loved her. The day Father disappears from Ferenwood he takes nothing but a ruler with him, so some said he’d gone to measure the sea. Others said the sky. The moon. Maybe he’d learned to fly and had forgotten how to come back down. But it’s been almost six years since then, and Alice is determined to find him. She loves her father even more than she loves adventure, and she’s about to embark on one to find the other. No matter the cost.

It’s a kind of fairytale, a story where magic is a must, adventure is inevitable, and friendship is found in the most unexpected places.”

If you like the Shatter Me series you might also want to check out some of the books on this book list.

Join the conversation!  Share a post about your favorite author OR tweet us your favorite author with the tag #YAAtoZ. While we’re sharing our favorite authors, we would love to hear about yours. We all might find some new authors we haven’t heard of before. And the more authors we share, the more comprehensive and diverse the list becomes. On Twitter, we’re @TLT16 and I’m@CiteSomething. 

#YAAtoZ Schedule: Week 1 4: A ; 5: B ; 6: C ; 7: D  Week 2 10: E ; 11: F ; 12: G, H, I ; 13: J, K ; 14: L  Week 3 17: M ; 18: N, O ; 19: P, Q ; 20: R, S ; 21: T  Week 4 24: U ; 25: V, W ; 26: X ; 27: Y ; 28: Z

Filed under: YA A to Z