Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Grace has spent years watching the wolves that live in the woods behind her house. It may be that she's fascinated by their beauty, but ever since she was almost mauled to death by a pack of wolves, Grace has always watched out for them. One in particular, with yellow eyes, has especially stood out to her. But Grace is not the only one who's watching. Sam, who changes from wolf to human when the seasons change, has also been looking out for Grace. He's never had the guts to talk to her when he's human, but that's about to change.

So Shiver took me forever to read! Part of it was the length (390 pages) and part of it was that I was reading books in between. My reading of Shiver has been a little choppy, so I recommend trying to read it as close together as possible. I really liked Shiver, though. The characters and theme were very interesting. There's not too many books about wolves/werewolves (though I suppose that will probably change soon) so I'm glad I read something original. The writing was superb and flowed very nicely. The romance between Sam and Grace was done very nicely, and part of me thinks it may have been over-developed. Not in a bad way, it's just that the book is extremely long, and in terms of plot not that much happens. So a lot of the novel is interaction between Grace and Sam. It's nice, because they are so cute together, but at times I wanted to say "Okay, something needs to happen now." By the last third or fourth of the book, the plot appears again, and the story finally gets good. You want to know what happens next, so I read the last pages of the book very quickly. And the ending: it was amazing. And a bit of a cliffhanger! Half-way through Shiver I wasn't sure if I was going to read the sequel, Linger (release date: July 20, 2010), but now I want to. So if you feel like Shiver is going slow, keep reading, because it gets much better.

7.5 out of 10.