Review: Forever by Maggie Stiefvater

Title: Forever

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

Series: The Wolves of Mercy Falls #3

Genre: YA Paranormal Romance

Publisher: Scholastic

Summary (from Goodreads):

In Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver, Grace and Sam found each other. In Linger, they fought to be together. Now, in Forever, the stakes are even higher than before. Wolves are being hunted. Lives are being threatened. And love is harder and harder to hold on to as death comes closing in.

What’s Good About It

I don’t envy the job of authors have when finishing their much beloved series. It’s a minefield of choices, where every decision you make is going to upset someone. Go for the schmaltzy happy ending? Or a grittier, more realistic end? Leave a few things hanging, or tie everything up with a nice bow? There are fans of every variety, and you can’t please all of them.

Me, I’m a fan of realistic, wrapped up, but not too tightly, endings. And I don’t think it’s too spoilerish to say that Forever got it just right for me.

The stakes are wonderfully raised: the wolves are in the crosshairs of the townsfolk, and with Grace and a number of other humans in wolf skin still running around with the pack, it’s a real race against time to save them, creating palpable tension in every page.

I loved the strained emotion of Sam and Grace’s relationship – their tentative steps back to their previous intimacy when Grace returns from the woods. I loved Cole and Isabel’s tense exchanges and Sam’s interactions with the police and other townsfolk who believe him to have murdered Grace. Everything just worked – the build up, the final climatic moments, the open-ended but not dissatisfying ending. A perfect final instalment to a fantastic trilogy.

What’s Not So Good

Like I said, it won’t please everyone. You’ll have to read it and find out for yourself, I guess.

Rating: 5/5

Sunday Recap, 30/10

1. Blogging

So, I’ve decided on a new weekly feature, which means with everything I’m already posting, the week should look something like this:

Monday – Book Review

Wednesday – Character Study Feature

Friday – Something from my life/my writing

Sunday – a recap of my goals for the week

Obviously, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday become spare days on which to post anything extra I might have to say, but also give me a chance to schedule future posts and do some actual novel writing. Plus, you know, spend some time with the Boyfriend and do my actual job.

2. Writing

So, the big one is out of the way – finish the first draft of my novel. Hooray! I’m so glad to finally have committed the last few chapters to virtual paper. Of course, it’s going to take a lot of editing, as I am well aware the last two chapters were written in a haze of ill health and cough syrup, so they aren’t likely to be any good. But it’s done, which is all that really matters right now. It’s been printed and put in a box ready to hide in a cupboard for a few months so I can attack it fresh.

3. Exercise

Due to still feeling the need to cough my guts up every once in a while, I’ve done fairly badly on this, but I did walk my baby brother to the shops and back, and had a very swift walk around another town centre with the Boyfriend, so I’m not feeling as sedentary this week as last week.

4. Music

Well, we didn’t quite get around to arranging the song. The time Ivy was up to spend with us was unfortunately interrupted by Taylor having a driving lesson, but I have learned a new song on the guitar, and have some ideas about what we are going to play at a wedding we’re doing in the new year. So not all bad on that front.

Targets For Next Week

• Finish plan for new story project
• Maintain current level of exercise, if not improve

The DIY Disaster Scale

I’ve been spending a lot of time at my mother’s lately – something I usually do anyway, but have been especially the past few days due to feeling exceedingly sorry for myself and wanting someone to look after me while the Boyfriend is at work.

It’s been very good for my productivity. I didn’t just watch the episode of Supernatural that my Sky+ conveniently failed to record – I wrote a song, played guitar, discovered some more things about maths (research for an upcoming novel) and introduced my family to Look Around You, a bizarre comedy take on 70s After School Specials I discovered while browsing the internet.

The other day my family were fairly occupied doing the DIY – which is fine by me, I’m not there to be waited on hand and foot, just for a bit of company while the Boyfriend is out – so I spent most of the morning with Taylor keeping half an eye on the babies while Mum and her Husband cleaned and drilled and took down doors and other random things. While we were talking about music and guitars, we got onto the conversation about the DIY Disaster Scale.

