Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater
Scholastic, 2009. 400 pages.
Source: Personal copy
When I curled up with Shiver and read the first few chapters, I was captivated. Grace is a teenage girl who survived a wolf attack in her Minnesota backyard as a child; Sam is the werewolf who saved her from the rest of his pack. During the six years since the attack, the two have watched each other: Grace catching glimpses of Sam in wolf form from the safety of her home and–rather than being afraid of his frequent presence–finding herself drawn to him. Other people in town are not so captivated by the wolves. When a boy from Grace’s high school is killed by one, hunters take to the woods to weed out the pack. Fearing for the life of “her wolf,” Grace plunges into the woods and encounters him in human form.
The story that follows is romantic, full of long gazes and many (mostly chaste, yet intimate) nights spent in Grace’s bed. Facing what may be his last year of ability to switch back and forth between wolf and human form, Sam’s body temperature must be carefully regulated in order to keep him from changing back into a wolf. Grace is determined to help Sam remain human for as long as possible, and her ability to keep a roof over his head owes to the fact that her parents are largely absent. Sam’s wolf-ness doesn’t remain a secret for long, though, and complications arise from nearly every direction: curious friends, rogue pack members, and the impending winter frost.
I enjoyed this book, but the thrill I felt when I began reading it did dwindle throughout the course of the story. Parts of it are very slow. There are many, many episodes where Sam and Grace snuggle in bed or do other leisurely activities together, like cooking or reading. (Sam’s one literate lupine, let me tell you! Rilke is strewn throughout the novel.) These scenes were sweet and did help to portray the young couple’s intimacy and ease with one another, but also they made me long for something, anything to actually happen to move the story forward. Alternately, the parts of the book which dealt with Sam’s pack members and teens from Grace’s school felt as though they were cluttered with too many characters. I’m not sure how these episodes could have been framed differently–where there’s one wolf or high school student, there tends to be many–but most of these side characters lacked depth. On the other hand, the alternating first-person narration limits the story’s perspective to either that of Sam or Grace. When I think about it this way, it makes sense information about side characters would be incomplete. Even so, the huge ensemble wasn’t quite satisfying to me.
That said, I think this is a good book for teens and adults who enjoy paranormal romance. A second book, Linger, will continue this story in July 2010. Perhaps that’s why there are so many characters in Shiver? Lots of directions for a second volume. 
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