Restore Me

Restore Me begins weeks after the end of Ignite Me, which culminates with Juliette killing Warner’s abusive father, Anderson. In Restore Me, Warner therefore must juggle various competing elements that vie for his attention: his new relationship with Juliette, figuring out his role in the new regime, and his complex feelings over the death of the father he hated. Warner insists that he doesn’t want to feel grief about his father’s loss, repeatedly telling himself that Anderson doesn’t deserve any emotional attention from his son. However, he finds that he cannot quell his feelings of grief, despite the painful history between father and son, and that trying to do so does not aid him.

Warner’s reluctance to grieve Anderson is further complicated by the way he was resolutely trained by his cruel father to believe that emotions constitute weakness. In this installment in the series, with his father dead and gone, Warner struggles to separate what he logically knows was manipulation on his father’s behalf—and his knowledge that his father’s methods and motivations were both corrupt—and the messages he has been taught to internalize. Warner thinks of Juliette, “I don’t want to share stories from my life that only disgust and revolt me, stories that would color her impression of me. I don’t want her to know how I spent my time as a child. She doesn’t need to know” (75). This demonstrates not only the length of Warner’s abuse and how it impacts his relationship with Juliette but also how he internalized said abuse, as indicated by how the memories “disgust” him. Even if Warner intellectually rejects his father’s violence, he still struggles with feelings of shame around having been the victim of childhood abuse and judges himself harshly whenever he experiences emotions that he cannot control.

This arc—the struggle between what he knows, what he feels, and what he feels about emoting—is not resolved in the novel, instead providing an emotional background to all of Warner’s actions. Though his grief continues throughout the text, Warner does find some comfort in speaking to his brother, Adam Kent, who confesses having his own complex feelings about Anderson’s death, even though Anderson was less explicitly violent to Adam than he was to Warner. The novel thus suggests that opening up about one’s feelings is a way to work through them—even as it pointedly illustrates that this is one of Warner’s particular challenges, as he has spent a lifetime hiding his emotions even from himself.

Though Warner is the focus of the novel’s theme of grief and abusive parents, this concept also affects Juliette. Juliette recalls her abusive adoptive parents after she learns that her biological parents surrendered her to The Reestablishment for experimentation. The resurgence of grief over her long-lost adoptive parents highlights the novel’s presentation of grief as an ongoing emotional concern; it is not something that only affects characters in the immediate aftermath of their parents’ deaths. Like Warner, however, Juliette struggles to communicate these feelings, suggesting that they will continue to affect her in subsequent installments in the series.