Spoilers for Destroy Me
I normally do not have really strong feelings about novellas written from different perspectives, but that’s not always the case as shown in my thoughts for this one. I went in expecting it to be like The Lost Sisters by Holly Black or A Court of Frost and Starlight, both of which I liked, but they were not anywhere near my favorite in their respective series. This novella, however, hit me the way How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories did. Maybe it’s just books written about or from the perspective of morally grey male main characters to humanize them and show why they are the way they are, but I really loved both of them. Destroy Me shows a side of Warner I never expected to see and definitely not this early. It shows how confused he was by what happened and how genuinely worried he was about Juliette. As much as I don’t like him reading Juliette’s journal, I understand his reasoning and how he uses it to connect to her and further understand her. I also appreciate seeing his father and how they interact, which was something I felt like I needed context for in Shatter Me. It went by very fast, and I found myself wanting more when it ended, a feeling I missed after Shatter Me and really got me to immediately pick up Unravel Me. Also, the use of the title Destroy Me was so vivid as to what the loss of Juliette had done to Warner. The way it ended with the puppy and Juliette makes me so excited to see where it ties in and to learn how those timelines add up from the beginning of Destroy Me to the moment she left, through however much of Unravel Me!