Watch Me by Tahereh Mafi Book Review

Tahereh Mafi is one of the most coin-toss authors I’ve ever read. Whenever she has something new out, I’m sort of interested. She’s published two stand-alones from the point of view of Muslim girls in a world that seems to loathe them (one book I liked, the other I disliked, but I sympathized tremendously with both protagonists.) Her Woven Kingdom series I sadly haven’t got to yet but I want to, and I’d better soon because she’s already published a lot. Even though I’ve given negative ratings to half of the books in her six-part Shatter Me series, it always kept my interest. It’s one of the only long-running series I’ve kept up with over the years. Now we have even more, but pitched as a sort of reboot rather than a seventh book. So here are my thoughts on Watch Me, which you could either call Book 7, or Book 1 of the New Republic series.

It’s been ten years since The Reestablishment was officially upended by Juliette Ferrars and Warner Anderson. Adam and Warner’s little brother James was an eleven-year-old, and now he’s all grown up, but the gang still treats him like a kid. Which is why he decides to head out to Ark Island, the last established place of the old patriarchy. He’s captured quickly, but he doesn’t worry too much because of a hidden talent of his, and he then meets a young woman about his age named Rosabelle who’s a Reestablishment prodigy. One thing leads to another and James escapes but he is still trapped on the island, and they can’t help but think about each other as Rosabelle tries to recapture him, while thinking about how she’s supposed to be betrothed to a slimy dude named Sebastian, and the life of her little sister Claire is in her hands.

Watch Me starts out rough with two main problems; one is its uneven tone, unable to decide if it’s a serious people-get-tortured dystopia or an easygoing Home-Alone funhouse. James doesn’t take his capture seriously, like, at all, which he’s able to do because of his powers, but there are discussions and thoughts about the horrors of the Reestablishment. Joking around while in the belly of the beast is not really my cup of tea. The other problem is the path it chooses to go feels a little underwhelming, a fair chunk of it being James and Rosabelle wondering about each other, but we don’t feel enough of a connection to Rosabelle to care as much as we should. A lot of the characters we’ve come to know from the previous books are also absent for the first half.

But then in the second half, it gets better. We get to know Rosabelle and her memories and tortured past more closely, seeing her start to unravel despite the barriers she’s been trained to put up around herself. We reunite with a fair chunk of our old friends, who are just as familiar and quirky as ever. We hear a little bit more of the believable horrors of the Reestablishment.

In the end, Watch Me is undemanding and inoffensive, but kind of average. It doesn’t have an intimidating antagonist to keep it energized, it doesn’t have a lot to stir up emotions in us, and it’s not very climactic. Or maybe the series is just starting to feel a little tired. What it does do well is have a sometimes welcome sense of humour, a sometimes enjoyable romance, an upbeat new point of view in James, and a manageable length. It’s not as good as some of Mafi’s other works, but not as bad as others either. Whether I’m going to continue with the series, I don’t know yet. The previous book in the Shatter Me universe, Imagine Me, was a wonderful conclusion, so perhaps my satisfaction with this series is solidified already.

My grade: 2 stars out of 5