Shiver: a quick review
Shiver is the story of Grace and Sam, wolves, teen angst and the biting cold of winter. Stiefvater has an interesting and original twist to the werewolf mythos, and at times her prose can be quite lyrical. Unfortunately I found the switching back and forth between Grace and Sam chapters quite tedious as well as some of the extremely short chapters, but this could just be me nitpicking at literary things that make me twitch.
The “romance” of the characters was by far the longest section of the novel, which was drawn out and occasionally bland to read and made the conflict towards the end of the novel feel rather tacked on the end. Although Grace and Sam had believable character development, the secondary characters are thinly fleshed out. I would have loved to have read more about Olivia, and her friendship with Grace at the expense of Sam‘s terrible song writing (seriously squeamishly nauseating stuff).
As far as teen paranormal romances go this one has a heart of silver at the very least. The characters are believably flawed as human and wolf alike which made for an enjoyable read. Amazon reveals that there is a follow up book, Linger, which I don’t think I will be reading as I think any further stretching out of the story into a series would ruin the first novel, unless it was central to other characters leaving Grace and Sam behind. It’s worth a read if you like teen fiction, and far better written than the likes of the dreaded Twilight books.
