Shiver [Book Review]

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A little heads up! If I'm not reviewing ARC copies, or am posting infrequently for a little while, it's because I'm currently going through exams. Bear with me ;)

Title: Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #1)

Author:  Maggie Stiefvater

Publisher:  Scholastic Press

Published Date:  1^st August 2009

Rating: 2 Stars

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Synopsis: 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.

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Review: I was very excited when it came to starting this book because everywhere I turn, I see people who love Maggie Stiefvater’s books and writing. When I managed to pick this one up for a euro only at a book fair I was incredibly pleased and couldn’t wait to crack this one open. However, instead of falling in love with it like everyone else, this book basically brought me to the brink of a potential reading slump. I was so close I almost considered DNFing it, but then in the end I somehow managed to push through this one.

I’ve only ever read a few werewolf books, so that was another aspect of this one that attracted me to it. This one is really centered on the wolves, and in a sense it put a different spend on being a werewolf that I hadn’t seen before. Instead of the moon being the deciding figure of when they would shift forms, it was actually the temperature which would do so. If the wolf was warm it would become human, and if it was cold as it generally is in the wintertime, then they would be a wolf. I think you can pretty much understand where the title comes from.

So where did it all start to go wrong?

The first thing that bothered me the most was the parents. They were completely absent from this story and totally aloof. Not in the general way that happens with YA sometimes, but in a way where it was impossible to not start hating them. They were always out late at night, and totally ignorant of anything that happened to their child. I would rather that they didn’t exist or had mysteriously died rather than came and went like the plot demanded of them. Oh, and if they went to a friend’s house, in most cases the parents were conveniently not at home. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to shake every single parental figure there was in this novel.

Then there was the main character Grace. I just didn’t get her, or what the author did to her character. When we first meet her she is shy, uninterested and inexperienced when it comes to boys. But then Sam comes into her like and suddenly her whole character turns into a flirtatious, confident girl who can’t get enough? I didn’t know how her character could do a complete 360 with no development whatsoever. She wasn’t consistent and even with the change, I just wasn’t feeling her jive. She also just happened to take the whole ‘werewolves are real’ thing way too easily. Maybe she had been wishing for it to be true her whole life, but it was still way too easy for her to grasp that phenomenon. Another thing was that every time her life was risked and she almost died she just pushed on and had a blasé attitude. Almost died? Whatever.

              

Generally, I felt like this book had little plot, and that the issues they were facing were relatively small, slow in coming and then easily solved. I wasn’t very interested when reading. I did want there to be a more prominent romance so that I could at least be intrigued by that, but nothing really happened. Sam decided he wanted to be a gentleman in everything he did and the whole romance was boring. Uninteresting from beginning to end.

Every now and again they would throw in some music lyrics so that it could be tied into Sam’s character. But again, that wasn’t really something well developed in the book and they kind of fell flat to me as well.

What was decently good about this book so that it could achieve the two star rating that it did was that Sam was a fairly nice character. I could like him well enough but he constantly remained at the level that a secondary character could’ve been at. And I also really liked Maggie Stiefvater’s writing style. If there were better characters and more of a plot, then maybe I would like a book of hers. Maybe I should try a different series?

I own the second book in the series, so I’ll try the next one. I hope it gets better than this.

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Gif Summary

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Links: Goodreads and Amazon!

Olivia’s Question: Are there any unpopular opinions you have when it comes to generally loved books?

Olivia-Savannah x