Shiver - Maggie Stiefvater

Look, it is a review, are you not amazed? I’ve finally returned to talk about the young adult, paranormal romance ‘Shiver’ by Maggie Stiefvater. I’m afraid this is one of those reviews where there are spoilers, so some of you may want to skip it. I really had to talk about some things in detail, or this review would have consisted of me going on about ‘the thing that happens with the thing’ and no one wants that.

Before I get started I’d like to offer up a disclaimer. I didn’t get ‘Shiver’ from Maggie Stiefvater, or her publisher, but I do read and really enjoy the author’s blog. I’ve seen a lot of posts about why she writes characters the way she does, which means that I have a clear shape in my mind of what her intentions were when she wrote ‘Shiver’. I think at times I might struggle to separate her awesome author intention from how I experienced the novel I read. I’m going to try to be super honest about how I perceived ‘Shiver’ before I thought about what Steifvater’s intentions were, but it might not work and I think you should be aware of that.

Every winter the wolves come to Mercy Falls and every summer they disappear. When she was little Grace was attacked by the wolves and this attack fostered (oddly you might think) a positive interest in the wolves. Grace watches the wolves every year, one wolf in particular, the wolf with the golden eyes who saved her from his pack’s attack. When rich brat Jack Culpepper is killed by the wolves, the men of Mercy Falls take up their guns and go into the woods to illegally cull Grace’s beloved animals.

Sam is a quiet, artistic boy who takes a summer job in Mercy Falls book shop every year. After the shooting he shows up naked and bleeding on Grace’s porch. Three guesses what the connection is. Yep, this is a book featuring werewolves. Any humans bitten by the Mercy Falls wolves, will change into a wolf once the temperature lowers and will become human again in the summer. Eventually they stop changing back to human form. It feels like his final season to Sam, but he is determined to fight this final change, especially now that Grace has learned his secret.

‘Shiver’ alternates between Grace and Sam’s first person narratives, which reveal the complex and flawed personalities of each character. Grace is different from many female narrators, even the kind of female narrators who we tend to identify as being different from the popular girls around them. She reads non-fiction and hates fiction, she’s more comfortable with numbers than with using words to verbalise emotions. Overwhelmingly male and female narrators of young adult and adult fiction tend to be interested in novels and good at using words, so Grace contributes a different kind of perspective. Nymeth explains this kind of character much better in her review of ‘Dark Dude’ so let me point you over there for some elucidation.

Grace is also a girl who doesn’t fit the traditional female personality definition. She is terrible at reading people, displaying a lack of that innate female intuition we all supposedly have. She can cook, but only does so because if she doesn’t cook no one in her house would eat. When she shops she (insert quote about seeing something and just buying it). It’s nice to see Stiefvater show a different kind of teenage, female character in a young adult novel – diversity, we like it. I personally found it hard to connect with Grace at times, as I felt she could be too definite in identifying other people’s behaviour as right, or wrong, but I definitely appreciated seeing an underrepresented kind of female character in ‘Shiver’.

Sam is a more of a traditional narrator, as he loves fiction and poetry, he’s artistic and introspective. At the same time he often displays an interest in subjects that perhaps aren’t traditionally considered things boys are interested in, for example poetry. These interests, Sam’s artistic side and the open way that he displays his emotions are part of what makes him such a swoon worthy romantic lead. He is kind, complex and (wonderful for emo me) terribly tragic. He has a back story to break your heart and I felt like his motivations were mostly believable. His character is so complete and he feels like a real person. I repeat, he is swoon worthy.

Both characters describe their experiences compellingly and their lives share many similarities, for example they have both been effectively abandoned by their parents. However, it’s perhaps inevitable that Sam’s story of parental abandonment, unwilling transformation and alternate family structure will resonate the most with readers. While I felt for Grace when she shows how uninterested her parents are in her life, her family grievances just can’t compare to Sam’s story of parents who try to kill him. I felt like Sam’s story was helped by the quick, concentrated flashback form Stiefvater used to present pivotal memories from Sam’s past. In Sam’s narrative Stiefvater seems to have identified the most effective way to present her material, in order to increase the dramatic effect of Sam’s story. She conceals parts of his past life and slowly reveals memories in what feels like a linear pattern, unfolding a coherent past narrative within the story set in the present. The slow reveal generates reader curiosity, the switch between the ugly, physical nature of some memories and the quiet, domestic scenes of Sam’s happier times creates an interesting contrast. Most importantly these memories adds extra layers of feeling to the story, keeping the emotional atmosphere of the novel fresh and diverse.

