Review: Shiver by Maggie Steifvater

genre: paranormal romance
age: YA
recommend to: those who liked Twilight
rating: 3/8 tentacles

Don't let this book fool you. It will try. It will pretend to have a plot, just to draw you in. It will dance pretty descriptions before your eyes and hide nonsense behind pretty words, hoping that you won’t notice. Steifvater writes, “As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air.” Isn’t that lovely? It fooled me too.

As soon as girl meets boy (in his human form), all pretense at plot is abandoned in favor of what I like to call Gooey Teen Romance. You’ve seen it. Two teens meet each other for the first time and it’s like a spell has been cast. They think constantly about that person. Every other aspect of their life fades into the background. Everything becomes irrelevant except for this other person. They need to see this person, need to speak to this person. But most of all, they need to touch this person. They yearn for them. Gooey Teen Romance primarily consists of yearning. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to read page after page of descriptions of yearning. I like to read stories. About things happening. With plots that unfold, instead of gathering dust in the corner.

This is the plot, before it was discarded and then vaguely picked up again towards the end of the book like oh yeah, wasn’t I talking about something? The book begins with Grace enduring a wolf attack. She lies there in the snow, motionless, doing nothing to protect herself. This seems like an interesting sub-mystery—why doesn’t she fight to live? But don’t get your hopes up. This is never addressed. So as she calmly submits to death-by-mauling she looks up into the yellow eyes of one of the wolves. And the wolf seems to gaze back before calling the other wolves off. Grace survives.

After this moment, Grace feels a special connection to what she comes to think of as her wolf. He appears in her backyard every winter. She looks forward to Christmas because she knows her wolf will be waiting at the edges of the woods. Watching her. Guarding her, it seems.

Then a boy, Jack Culpepper, is killed by wolves. The town is in an uproar and the boy’s family insists the wolves be eradicated. Jack’ body is stolen from the morgue and Grace could have sworn she heard his voice in the forest. And there’s a new wolf lurking in its shadows. A mercurial wolf with very familiar eyes. She’s determined to save her wolves and also worried about what has become of Jack and what this new, dangerous wolf will do.

Sounds good, right? I thought so. But then human Sam, aka golden eyed wolf, appears and the plot is forsaken. The angry wolf hunters are never mentioned again. The yearning and drivelly romance begins. Grace actually tells us, several times, that she feels like the rest of her life (school, her friends, her parents) doesn’t matter anymore. All that matters now is being with Sam. I had some horrifying Twilight flashbacks. Their relationship is revealed as being even more unhealthy when Grace admits that she fell in love with Sam before she knew he was a human. She fell in love with a dog. Fell. In love. With a dog. He is touched, instead of being properly repulsed by her bestial tendencies.

Steifvater alternates between Sam’s and Grace’s perspectives although the only way to tell the difference between speakers is context. I often skipped reading the chapter heading and mistook who was narrating. Steifvater probably wanted to get both points of view in, but focused on trying to sound writerly instead of creating distinct voices for her characters. See As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner as an example of successful alternating perspectives. One of Sam’s chapters begins, “I was a leaking womb.” First of all, what boy would ever liken himself to a womb? Second of all, leaking? Was it his time of the month? Was he leaking baby juices? Whatever female reproductive organ he feels like, there is no need for metaphorical leakage. It’s just disgusting. Regardless of whether or not this is a successful and illuminating metaphor (it’s not. what does it even mean?), this is not something that ANY boy would say. She really wrote this. Its on page sixty-three.

Further nonsensical imagery include, but are not limited to:
-paper falling "like listless birds" (page 49). Grace drops some loose leaf. Imagine listless (languid, dispirited, indifferent) birds falling to the ground. Now imagine sheets of paper falling to the ground. Do they look similar? Does describing these indifferent birds help you envision the paper? I rest my case.

-The full leaking womb bit goes like this: “I was not a wolf, but I wasn’t Sam yet, either. I was a leaking womb bulging with the promise of conscious thoughts…” Okay, so I think what Steifvater is trying to tell us is that Sam is in between forms and he can almost feel the conscious thoughts coming, like a baby being born? But… I don’t know. If he didn’t already have conscious thoughts he wouldn’t have been able to tell us this, so that doesn’t work either. And I have never heard and can't imagine ever hearing a boy use the word "womb."

-“Sam and I had spent last night talking about the strange room of stuffed animals at the Culpeppers’ and wondering, with the constant irritation of a scratchy sweater, where Jack was going to make his next appearance” (Page 120). This metaphor makes sense but it’s really crammed in there. Awkwardly. This sentence is as awkward as a leaking womb.

I only wrote three examples down. But there are plenty more. I attribute them to Steifvater paying more attention to what her words sounded like than what they meant. A lot of this novel reads like overwrought pseudo poetry. For example: Sam’s song lyrics. One of Sam’s hobbies is to make up song lyrics in his head and then force us to read them (One of his songs is about truffles). I skipped over them. They seem completely out of nowhere and disconnected to his character.

So who is Sam? In the winter he’s a wolf with yellow eyes that saves girls from being mauled. In the summer he is a boy who makes up songs in his head, feels like a uterus with something oozing out of it, and reads Rilke. Which Steifvater forces us to read too.

When I picked up Shiver, I wanted a story about the silent bond between a girl and a yellow-eyed wolf. I imagined them exploring a lush forest carpeted in pine needles. I imagined the wolf following the girl, the amazement that such a majestic and wild animal had chosen her as its companion. I imagined the adventures they would have together, and her shock and delight when the wolf became a boy. When he could respond to her with words of her own language. Then, the bond they built as girl and wolf might evolve into something else. I was hoping he would still be wild and wolflike as a boy.

But Sam is just ordinary. And this isn’t the story I got.

I’m primarily focusing on the negatives here, and I feel a little bad about that. There is a lot more of the beautiful description I quoted in my first paragraph. But I didn’t like this book. Partly because it didn’t meet my expectations, partly because this kind of story just isn’t my cup of tea, and partly because a lot of things in it didn’t make sense.