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

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

Good Romance

I’ve said many a time in reviews that I love a bit of romance in a story. I love shipping the characters and waiting to see if the two I’ve pegged as potential lovers ever get together. I love watching the hate relationship turn to love, love the bad boys turning good for their girls, love the daring moment where someone steals the first kiss before they are sure the other feels the same way. I’ve also said that it is my preference that romance comes second to the main plot.

Now, I don’t mind a book where romance comes first. Let’s face it, Shiver was mostly about Grace and Sam’s love story, with the werewolf stuff thrown in as an interesting twist. It definitely wasn’t werewolf first, romance second, but it definitely was one of my favourite books I read last year. But, it’s the exception that proves the rule. For me to truly love a book, 99 times out of a hundred the romance has to be secondary to, and even better, because of a really killer plot.

Now, there are many great books out there that get this absolutely spot on. And there are many great books that don’t fulfil my specific requirements that do romance well. There are also a lot that read like the next progressive step from Fanfiction. It seems to be particularly prevalent among YA.

Now, maybe that’s because I read a lot of YA, and am more inclined to try reading a book I’ve heard nothing about if it’s YA, tending only to pick up adult books that I’ve been told from various trusted sources are amazing. Maybe it’s because romance is such a big selling point in the hugely valuable YA market, and publishing is a business. Businesses do what they can to please their customers, and maybe they think their customers can be easily satisfied with tales of instant infatuation and plastic love. Maybe there are people out there who don’t think teenagers can have rich and complicated relationships, that it is all just instant ‘I fancy your mate’ attraction for them. Who knows? All I can say is, I’ve read a fair share of YA books over the last couple of years that I would definitely say have bad romance. And that makes me think of Lady Gaga. And that isn’t good.

*cue Psycho music*

Bad Romance

If two characters in a story only seem attracted to each other because they are both incredibly hot, that, to me, is bad romance. Yes, you can be attracted to a person and want to kiss them, hang them off your arm like an accessory etc, because they are Brad Pitt good looking, but that is not love. So don’t call it love. Love can develop and grow out of such a relationship, but if all you’re going on is them being super hot, how do you know they aren’t secretly a complete idiot who sacrifices goats to a dark god. Or something.

A lot of books I’ve read recently use this ‘instant attraction/fascination’ angle. Now, I’m not hating on these books at all – they’re okay for the most part – but they aren’t fantastic. Beach reads.

The Drake Chronicles by Alyxandra Harvey is one series the pops to mind instantly. The first book isn’t too bad as one of the couples has at least known each other for a long time. But in the second and third book it does seem to be ‘Hi, you’re hot, I love you.’ I mean, in one the male love interest has an identical twin, but it’s never established how they are different to each other and why the girl loves him and not his twin. The relationships are totally shallow, and move from having a quick make-out session to full blown ‘I love you’ within about three chapters, with no sense of how they arrived at that depth of emotion. And that’s okay if you just want to drool over the image of a hot boy in your mind. Maybe I’m just getting a little too old for this sort of book – at 22 it feels a little cradle snatchy to drool over a 16-year-old-ish boy – but it just doesn’t do it for me. Books like this always leave me craving a romance with substance.

Romance lacks substance

Substance

Maybe I don’t get along with shallow romance stories because I never really did the quick fling thing when I was younger. Every boyfriend I’ve ever had I’ve kept for at least six months, each one developing from friend to boyfriend over a few weeks. I wasn’t particularly gregarious as a child, a trait I’ve carried into adult life, and I never really wanted the instant attraction/I’ll get bored of you in a couple of weeks love life that some of the girls in my year had.

What I wanted was a relationship with substance, that would last longer than five minutes, where I’d be loved for more than just how attractive that person thought I was. I wanted something that would grow and change as I did, that would progress and develop. And that’s what I want to read about.

A Real Love Story

I can imagine there are some people out there who don’t think that teenagers are capable of going beyond the ‘lust’ stage of a relationship, that genuine love is something that comes with experience and maturity. After all, how can you know you love someone if they’re the only person you’ve ever been in a serious relationship with? Allow me to digress and tell you all a real love story…

I met my current boyfriend in school. He was a late arrival, moving to my area when he was 14. I thought he was an idiot. He thought I was a geek. Apparently we sat together in English for six weeks while we were sitting alphabetically, though I don’t really remember this. I do remember being in the same Geography class, but we didn’t get much exposure to each other until college. (College in England is when you are 16-18, which comes before University. I’m not sure how that compares to the American or other school systems.)

