Shiver

Shiver 

By Maggie Stiefvater

Blurb: 

The pack circled around me, tongues and teeth and growls.

When a local boy is killed by wolves, Grace’s small town becomes a place of fear and suspicion. 

But Grace can’t help being fascinated by the pack, and by one yellow-eyed wolf in particular. 

There’s something about him - something almost human. 

Then she meets a yellow-eyed boy whose familiarity takes her breath away... 

Critics Reviews: Shiver has remained on the bestseller list for over 32 weeks, selling 130,996 copies in 2009. it debuted at #9 on the New York Times Bestseller List and made the Amazon Top Ten Books for Teens, is a Indies Choice Book Award Finalist and is part of Publishers Weekly Best Books for Teens.

My Review: Yes, I am a fan of the Twilight books. I realise this holds a bit of weight these days, but don’t let that put you off. 

I knew when I saw this book on Amazon that, like many teen books recently, Shiver is aimed at the Twilight market. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, in many ways this has helped me broaden my reading.

Shiver, though, isn’t Twilight. There are enough similarities to satisfy fans but overall it much better written and a lot more involving. 

Told through a dual narrative, we follow Grace and Sam as they eventually meet, fall in love... and then the complications begin.

Sam is a werewolf, but Maggie Stiefvater tells Sam’s story with realism and emotion as we learn what that means in Mercy Falls. Being a werewolf means he’s subject to temperature: warmth turns him human, the cold wolf. But that’s not all, after a certain amount of changes Sam and the rest of the werewolves will stop changing human at all and will remain wolves - oblivious to human ways and emotions, basically forgetting their human selves.

Grace enters Sam’s world when she is attacked by the pack in her back garden, from then on she is fixated on seeing ‘her wolf’. It’s not until she finds Sam, newly turned human after being shot by the locals, that she finally gets to meet him. And thus begins their relationship and its consequences.

Such a lot happens in Shiver it really is a rollercoaster ride. 

One of the most heart-felt and interesting books I’ve read for a while, Shiver was a refreshing take on the recent vampire/werewolf fiction that is engulfing teen fiction of late.

Score: 8.5/10