When it comes to Grace’s narrative Stiefvater seems to struggle to sustain interest in Grace’s life, independent of her relationship with Sam. Grace’s narrative includes just one dramatic flashback, when the novel opens with Grace’s memories of her wolf attack. As this is really the only active memory Grace has that relates to the present narrative (all her other memories relate to passively watching the wolves, or photographing them). I think that Stiefvater settles on making present conflicts and relationships, such as Grace’s troubled relationship with her parents, provide the extra layer of feeling in Grace’s story. While that’s a sound idea, I’m not sure Steifvater is totally successfully in her efforts to increase the readers interest and sympathetic feeling for Grace by showing her complicated relationships. Grace and her parents relationship certainly works well to that end. When Grace describes how angry she is at them, how let down she feels by them my heart was squeezed. Her broken down friendship with Olivia is less successful, simply because Olivia is absent from Grace’s life for so much of the novel it’s easy to forget about their friendship. Grace’s most significant relationship away from Sam, seems to be with her best friend Rachel and it would have been interesting to see them interact more as Grace grows more involved with saving Sam, but again Rachel is missing, reappearing sporadically to make small hints that she feels Grace is becoming estranged from her.

It’s very possibly that I’m missing the point of this book by talking about Grace and Sam’s stories separately. The real driver of drama in this book is the full on romance between the two main characters. As a result of the exclusive emotional attachment Stiefvater has her two first person narrators reflect by keeping other positive relationships in the background, or scuppering them with big misunderstandings, the one area where the emotional tension is always consistent is Grace and Sam’s relationship. From reading Stiefvater’s blog I knew my idea of how a relationship might go was going to differ from the hers so I allowed for that. I allowed for the fact that ‘Shiver’ is concerned with first love, teenage love and love in tragic circumstances, so when Grace says things about Sam like 'I need this to live' I chalked it up to extreme feeling, not a girl who is too dependent on her romantic relationship to be troubled by, although I can see how others would disagree. The romantic scenes feel warm and heartfelt. As Grace and Sam learn about each other and find attraction, comfort and love with another person they reveal themselves and their partner to the reader in a detailed, yet overwhelmingly sympathetic way, which increases the readers connection with them. Stiefvater recognises that if you do love up right there is no need to create fake drama by introducing a love triangle. And for bonus points there is sex! In a YA book! And yes it’s typical fade to black no explicit details after a bit of kissing and grinding stuff, but ‘Shiver’ contains a heroine who gets to have sex that is not creepy and she suffers no TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES! I was very happy about this.

However, in the later stages of the book I came upon a problem with the romance. Sam annoys Grace mightily and Grace wants to go off on one, but she realises she can’t because they have so little time before Sam may become a wolf forever. She bites her tongue, because angry feelings are not important when your boyfriend might be a wolf tomorrow and they get on with loving each other. That makes sense in Steifvater’s world, but I didn’t like it. It will be interesting to see how the romance element progresses in the next book.

While there is often plenty of plot tension surrounding Grace and Sam’s fight to be together, there are a few crucial moments where the tension is just absent. When Sam’s surrogate wolf father Beck willingly goes out into the cold to save Sam, ending his last season as a human prematurely I felt like I should have been feeling more. As the reader receives the narrative through Grace’s first person perspective they find it hard to make a connection with what Beck is giving up. Instead they are forcefully directed by the narrative to focus on the emotions Grace projects about what Sam might gain. This is a huge problem for the book, as the exclusive emotion the pair feel for each other often conflicts with the readers need to feel an emotional connection with other characters in order to feel immersed in the full story. Grace wants Sam to be safe, so although she might care about Beck giving up his humanity, her focus is entirely on Sam’s well being, making her disconnected from her feelings about the huge sacrifice Beck is making. The reader has to step back and go outside the immediate narrative to empathise with Beck’s loss as space for such emotional connection is not provided in the text. The purpose behind Grace’s focus, which she passes to the reader is to keep readers engaged with Sam and Grace and to forge a deep emotional connection between the main characters and the reader increasing the emotional impact of the story. The novel’s inability to allow readers a real chance to care about other characters, in case it jeopardises the certainty with which they approach their relationship with Grace and Sam makes ‘Shiver’ a weaker book.

Another problem I had with ‘Shiver’ was the total insanity of the novel’s plot. I’m not talking about Steifvater’s unique temperature controlled werewolves; that seemed like a clever twist on the werewolf story. My problem with ‘Shiver’s plot is that at times I felt like I was watching a game of ‘Fortunately, Unfortunately’ unfold. Fortunately Grace thinks there’s a cure for Sam’s ‘condition’. Unfortunately a deer hits her car windscreen letting the cold air in, which means Sam changes before they have a chance to cure him. Crashing plot devices like this result in some incredible, dramatic plot twists, but I thought that these plot devices felt contrived. There were a few times when plot developments made me snort with laughter because they seemed to have been ridiculously forced into the novel, to temporarily increase the tension of the plot. More genuine emotional tension was evoked during episodes that emerged naturally as a consequence of the characters actions (the bath – gah my heart was broken during this part), rather than scenes caused by dues ex machine devices.