You see, the Step-Dad is good at DIY, really. He used to build boats, and knows how to cobble things together, and will always have a go at fixing things himself before resorting to calling in the experts. And usually he gets it right. But sometimes there are mishaps…

I think he’s got a bit of a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ attitude to DIY. I’ll just stick this drill bit through here and see what happens… and generally it doesn’t serve him too badly. But we have learned from many (amusing) experiences, that when things go wrong, you can always tell how bad it is, and whether or not to offer assistance, from what he shouts out.

The DIY Disaster Scale

‘Oh’ – small scale mishap, probably tried to hammer in a nail with a chisel or something. No real damage to anything other than perhaps pride. Don’t even bother to investigate, it probably doesn’t even have comedy value.

‘Oh God’ – a slightly larger mishap, but nothing terminal. Point and laugh is usually the best response here.

‘Oh sh*t’ – something has gone extremely wrong. Approach with caution and tentatively call out from a safe distance if there’s anything you can do to help. Hope he says it’s all under control.

‘Oh f*ck’ – evacuate the house immediately.

The last time we hit the last stage, he’d put a nail gun through the hot water pipe in the living room while trying to fix the wooden flooring. We had an impromptu swimming pool and he had to run to Homebase (fortunately just over the road) dripping wet to get some emergency pipe sealer, while Mum tried to stem the flow with a tea towel and my siblings ran through the house turning on every hot tap to try and drain the system.

I went home before anything major happened this time, but later my mother posted on her blog that all had not gone entirely smoothly. I’m just glad they only hit ‘Oh God’ on the DIY Disaster Scale!

What Next?

The just finished novel manuscript has been printed (largely on scrap paper, using a half dead ink cartridge… I’m saving up for a new house and environmentally conscious) and stuffed in a bigger box than my last ‘novel box’ on account of not fitting in the last one. It is still sitting on my desk at the moment, ready to be stuffed in a cupboard for a few months before I come back to it completely fresh.

Which leaves me with the same adrift feeling I got last time I finished something. And that pesky question buzzing around in my head, asking ‘What next?’

It’s an important question, and one that needs answering soon, because I would like to get back to writing something. So why is it that all the wonderful ideas I had when I was supposed to be finishing the last one seem somehow less tantalising than before? Like the idea of being allowed to explore them now has made them less interesting and shiny.

I know what project I’m doing next, because I had decided as much before I finished. I’m going to stick to that plan. I mentioned the project briefly in this post: it’s a mystery thriller (sort of – I have trouble defining genre) and set in a little town that Mr Taylor, Taylor and I had much fun designing.

And that’s thing I’m trying to remember – this is the fun stage. Not that writing isn’t fun, it is, but it’s also difficult and tiring and generally hard hard work. Designing characters, playing with plot ideas, designing settings and deciding on the rules – that’s the creative part, the part where anything and everything goes, before the lines in the sand are drawn and the plot resolves into whatever shape the characters and events dictate.

I haven’t finished the drawing of the town yet. The main town centre is done, and rather than try to draw the rest of the town behind it, I have filled the empty space with little boxes in which to draw other important places. I don’t know what the important places are yet, but so far I’ve added a picnic spot by the river that I didn’t know about until the thought popped into my head, and a couple of houses for main characters. There are plenty of boxes waiting to be filled with places that may or may not become integral to the story.

That’s what’s so exciting about it. You just don’t know what will happen next. The fun is in finding out.

The End

Yesterday I typed those two words on my second completed novel project.

That is all.

Now excuse me while I celebrate.

The Writing Workshop: Missing

Ah, holidays are great. A chance to catch up on everything you’ve missed out on doing while busy at work. Appropriate, then, that this week’s writing workshop is about ‘Missing’ things. As always, this is interpreted with a fictional slant, and a continuation of an ongoing series. To read the rest click here.

Hope you enjoy!

