Restore Me

“I will never again apologize for surviving.”

Juliette remaining confident in the choices she makes to survive reflects her character arc in the first three books in the series, in which she has to learn to embrace her power, rather than fear it. This confidence also offers a starting point for the emotional turmoil that Juliette faces in this installment in the series, as she fights through insecurity about how to embrace her power amid The Varying Challenges of War and Peace.

“Right now, my biggest problem is also the most confusing:

Wars require enemies, and I can’t seem to find any.”

This observation illustrates Juliette’s black-and-white thinking about political enmity at the beginning of the novel. Because she is a teenager who has found herself unexpectedly in power through her perceived destiny of overthrowing The Reestablishment, she is not trained in political machinations. Now, she is the unlikely head of a movement alongside people far more educated and prepared than her. Over the course of the novel, she learns to understand that invisible enemies might be more dangerous than visible ones.

“‘I’m not sure you’re aware of this,’ [Juliette] says finally, ‘but it’s okay to mourn the loss of your father, even if he was a terrible person […] You’re not a robot.’”

Though Juliette and Warner spend much of the novel not clearly communicating with one another, this comment is made when their romance is still ongoing. It indicates that Juliette understands Warner clearly, even when he tries to hide his feelings. She recognizes that he has