Saturday 31 March 2012

Review: Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater
(The Wolves of Mercy Falls #1)
4 out of 5 stars

Published by Scholastic

Usually when it concerns a book like Shiver, there are two teams. There is the "OMGZ THIS IS THE BEST BOOK, SAM IS HOT<333" team and the "this sucks. i'd rather die than read this shit again" team. They're both pretty self-explanatory. But right here, right now I will make a third team. I will call it "We Like Shiver". Because that's how I feel about this book. I don't love Shiver, I like it. I like the main characters, I like the romance, I like the werewolf lore, I like the story, I like the ending. But there's no passion for me here, there are no "oh my god" moments.

Well, except for the animal torturing part. If you read the book, you will probably know what I'm talking about. Yuck. Seriously. I had to put the book down for two days, it put me off so much.

Shiver is basically a classic young love story, with the big obstacle being that one of the two is a werewolf. The writing was pretty good, it was quite rich with some beautiful descriptions. There were a lot of little details to this book that tells you that a lot of time and effort went into this book to make it as good as possible. For example, the colour of the letters match the blue on the cover. Every chapter states the temperature, which is pretty relevant to the story. Overall it felt like a very polished effort.

But maybe it felt a bit too polished for my tastes. It felt like every real and raw emotion has been polished out. Shiver is just a big string of poetical moments. If you have one of them, they can be strong and memorable, but if you have too many, they just turn into a blur. What am I trying to say? Maybe the relationship between Grace and Sam was too easy.

That doesn't mean this isn't a very enjoyable book. But I never really swooned over Sam, even though I usually love a tortured hero. Conclusion is, I liked Shiver. Didn't hate it, didn't love it. Who's with me?

Blurb

Grace and Sam share a kinship so close they could be lovers or siblings. But they also share a problem. When the temperature slips towards freezing, Sam reverts to his wolf identity and must retreat into the woods to protect his pack. He worries that eventually his human side will fade away and he will be left howling alone at the lonely moon. A stirring supernatural teen romance.

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6 comments:

Annette said...

I liked Shiver quite a bit. Linger is the one I felt a bit "meh" about. Interesting thoughts. Usually I don't require a swoon-worthy guy to love a book, because I can't really say I swooned over Sam either.

rogier said...

 i really liked shiver / sam was ann interesting dude/ yep he is/loved the song writing and reading poems etc

Shan Li said...

I have yet to start reading this series. When I first heard about it I honestly wasn't interested, it sounded a bit like twilight - I'm not a 'twihater' or whatever their calling themselves these days, but I wasn't exactly a fan! But their has been a lot of praise for this series in the internet so I think I'm going to check it out (: I'm happy to hear you've created a, We Like Shiver group, I'll hopefully fall into that one since I'm not one for drastic fan-girling! Hahahaha, good review! 

Celine said...

Thanks for stopping by Shan!

I actually was exactly like you with the Twilight series - didn't love them, didn't hate them. My only opinion about them is that they're quite catchy, but I found them quite lame plot-wise.

The biggest difference for me between Shiver and Twilight is that Shiver doesn't contain a love-triangle. Thank goodness for that! It's very romance heavy, but in a very sweet way. I hope you'll join me in the We Like Shiver group! (:

Oh! Paper Pages said...

Great review. I really liked this book, but I felt like the series slowly went downhill after this one. I did not like the third book at all. It is a unique idea, and I did enjoy the writing style. 

Celine said...

The writing is certainly beautiful, I absolutely love it. I don't know, once I get to "know" a character I just stick with it until the end. I'm currently reading Forever and I still like it. It's so strange, since everyone else hated the last two books, I seem to like them more than the first

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