3 - Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Shiver is a werewolf story.  I'm not giving anything away by saying that, because it's obvious almost immediately (if you didn't guess by the gorgeous wolf peeking through the branches on the cover of my copy).  It's also a story of love and loss and betrayal and hope.

The story is told in chapters that alternate between the voices of Sam and Grace.  Each chapter is marked with the temperature, which eventually plays into the story.  Much like Two Boys Kissing, as the story climbs toward the climax, the author uses shorter chapters, choppy line breaks, and unusual punctuation and capitalization to pull the reader into the intensity of the moment.

The reimagining of werewolves for this story is intriguing.  In the world Stiefvater has created, up in Minnesota near Canada, the werewolves are all bitten humans, infected with a disease that makes them more and more wolf-like, until finally the human is gone and wolf remains.  It's a hopeless progression, hated by some and embraced by others, until Sam and Grace meet and fall in love.  Then there is a race against time and the peculiarities of the disease.

Pages: 390
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