Missing
by Liberty Gilmore, 24/10/11

Adam’s trail reminds Ava of the things her childhood was missing.

August 12^th, Age 10

Ava looked down at the post-it note in her hand for the twentieth time as she paced back and forth in her room.

August 12^th, Age 10

It was from Adam, had to be. There was no one else who would ascribe any sort of significance to that date. Was he trying to lure her out? Trying to get her attention? To what end?

Ava knew she shouldn’t have ignored him for so long, but the thought of talking to him was harder. It was cowardice, she knew, but Holly and Adam had been the one consistently good thing in her life, and she didn’t want to jeopardise that, didn’t want to ruin it.

But she had. Already. And it wasn’t just because she’d ignored Adam – she could have done the same to him as she did to Graham, and things for him would have gone back to some semblance of normality. But for her they never would, because like Eve in the Garden of Eden, she’d taken a bite of the forbidden fruit and now she was filled with knowledge: knowledge of how Adam’s lips tasted, how wonderful it felt when he tangled his fingers in her hair.

Her bedroom door opened, and Ava spun to face her mother, balling the post-it note in her fist.

‘What are you doing, Ava?’ Natalia asked, arching one slender eyebrow.

‘I was just thinking about everything we were discussing at dinner,’ Ava lied.

Natalia gave a close approximation to a warm smile. ‘Your father and I are pleased that you’re taking your duties more seriously of late.’

Ava didn’t respond to that – it was a minefield. Anything she said would be confession that she was decidedly more Human that her mother and father thought. If Natalia knew she’d been replaying the memory of a Human boy’s lips on hers, she would be dragged back to the Court. The punishment would be severe.

‘Tomorrow we should discuss the next stage in your duty. You recall I mentioned our Lord and Lady have taken a personal interest in you? They have decided on a match for you.’

‘Decided?’ Ava said, unable to keep the inflection of surprise from her voice.

‘Yes,’ Natalia said with a cruel smile. ‘Another Fey raised in the Human world. He’s already at Oxford, studying Law. You are to meet at University and fall in love, but our Lady, in her infinite, wisdom thought it would prudent to introduce you before.’

‘I look forwards to it,’ Ava said, her fist pinching tighter around the post-it note.

Natalia treated her to one last withering smile, then left her.

As soon as Natalia’s footsteps were out of earshot, Ava opened her fist and looked at the note one last time. She tucked the post-it note into her pocket and, after bolting her bedroom door, climbed out of the window.

It was a balmly night and the sky overhead was littered with stars. Ava took a lungful of air, smelling the tang of fresh cut grass on the light breeze. It made her feel better, chasing away the chill of Natalia’s presence, filling her body with vitality. Silently, she dropped from the roof outside her window, her legs bending to cushion the impact. It jarred her little – the grace of the Fey had advantages beyond seduction.

Her destination was a short walk across town to St Mary’s Church, or more specifically, the churchyard there. It wasn’t a place Ava had been to often, but she remembered that August day as clearly as she remembered the taste of Adam’s kiss.

The gate to the churchyard creaked when Ava pushed it open, but her heart didn’t race, her eyes didn’t start to see ghosts in the shadows. She could sense every living thing in that graveyard, just as she could when she was ten years old.

She’d been visiting Holly and Adam while her parents were away at a business conference. It was one of the rare occasions where Natalia had bowed to human custom, deciding it would attract too much attention to leave her ten year old alone, even if it was just overnight. Ava had been delighted at the idea of spending the night with Holly, though even at ten she’d learned to hide such emotions from her mother.

It should have been a wonderful night, but the warmth and colour of Holly’s family home just served to remind Ava of what her own childhood was missing. By the morning she was miserable. Holly’s mother thought she was homesick and tried to take her mind off things with a trip into town.

A trip that had lead Ava to this graveyard, looking for Adam, who had wandered off – as he was very prone to doing. His mother had been panicking, but Ava could sense his energy among the crowd, and followed his trail right to a point at the back of the graveyard, tucked away between two trees. As Ava retraced her footsteps, she could almost see Adam’s eight year old self, stubbornly planted between the trees.

