{"id":3587,"date":"2012-02-18T21:45:45","date_gmt":"2012-02-19T02:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=3587"},"modified":"2012-02-18T21:45:45","modified_gmt":"2012-02-19T02:45:45","slug":"shiver-by-maggie-stiefvaterscholastic-press-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/shiver-by-maggie-stiefvaterscholastic-press-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Shiver by Maggie StiefvaterScholastic Press, 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grace has grown up watching the wolves behind her family’s house in Mercy Falls, Minnesota. As a child, she was actually attacked by them once: one dragged her from her tire swing on a cold winter day, and the others circled around—but one wolf stopped the attack partway through. That wolf, the yellow-eyed wolf, becomes her<\/em> wolf, the one she’s always looking for in the winter, when she can see the pack through the bare branches of the trees. But when Grace is a junior in high school, it becomes clear that the wolves aren’t just ordinary wolves. They’re werewolves, and they attack one of Grace’s classmates. In the wolf-hunt that follows the attack, Grace’s wolf gets shot—but when she finds him on her back porch, wounded, he’s not a wolf, but a teenage boy. He saved her six years earlier; she saves him in return. They’ve been watching each other since Grace was attacked, Sam in wolf form in the woods watching Grace in her backyard, Grace looking for her yellow-eyed wolf—so of course they fall in love when they’re both in human form. <\/p>\n

But there’s a problem: in this book, werewolves don’t change from human to wolf at the full moon; it happens when it’s cold, so they change for the winter. But they don’t change back to being human every summer: there comes a point at which they stay wolves forever, and Sam, it seems, is just about to reach that point. (You might be wondering, as I did, why the werewolves don’t just move someplace where it doesn’t get cold: someone in the book asks about this, too, and it apparently just doesn’t work: being in the heat just makes the werewolves super-sensitive to small temperature shifts.) So Grace and Sam are dealing with a lot: they’re worried about Jack, the boy who was just attacked who’s now a new werewolf and therefore unstable and might cause problems for the pack; they’re worried about Sam changing back into wolf form forever; they’re worried about jealousy: one of the other wolves wants to be alpha female, with Sam as alpha male, and Grace is clearly a threat to that plan. <\/p>\n

The book, told in chapters alternating between Grace’s viewpoint and Sam’s, is sometimes pleasing, sometimes not so much. I like Sam: he’s smart and sensitive and reads Rilke and loves books. I like Grace: she’s smart and introspective, though more pragmatic than Sam (she doesn’t really like\/get poetry or art, though she is<\/em> bookish). And I like the two of them together, all handholding and kisses. Stiefvater’s style is sometimes a bit overly descriptive, or trying too hard for lyricism, like: “Sure, there was the lean, sickly-looking brindle wolf who hung well back in the woods, only visible in the coldest of months. Everything about him — his dull scraggly coat, his notched ear, his one foul running eye — shouted an ill body, and the rolling whites of his wild eyes whispered of a diseased mind.” (14) But sometimes that lyricism works: I liked passages describing the woods, the weather, the chill in the air, the color of sunset—or sentences like this, from Sam: “Some days seem to fit together like a stained glass window. A hundred little pieces of different color and mood that, when combined, create a complete picture.” (89) The song lyrics Sam writes, on the other hand, are pretty terrible—I wished he would just stick to quoting Rilke.<\/p>\n

This book is the first in a trilogy, and I’m not sure if I’m going to read the next two or not. Once the action got going, I found Shiver<\/em> pretty impossible to put down: I read the second half of the book over the course of one night, and stayed up way past my bedtime to finish it. But I’m not sure if I like the story or characters quite enough to continue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grace has grown up watching the wolves behind her family’s house in Mercy Falls, Minnesota. As a child, she was actually attacked by them once: one dragged her from her tire swing on a cold winter day, and the others circled around—but one wolf stopped the attack partway through. That wolf, the yellow-eyed wolf, becomes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}