The way Stiefvater keeps her plot going actually leads to my biggest problem with my favourite male character (Sam, oh Sam, how I adore you). There were times when Sam’s actions would differ wildly from his established personality, in order to fuel the tension in the book. Let’s take the big misunderstanding between Beck and Sam. Sam thinks Beck has kidnapped some kids and turned them into werewolves to keep the pack safe, as many pack members have now reached the stage where they never transform back into humans and they need new human recruits to watch over the wolves who never change back. Sam sees three bleeding kids tied up in the back of a van and they ask for help. He cuts Beck out of his life right there, because Sam knows how bad being a werewolf is and this sets up an emotional tension between him and Beck that emerges throughout the book, making it feel richer. It also sets up a final, last dash attempt for Sam to see Beck before they both change for the final time and that leads to lots of other plot development.

Sam has been constantly set up as the wonderful, brave hero of ‘Shiver’. He’s emotionally vulnerable, but we know he can kill if he has to and he will kill to save people. Does he try to free the kids? Nuuh, he leaves them there. His actions could be justified but I didn’t really believe in the justification I had to come up with to understand why he leaves three helpless kids to their fate. Beck is the pack alpha while in human form, perhaps we can explain Sam’s behaviour as an inability to break pack hierarchy. They’ve already been turned and Sam can’t actually save them. But...really...I’m supposed to think of Sam as the wonderful hero of this book after that? I mean Stefivater still makes me love him because she writes a novel that reminds me of his tragic circumstances and his devoted love for Grace and his swoonworthy behaviour, but it was always there in the back of my mind. I know she says she always writes flawed characters, but...really? I know, I know it all turns out to be a big misunderstanding and it get’s explained in the end and Sam doesn’t really care then because he’s turning into a wolf for the last time without speaking to the man who raised him, but...really? And I can’t help feeling that the closest relationship Sam has ever had has to be temporarily destroyed, not to add to the story but to ensure that Grace is all Sam has and the exclusivity of their romance becomes even stronger and more potently emotional. You can feel the love and the trust steaming off Beck and Sam in Sam’s memories and it made me sad to see that bond broken when they next meet in real life. However, that’s just my personal preference.

So, will I be picking up ‘Linger’ the next book in the trilogy? I think I will. First the ending to ‘Shiver’...no I can’t talk about the ending. It makes me frustrated as a reader, but let’s just say it’s designed to make you go out and rob a bookstore to see what happens next. Stiefvater’s writing, especially her choice of words to describe nature:

'The white peeled bark of the birches looked buttery in the long, slanting afternoon light, and their leaves were a delicate gold.'

and sensory detail like smell:

'Peppermint swirled into my nostrils, sharp as glass then raspberry, almost too sweet like too ripe fruit. Apple, crisp and pure. Nuts, buttery, warm, earthy, like Sam. The subtle mild scent of white chocolate. Oh, God, some sort of mocha, rich and dark and sinful.'

is lovely. Although at the beginning of the novel I thought she might overuse the classic techniques she picks to create atmosphere and tip into overly dramatic writing, the book soon settles down into a style which combines the necessary gothic imagery and sharp, tension driving sentences with longer sentences and everyday scenes. There’s more Sam to look forward to. I’d like to try again to establish a connection with Grace. I absolutely can’t wait to see Jacks sister, Isabel again. And I hear rumours of a new character named Cole, which of course automatically makes me think of Charmed.

There’s something there in Mercy Falls, something fascinating. But I definitely think knowing that Maggie Steifvater is not in favour of creepy relationships and thinks girls are super awesome means I’m reading this book differently than I would if I were coming to it with no prior knowledge. There were some parts of ‘Shiver’ that made my symbolism eye twitch out of control, for example when she remembers being attacked by wolves Grace says:

'I could have screamed, but I didn't. I could have fought, but I didn't. I just lay there and let it happen, watching the winter-white sky go grey above me.'

When Sam later begins to hide information from Grace, that could be interpreted as controlling, rather than kind. Lastly, I am so conflicted about how Isabel is so traditionally feminine and so horrible. And through these parts I just chanted things like ‘this will probably be resolved in the sequel’ and ‘flawed characters’. Let’s see how it will all work out in ‘Linger’ shall we!

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