‘What are you doing all the way back here?’ Ava asked him.

‘Hiding,’ Adam said, folding his arms as if to prove his conviction.

‘Why?’

‘I hate shopping.’

He had sulked about the decision to go shopping all the way into town.

‘Can I hide with you?’ Ava asked.

Adam looked up at her and, after a moment’s consideration, nodded. ‘What do you want to hide for?’

‘Because if they don’t find me, maybe I won’t have to go home,’ she had whispered.

Even now Ava felt the pressure of unshed tears behind her eyes. She had wanted – wished so hard – to be a normal little girl back then. She had imagined a new future, where she could live free of her mother’s oppressive ideals, become human and be adopted into Adam and Holly’s loving family. If only she could stay hidden for long enough.

Adam said to her afterwards that it was the first time she had felt like his friend, not just Holly’s. He assumed, with childish innocence, that she didn’t want to go home because she was having too much fun with him.

Pinned to the bark of the tree they had sat under was another note. Ava snatched it up.

When I think about it, you were never really happy, were you?
You’ve always been good at pretending otherwise
but it’s not just lately that things have got too much, is it?

March 9^th, Age 14

 Again, Ava knew exactly where he meant for her to go. She pocketed the note and began walking.

Review: Lament by Maggie Stiefvater

Title: Lament

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

Series: Books of Faerie #1

Genre: YA Fantasy

Publisher: Scholastic

Summary (from Goodreads): 

Sixteen-year-old Deirdre Monaghan is a painfully shy but prodigiously gifted musician. She’s about to find out she’s also a cloverhand—one who can see faeries. Deirdre finds herself infatuated with a mysterious boy who enters her ordinary suburban life, seemingly out of thin air. Trouble is, the enigmatic and gorgeous Luke turns out to be a gallowglass—a soulless faerie assassin. An equally hunky—and equally dangerous—dark faerie soldier named Aodhan is also stalking Deirdre. Sworn enemies, Luke and Aodhan each have a deadly assignment from the Faerie Queen. Namely, kill Deirdre before her music captures the attention of the Fae and threatens the Queen’s sovereignty. Caught in the crossfire with Deirdre is James, her wisecracking but loyal best friend. Deirdre had been wishing her life weren’t so dull, but getting trapped in the middle of a centuries-old faerie war isn’t exactly what she had in mind . . .

What’s Good About It

I’m easily won over by faeries. Particularly faeries of the ruthless, cunning, child snatching variety, and there is plenty of that going on in Lament. The faery mythology draws heavily from Gaelic and other European traditions, and the faeries are terrifying for it. They plot and scheme and murder and hide in the shadows just out of eyesight – spine tingling!

James is the best character, though I must confess, I read book two, Ballad, first, and that features him as the main character, so perhaps I was just naturally drawn to him, and naturally put off Dee, who spends the vast majority of Ballad being a total trainwreck. I wasn’t overly enamoured with Luke, and found the background characters surprisingly pantomime. I guess I’ve just been spoiled for Maggie Stiefvater by how much I loved the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy, because Lament is certainly not a bad book at all, but I still felt there was something lacking.

Of course, reading Ballad first meant a lot of the punchlines in Lament were ruined, but I can see how they would have been shocking and how the final climatic moments of the story would have been tense. Even though I knew how it would play out, I read through the final part of the story in a matter of hours, after dragging the first 100 or so pages out over several weeks. And I guess that leads me nicely into the biggest problem I had with the book…

What’s Not So Good

It was just a bit slow to get going… I didn’t particularly care about Dee’s romance with Luke, and I felt some conclusions were drawn a little rapidly, others brushed over completely, which left me feeling a little lost.

