For years, Grace has watched the wolves in the woods behind her house. One yellow-eyed wolf--her wolf--is a chilling presence she can't seem to live without. Meanwhile, Sam has lived two lives: In winter, the frozen woods, the protection of the pack, and the silent company of a fearless girl. In summer, a few precious months of being human . . . until the cold makes him shift back again.
Now, Grace meets a yellow-eyed boy whose familiarity takes her breath away. It's her wolf. It has to be. But as winter nears, Sam must fight to stay human--or risk losing himself, and Grace, forever.
Oh my, oh my...all of the wonderful things I could say about Shiver. By far, without a doubt, the best book I've read this year.
I'm a new Maggie Stiefvater fan after reading Lament. When I saw Shiver on the shelves I just knew it had to be good, and boy was I right!!
11-year-old Grace is attacked by wolves in the backyard of her snowy Minnesota home. While the wolves nip at her in the cold snow, her body frozen mostly by fear, her hand is nudged by the one wolf that will not join the others. She locks eyes with this yellow-eyed creature and won't let go.
6 years later, Grace is a junior in high school. She seems fairly happy; she has two best friends, parents who aren't around much but seem to love her just the same and an obsession with the wolves who live in the woods outside her backyard. Well, obsession with a wolf, the wolf, her wolf. The same yellow-eyed wolf who holds her gaze almost every day during the winter, the same yellow-eyed wolf who disappears once the summer comes, the same yellow-eyed wolf who nudged her hand 6 years ago and has had a piece of her heart since then.
Sam watches Grace in the shadow of the woods during the cold of the winter, every day. He can't smile at her, can't touch her, can't talk to her, so he watches. He sees her sit at home alone, cook dinner alone, looks as she sits on the tire swing she was stolen from 6 years ago and dragged into the woods by his pack, sees her scan the woods until she finds his yellow eyes. Sam watches Grace and waits for the day he can stand next to her and tell her everything he's wanted to say for the last 6 years. Summer is that time for Sam. The time when the temperature warms up enough to let Sam shift back into his human form for a few fragile months.
The first time Grace sees the boy with those familiar yellow eyes, she knows. It's him. The wolf. Her wolf.
Sam and Grace fight the temperature, human obstacles and this curse to stay together.
Like I said, best book I've read this year. I had tears streaming down my cheeks when I read the last page. Magical, simply magical.
writes,
Sooo apparently I disagree with the rest of the reviews that have been written about this book so far, but I have to say that Shiver was not much better than mediocre. Yeah, the romance was exciting. But come on, we all know it wasn't very original. Steifvater recycled the same technique that made Stephenie Meyer famous: dragging out the romance and amping up the sexual tension until its practically unbearable. By page 200 readers will practically be begging the main characters to just get it on already. Sam is the perfect romantic hero: smart, kind, chivalrous, self-effacing, well-read, he plays the guitar AND writes songs about his girlfriend, he's vulnerable, and of course he's gorgeous. He does have an annoying tendency to break into cheesy song long lyrics from time to time, but hey that's just water under the bridge with a guy that's so unnaturally perfect in every other way. Grace has been waiting for him all her life. It's picture perfect. It's really really fun to read. But it doesn't make up for the total lack of plot.
The first thing that I noticed about this book was that I didn't care at all about what was happening to the other characters. None of them were very interesting or engaging. They were mostly artificial and stereotypical. Also, conveniently, none of the characters seemed to have parents that were ever around or interested in their lives, which could have worked but instead just felt lazy on the part of the author. The whole mechanics of being a werewolf in this book also did not seem to have been very well thought out. There were definitely gaps in the author's mythology and also her commitment to veracity. For example, at the end of the book Grace and her new friend Isabelle make a choice to try to change the way things are based on their belief in a very untested and dangerous hypothesis. In doing so they knowingly endanger the lives of the two people they love the most. In fact, they know that their actions are highly likely to kill them. Which makes NO SENSE! No one in their right mind would ever condemn the people they love to almost certain death on the off-chance that they might fix a problem that is WAY less bad than being DEAD. I mean come on: that isn't love, it's selfishness. So no, I can't with good conscience recommend this as a good book. Yeah, the romance is compelling and almost heart-breaking at times, but the ending just really ruins it, as does the total lack of other engaging plot. If these flaws don't bother you, then by all means pick it up. But if you want to read a good werewolf story I would recommend Blood and Chocolate instead.
writes,
Forget the full moon and silver bullets. Maggie Stiefvater's werewolves are different from any you've seen before. After being bitten, a werewolf changes erratically for a while, then settles into a seasonal cycle. Cold weather brings on a change to wolf form; warm weather returns the werewolf to human form. However, this cycle doesn't last forever. As the years pass, it takes more and more heat to trigger the change back to human, until one year the werewolf remains a wolf for life.
Our heroine, Grace, was attacked by wolves as a child. Just before she was about to become lunch, one of the wolves intervened and saved her. Ever since, Grace has watched for "her" wolf in the woods each winter. And every summer, a golden-eyed boy named Sam watches Grace from afar, too shy to approach her. Then, when one of Grace's high school classmates is killed in another wolf attack, several of the local men take it upon themselves to rid the town of the beasts. This time it's Grace who helps Sam. Finally, the two have the chance to get to know one another. Their budding relationship is marred by one tragic truth: This is almost certainly Sam's last year as a human.
Like Deirdre, the heroine of Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception, Grace is more "real" and well-rounded than many of the girls who populate YA paranormal romance. She's neither too perfect nor too wild, and she doesn't become subservient once her love interest appears on the scene. She's just an ordinary girl, compassionate and resourceful and caught in an unimaginable situation. The relationship between Grace and Sam is also refreshingly "real." They don't just fall in love because of the weird metaphysics that surround them. They bond over music and poetry and cooking and B-grade horror movies. The reader is left with the impression that, if only the looming metaphysical tragedy could be averted, they'd have a happy future together.
Which, of course, makes the inexorable approach of winter incredibly poignant. I couldn't put _Shiver_ down, wondering how Grace and Sam's story would end, and Stiefvater kept me hanging till the very last page.
_Shiver_ is written in vivid prose that engages all of the senses. Maggie Stiefvater does a great job of evoking the sight of a single spot of red against a sea of white, the sound of canine nails scratching at the deck outside Grace's house, and the smell of paper and ink in a bookstore on a warm summer day, making Shiver a fully immersive experience. I nearly forgot it was July here as I read; I could hear the winter winds howling.
