Schaduw me

Schaduw Me is the Dutch language edition of Tahereh Mafi’s Shatter Me, the dystopian young adult novel that launched her career in 2011 and turned into one of the major YA series of the 2010s. The book was translated into Dutch as part of the international rollout of the series, which has appeared in dozens of languages around the world.

The original story is a science fiction romance set in a near future where the world has been ravaged by environmental collapse and where a totalitarian organization called the Reestablishment has taken control of what remains of human civilization. Juliette Ferrars is seventeen years old and has been imprisoned in an asylum for nearly a year because her touch is fatal. Anyone who comes in contact with her skin dies. The Reestablishment has decided to use her as a weapon, and the novel follows her movement out of the prison and into the larger conflict between the regime and the resistance fighters who oppose it.

Tahereh Mafi writes in a distinctive style that uses strikethrough text to show what Juliette is thinking but cannot allow herself to say, and that uses fragmented sentence structure to convey her psychological state after months of isolation. Some readers love the technique. Others find it overwrought. The translation into other languages has to grapple with how to render this stylistic experiment in different linguistic registers, and the Dutch edition handles it with care.

The wider Shatter Me series eventually grew to six books plus several novellas, with the central romance between Juliette and the dangerous regime officer Warner becoming one of the more discussed in YA. For Dutch readers who want to start the series in their native language, Schaduw Me is the entry point. For English readers curious about the international success of the series, the existence of so many translated editions is its own kind of testimony to the books’ reach.