Shiver - Maggie Stiefvater

Summary: The cold. Grace has spent years watching the wolves in the woods behind her house. One yellow-eyed wolf--her wolf--watches back. He feels deeply familiar to her, but she doesn't know why.

The heat. Sam has lived two lives. As a wolf, he keeps the silent company of the girl he loves. And then, for a short time each year, he is human, never daring to talk to Grace...until now.

The shiver. For Grace and Sam, love has always been kept at a distance. But once it's spoken, it cannot be denied. Sam must fight to stay human--and Grace must fight to keep him--even if it means taking on the scars of the past, the fragility of the present, and the impossibility of the future.

My review: I started out liking this book right away. I had tried to read something else before and had to put it down when my mind shut off during the prologue. It didn’t with this one. It started off kind of mysteriously and you knew that there was going to be more to this whole “werewolf” thing than was indicated in the summary. The story was narrated alternately by both Sam and Grace. I liked being given both viewpoints and knowing what each character was thinking/feeling/doing instead of just getting a one-sided perspective.

I’d be a fool if I ignored the obvious similarities between this books plot and Twilight. Not only is it the first book in a series, but it is fairly obvious that Shiver was made, as so many books currently are, to lure in book hungry Twi-hards who are dying for their next supernatural fix. Okay, so Sam is a werewolf and not a vampire. Big whoop. They are still two seemingly star-crossed lovers who just can’t stay away from each other and one of them just happens to be a fictional monster. Obviously Team Jacob would be running to the shelves for this one. This book did not contain all the odes to chiseled abs, sparkly descriptors, and outright worship of the male character that Twilight had (the lack of which is a HUGE bonus even though I enjoyed the series).

Somewhere along the way though, I lost interest. I actually felt that Shiver was better written than Twilight in a literary sense, but didn’t have the same emotional pull that Twilight did. I’m not quite sure why that is, as better writing usually creates a better pull, but in this one I just didn’t feel as swept away by the story as I had hoped to be. Go figure.

To conclude, I just didn’t love it. It was okay. It had it’s moments, but overall I wasn’t running to pick it up and I wasn’t dying when I had to put it down. Most of the time, the connection wasn’t there and I felt the story moved to slowly for my taste. It got a little dull and I kept waiting for some real excitement.

While Shiver wasn’t precisely my cup of cocoa, I still think that if you were ever a member of Team Jacob and longing for the wolf to finally get the girl, you might enjoy this book.

My rating: 3 Stars. An okay one time read. For a sensitive reader, there was sex in this book, but it was done in a fairly tactful way (if that can be said about sex in a young adult novel), as a very kiss-and-fall-onto-the-bed-and-wake-up-the-next-morning kind of love scene. Language was pretty much nil – as far as my prego brain can remember, anyway.

Sum it up: Shiver didn’t knock my socks off, by any means. Perhaps there was a little sock slippage, but they stayed on my feet.