Shiver!

Hey all! So this is my first review in a while, but here it goes!
The book, Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater is a wonderful tale about family, love, and the supernatural. It shares common traits with Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, such as the romance between a werewolf and a human girl, and the fact that it even has werewolves in it, but that's where the similarities end. It is a lot more violent than the Twilight series, and revolves around only werewolves; no vampires included! This kind of wolf is bitten, and can change between human and wolf for about fifteen times each.

The story starts in the small town of Mercy Falls, Minnesota. Our heroine, seventeen year old Grace Brisbane is the perfect child. She has good grades, cooks for her parents, and tries not to get into trouble. But all is not well in her small town. One of the local boys, Jack Culpeper, has been recently killed by one of the wolves in the area. Everyone is in a state of panic, scared of the wolves. Everyone but Grace. She knows the wolves aren't bad, especially her wolf. The one with the yellow eyes that is always looking at her.

But the rest of the townspeople think the wolves are bad, and want to kill them, including Grace's father. After her father and the rest of his arranged hunting party shoots one of the wolves, she finds Sam, naked and alone in the middle of the woods bleeding. He has the same yellow eyes as her wolf! She brings him to the hospital where she discovers his unnatural healing abilities. Grace soon finds out that he is a werewolf, and they start a relationship.

 But their happy relationship is tested when winter comes. You see, Sam's kind of wolves only shift into their human forms in the summer, while in the winter, they revert back to their wolf forms. Sam's winter is especially hard. He wants to stay with Grace, but the wolf inside him is slowly creeping out. When Sam finally does shift, he knows he can never be human again. Sam is different. For some reason, Sam has fewer changes than a regular wolf.

Shiver is a simple, but powerful love story of two ordinary teenagers who have become extraordinary. I love this story because it is a taste of what is to come for me when I read Twilight next year. Be sure to catch the breath-taking sequels!

 

Thank you to Common Sense Media and Seacoast Blog!