Review: Shiver By Maggie Stiefvater

I was never a wolf girl. I never got the attraction to wolves. I always liked how they looked but never cared to read a book about wolves.  However, I now know why everyone loves them.  Written properly wolves emit so much emotion you can’t help but want to be in their world.  Maggie Stiefvater created a cool, crisp and colorful world of wolves that I want to live in so badly. 

Shiver 
by Maggie Stiefvater

Grace and Sam share a kinship so close they could be lovers or siblings. But they also share a problem. When the temperature slips towards freezing, Sam reverts to his wolf identity and must retreat into the woods to protect his pack. He worries that eventually his human side will fade away and he will be left howling alone at the lonely moon. A stirring supernatural teen romance.

Shiver is about Grace and Sam.  Grace was attacked as a child by a pack of wolves and saved by Sam.  Since then, they have watching each other but never interacting.  Every winter Grace would look forward to seeing her wolf with the yellow eyes.  And during the summer she felt a loss without him watching her. 

Sam spent the same time wanting to get close to her but knowing that he shouldn’t. His wolf instincts were always too strong, but his love for Grace was growing to be stronger. 

In the town of Mercy Falls, the wolf pack just wanted to live in the woods and be on their own. Well most of them.  Some of the wolves attacked a local kid names Jack. When news of the attack spread though the town, the locals went after the wolves.  During the hunt Sam was shot.  He showed up at Graces porch, bleeding everywhere, in human form.  She knew it was her wolf by his yellow eyes. 

She nurses him back to health and they start spending a lot of time together and soon they fall in love (more than they already were). They spend most of the book loving each other and waiting for the inevitable end; when Sam turns into a wolf, forever.

I loved this book.  This was my first book about just werewolves.  I have read other books with a mix of paranormals, but none just about wolves alone.  Not having read any other books about wolves, I have no comparison to give you.

First things first, I love that the text is blue! Yea I said that right, the text is BLUE!!!!! I though that was so different that I loved it already.  (and even cooler, the next book text is GREEN!!!!)

Second, it took me a while before I understood where the direction of this book was going.  I have been reading a lot of books lately and a majority of them are love and action books.  Always the main characters separated by some cosmic destiny.  Reading Shiver, with every page I turned, I kept waiting for the big spoiler that would separate them and leave me hurrying to put them back together.  But in this book, they weren’t separated.  The do face an end that neither wants to happen; that what they have will have to end, when Sam can no longer hold on to being human.  Once I realized that the main focus of this story was a basic love story I relaxed. I was able to enjoy their love and start feeling the emotions that Maggie laid ahead of me. 

This book is a dual POV, told from both Grace and Sam.  In other books I sometimes get annoyed with the alternating.  When you a reading from the main character and it switches at a pivotal moment, you curse and shout NOOOOOOO I want to read it from her POV not HIS!!!!! But in this book I never felt that.  The alternating POV always enhanced the emotions you feel while reading.  You get double the wanting; double the longing and a deeper connection to these characters. 

Maggie told a tale so ripe with emotion it was busting at the seams.  I loved how she described emotions in smells.  She assaulted every sense I had and left me tingling.  You felt everything Sam and Grace were feeling and you wanted everything so badly to work out. 

Shiver gives you everything you can hope for in a YA novel (at least everything I'm always looking for).  A beautiful, well thought-out world that you can envision being real. I laughed out loud and couldn’t hold my feelings in! I was shaking with excitement and kept saying YES YES YES!!!! That’s how they should be!!!!! I look forward to continue my relationship with Grace and Sam in the next two books. 

Overall rating: 5/5