Unless my copy of the book has some pages missing (and I did get it from a library, so it’s a possibility) there were at least two moments in the plot where I was left thinking ‘When did that happen?’ So for all it’s slow build up, the end scene felt a bit rushed and at times as if it came out of nowhere. I wasn’t disoriented enough to make me want to put the book down, but it did pull me out of the narrative on occasion.

Rating: 3.5/5

Sunday Recap, 23/10

So this week was my last week at work before my holidays, and they came just in time. After two late nights at work on Monday and Tuesday, I wasn’t in much of a fit state to do anything. And then my cold, which had just been a niggling annoyance for the past few days, became the worst sore throat I’ve ever had. The past two days I’ve basically been in bed. Which sucks. I wrote of my running target for this week, but elsewhere I have been keeping things ticking over.

1. Blogging

Still doing okay on this front. Haven’t done much by way of writing posts as my brain has been pretty much mush this past week, but I’ve sorted out all my tags, linked all my reviews to Goodreads, and rated on Goodreads all the books I’ve read during my break from actually reviewing books, so I have a nice list of books to review when I don’t manage to finish a book in a week. All in all, feeling very organised.

2. Writing

With Tuesday being one of my late work nights, I didn’t get my allocated hour. Combined with the aforementioned ‘brain mush’ issue, I was worried that I wouldn’t make my target. But this morning I was feeling a lot better and I’ve got chapter 18 done. That means next week’s target is to finish the thing! At long long last!!

3. Exercise

Er, yeah, not so much this week. But there’s always next week.

4. Music

Despite having no voice for the past two days, Taylor and I have managed to have both a jamming session (in which I played the guitar) and a song writing session. We put music to an old set of lyrics that I wrote a while ago. The harmonies and stuff I’ll have to work out when my voice is back, but it’s a cheerful song (shock horreur!) and it’s sounding really good so far. Ivy will be impressed when she comes home from Uni to find we have two new band tracks!

Targets For Next Week

•  Finish the novel
• Do some exercise
• Finish arranging the song

Just How Flaming Amazing Is ‘The Fades’?

BBC3 have produced some amazing supernatural dramas lately.

Sure the pilot for Being Human left a lot to be desired, but a cast shift around and having six episodes to play with did it wonders. It went from strength to strength across the three series, and though it will be forever changed now they offed a main character in the last episode, I look forwards to the newly re-imagined series four.

For some reason though, I wasn’t expecting The Fades to be any good. I don’t know, maybe I’m (unfairly) dubious of anything not good enough to be shown on BBC3 – a particularly unfair judgement, given that my favourite TV show ever has recently been ousted to the dead-end channel that is Sky Living. Primetime slots have never been an earmark of quality. Just look at the X-Factor.

I turned on this spooky supernatural drama mostly because I was bored, and was immediately bowled away by the spooky, atmospheric direction, the engaging characters and the interesting premise of the dead remaining on Earth due to ascension being broken.

In a somewhat recurrent pattern, I didn’t particularly expect episode two to be any good.

I guess I’ve been jaded by too many superb openers that lose their way among the minefield of repetitive plots, characters that refuse to develop and story arcs that are dragged out far too long to sustain interest. Just look at Flashforward. Fab opening episode. I can’t actually remember what happened next.

But The Fades didn’t play all its trump cards in the first episode, and in fact the end of episode 3 was so daring and shocking, that even though I sort of saw it coming (call it policeman/firefighter girlfriend intuition) I still couldn’t believe they’d actually do it until they did.

Daring writing like this is my favourite thing in any genre. I’ll harp on forever (and probably already have somewhere in the archives of this blog) about how, for all its faults, LOST was cemented in my mind as a brilliant TV show when Sayid shot baby Ben. Shooting kids – brave, daring, and it was totally believable within the confines of the story and character, so therefore not gratuitous and played for cheap shocks.

I do think we Brits aren’t as much into the saccharine Hollywood ending – the end of Minority Report, for instance, a film that is otherwise great, makes me want to vomit. As does the end of Face/Off – a film of dubious quality but definite puke factor ending. I mean, I like a happy ending as much as the next person, but only when it’s plausible. Daring to leave things unresolved, to take characters to dark places and explore the consequences – that’s much more interesting and affecting than sunshine and rainbows happy smiles all round.

