Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1)
by Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Paranormal
Romance/Werewolf
Reading Grade: Young
Adult
Publishing Type:
traditional
Publication Date: August
1, 2009
Rated: Teen (13+)
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 left howling alone at the lonely moon. A stirring
supernatural teen romance.
My Review
I downloaded the
audiobook version of this novel from AudiobookSync.com and couldn't
wait to listen to it. Glad I didn't hesitate. I was kind of leary
about whether or not I'd like it, since I could tell the writing was
sort of “flowery”, and I'm not a big fan of that. But, this book
turned out to be fan-freaking-tastic! I fell into the story so
quickly and easily, as if I were right there experiencing the entire
saga with the characters. Everything came to life in my mind. I love
when I have that type of experience with a story.
I also feel the shifting
first-person POV between the two main characters, Grace and Sam,
worked very well. I realize now that I like books that do this,
although I haven't read very many that do. You get to see the story
through both their eyes all along the way, and they are very
convincingly different from each other—another reason this worked
so well. The voice actors were
magnificent and sounded exactly like how the characters should sound,
age-wise and personality-wise.
I ended up falling in
love with the premise of this book after getting into it because of
how cleverly it deals with what is so seemingly cliché: teen girl
falls in love with paranormal teen boy. That general idea sounds
super boring and overdone nowadays, but this book makes it so new and
fresh again, unlike any other take on it before. It's the natural way
the characters come to know each other and fall in love that makes it
work. The author mentions in a Q&A at the end of the audiobook
that she wrote these two characters doing and saying what came
naturally for them, not forcibly writing them into a set plot. It
shows, and it's just brilliant.
Grace and Sam are
wonderful characters, neither quirky nor unusual, but very realistic.
That realism is what grabbed me because that's what I feel is necessary
for a paranormal novel to succeed—the paranormal invades the real
world in some small or large way, but it always seems as realistic as
possible. Shiver succeeds wildly at this and I'm sure that had
mostly to do with why I loved it so much. So glad there's two more
books in this series to read...
My score: 5 out of 5
stars
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
