Restore Me

The first section of Restore Me establishes the primary emotional stakes for the two narrators. In this section, Juliette struggles with feelings of inadequacy to be a peacetime leader, a fear that will grow over the course of the novel. The novel validates these concerns. Juliette, it confirms, is young and inexperienced. Juliette’s superpowers, super strength and invulnerability, do not lend themselves toward leadership in peacetime the way they did during a more straightforward war, which leaves Juliette as a teenage girl—determined but politically uneducated and immature. Juliette thus explores The Varying Challenges of War and Peace and often finds herself lacking in the skills needed for peacetime. However, the text does not necessarily accept Juliette’s logical conclusion that this means she is unequipped to lead. Warner most clearly rejects the idea that Juliette is an unfit leader, though he mostly does so during his internal monologue, which means that Juliette is not able to gain confidence from his faith in her.

Warner’s perspective holds weight, though, as he possesses all the things Juliette lacks aside from age; as Castle later observes, Warner is also only 19 years old. If Warner, who has grown up being trained for leadership, believes Juliette is capable, the text suggests his word should be taken for it. This is true no matter how much Juliette doubts herself or how frequently she’s caught out without information that would aid her significantly in the early days of her rule. An education can be gained; in the meantime, Warner is eager to serve as Juliette’s advisor. Juliette, however, is feeling the pressures of time and struggles to see her way forward, which leads her to flail, overwhelmed. As a result, she spends much of the novel wandering Sector 45, worrying about her lack of knowledge, rather than doing something that will help her gain that knowledge. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because Juliette thinks it is impossible to learn everything she needs to know, she learns nothing that she needs to know, instead spending her time fretting about all the information she lacks.

Warner, meanwhile, struggles with anxiety over his father’s death, as well as his anxiety over having feelings about his father’s death. The cruel physical and psychological abuse that Anderson dealt his son his whole life makes Warner feel that he shouldn’t care about Anderson’s passing. Like Juliette, Warner does not wish to speak about his worries aloud, fearing that admitting weakness will cause Juliette to think poorly of him. In both cases, this tactic backfires for the two narrators. If Juliette’s silence leaves her unable to benefit from Warner’s faith, Warner’s silence makes Juliette suspicious of the many secrets between them. This suspicion explodes into anger when Warner reveals what he knows about Juliette’s past, anger that might have been lessened if Warner had been more forthcoming about other, less important things in his life. The novel thus illustrates how Complex Grief About Abusive Parents can have far-reaching emotional and interpersonal implications.

This section of the book also shows Warner and Juliette interacting with Adam, someone who was a major character in the earlier books and is a minor character in Restore Me. In the past, Warner and Adam battled for Juliette’s affection. They tried to kill one another at various points, something for which they apologize in this installment. The narrative of two brothers fighting over a woman is entrenched in religious, mythological, and literary traditions. In the Islamic version of the Cain and Abel story, for example, humanity’s first murder takes place because both men desire the same woman: Cain’s twin sister, Aclima (sometimes referred to as Luisa).

Though some interpretations of this narrative cast Cain, the murderous brother, as the sole villain in the tale, French Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama of Université de Paris Diderot frames both brothers as engaging in violence—Cain by doing the killing, Abel by seeking his brother’s eternal punishment by encouraging the murder (Benslama, Fethi. Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam. Illustrated ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2009.). Mafi’s public discussion of the way her Muslim identity affects her writing, as well as the recognition of Islamic culture via Nazeera’s head scarf, indicates that the Islamic version of the Cain and Abel narrative may be the most relevant to the text.