By the time this publishes, I will have watched the penultimate episode of the series. I will be wondering, as I often do about BBC programs, why we don’t get 22 episodes as is the norm in America. Part of me, the cynical part, wonders if it’s the very nature of having only 6 episodes that makes the storytelling so tight, so creative. If there were 22 episodes to fill, would it not become boring as ideas became stretched out? Can you have too much of a good thing? I don’t know. I never watched the American adaption of Being Human, so I guess I never will.

I will probably be wondering if The Fades can get any better. And hoping the finale isn’t as disappointing as the Heroes series one finale was.

It won’t be.

Night Terrors

I’ve been watching a lot of Embarrassing Bodies on Channel Four lately, partly because I inherited a taste for medical programs from my mother, and partly because I like to have things to stick on the telly when I’m washing up, and there are only so many episodes of Pointless one can watch in a day.

Embarrassing Bodies mostly serves to make me gawp at the horrible things people put up with for years on end. There’s the added element of this series with the dentist section that just makes me vomit (I’m sure they didn’t used to do that before) and I always like to hear about the weird really rare illnesses. Like Foreign Accent Syndrome this week, a syndrome that makes you speak in a foreign accent. Brain chemistry is a fascinating thing, but more on that another post perhaps.

Because what I actually want to talk about is a problem in my own home that Embarrassing Bodies gave me and the Boyfriend a rather embarrassing name for.

Night Terrors.

It sounds like the sort of thing a five year old would get, right? Well, apparently less than two percent of adults get Night Terrors. The Boyfriend is one of them.

A little medical history…

I’ve spoken about the high pressure jobs that both the Boyfriend and I have. The thing is, neither of us deal with stress very well. I tend to rage and storm at things for no reason, as I did last thursday, but I do at least let it out. The Boyfriend internalises, and it manifests in a series of text book symptoms, that despite several different medical professionals tell him are all down to stress, he still likes to believe they aren’t. He’s awkward like that.

Night Terrors happen mostly in the first 90 minutes after you fall asleep, before your brain sinks into the deep sleep. That sort of awake, but not really awake stage of sleeping that you can wake up from quite easily but it leaves you feeling confused as to what’s real and what’s not. Which for us is usually between about half ten and midnight.

Most Night Terrors involve thrashing about and making strange noises and talking gibberish. The Boyfriend, possibly because of his Firefighter instincts for responding to his alerter, generally leaps out of bed. Which wakes me up with quite a jump.

In his time he’s done many amusing things, and some less so.

The funniest one recently was when we were away for the weekend, staying at a Premier Inn. The Boyfriend leapt out of bed and flew into the corridor, then stood in the open doorway wearing only his boxers. I called and asked him what he was doing. He responded, ‘looking for the bathroom,’ but then got straight into bed and fell back asleep. I told him about it the next morning and teased him mercilessly. Because I’m a supportive girlfriend that way.

Sometimes, however, it can be a little more… Paranormal Activity. Like the time I found him standing at the end of the bed just grinning at me, and when I asked him what he was doing, he simply turned and got back into bed without saying a word and wouldn’t wake up.

Last night (as I’m typing this, who knows what he’ll get up to the night before this posts) he leapt out of bed screaming ‘GET OFF!’ and then ran for the light switch. With the room cruelly illuminated at 12:46, I wasn’t best impressed. The Boyfriend, however, was more concerned about tearing the duvet and pillows off the bed to search for the mouse that tried to bite him.

I kid you not.

I’ve tried to persuade the Boyfriend to seek medical advice about his nighttime antics. He’s wearing down slowly, and may eventually submit to the idea. In the meantime, I will continue to laugh at his expense, and hope there are no more reruns of the Paranormal Activity incident. Because honestly, that one totally freaked me out.