In college, I still thought my future boyfriend was an idiot, and he still thought I was a geek. But prolonged exposure to each other taught us a few things. He could make me laugh – a trait I value far higher than appearance or money (or competency at fixing electronic things and chasing spiders out of the bathroom fortunately for my boyfriend…) – and I could talk to him for hours. Me being inherently antisocial, that was quite a big deal too.

It was not the smooth ride of instant attraction. At the time there was another girl vying for his affections, a little more aggressive and confident than I was. I wouldn’t say I put up much of a fight, which is why I think I won in the end. When we first started getting to know each other better I had a different boyfriend. We’d been nearly finished for a long time, but it took knowing what I wasn’t getting out of the relationship – that heart feels a little bit fuller just for being in the same room feeling – that gave me the impetus to end it for good.

Then we had to suffer through the whole ‘friends trying to get us together’ thing, which just made everything a hundred times more difficult, but we got there in the end. After about nine months.

After we didn’t instantly fall into each other’s arms, declaring our passionate love for each other, it didn’t get any easier either. For reasons that could make a whole series of blog posts, I didn’t have the best time when I was seventeen. I was a mess, and it would have been easy for the boyfriend to ditch me and go and have lighthearted fun with people who weren’t verging on the edge of total breakdown. I wouldn’t have blamed him. But he didn’t. He stay and he helped me through it. And it was that, not the fact that he was attractive, that made me fall in love with him. I’m still with him today and plan to be for the rest of my life.

So YA boys can be deep, dependable and forever. I know because I’ve been lucky enough to find that myself. I’m not naive enough to think that’s everyone’s experience – a lot of 16-year-old-ish boys are… well… 16-year-old-ish boys. But if books were totally about the common real life experiences then they would be very, very dull. Books give us a piece of the dream, the romance we wish we had, the experiences we’d love to explore.

I guess the winding moral of this very long post is this: 16-year-old-ish boys can be amazingly romantic and go above and beyond the call of duty in a relationship. Teenage love can last the test of time and grow and develop into something wonderful to share in adult life. So show me a bit more of that in YA literature, Paranormal, Contemporary or otherwise. Give me a lasting love affair in the pages, that takes place next to an incredible story, and I’ll have a lasting love affair with your book!

Review: Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

Title: Linger

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

Series: The Wolves of Mercy Falls #2

Genre: YA Paranormal Romance

Publisher: Scholastic

Summary (from Goodreads)

In Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver, Grace and Sam found each other.  Now, in Linger, they must fight to be together. For Grace, this means defying her parents and keeping a very dangerous secret about her own well-being. For Sam, this means grappling with his werewolf past . . . and figuring out a way to survive into the future. Add into the mix a new wolf named Cole, whose own past has the potential to destroy the whole pack.  And Isabel, who already lost her brother to the wolves . . . and is nonetheless drawn to Cole.

What’s Good About It

Well, you’ve already had me ranting about how great Shiver was. I won’t bore you with the same spiel.

What was different about Linger? Well, it introduced two new viewpoints. We now not only hear from Sam and Grace, but from Cole and Isabel as well. Having Cole, this completely new character, thrown straight into the mix is a bit disorienting at first, but as ever, Maggie Stiefvater writes her different viewpoints so well. Despite the fact that he’s not a terribly sympathetic character initially, you can’t help but be sucked into his view of the world.

The werewolf mythology is developed even further, with new twists and turns on the temperature shifting thing. These developments were essential to keeping the story fresh, otherwise this would have been a stale rehash of Shiver. As it is, Stiefvater strikes the perfect balance between giving her readers more of the Sam/Grace relationship we’ve come to love, while injecting enough new and exciting to sustain the novel over its 416 pages, and the next 400 odd in the final installment.

Second books in trilogies often suffer simply for being the second book. There’s no real sense of threat, because we know there has to be a third book. But Linger manages to avoid this. I think having the Isabel and Cole perspective introduced left it feeling like a new book, set in the same world, rather than a direct continuation. And by the end, the climactic scenes were so intense it was hard to believe everyone was going to make it to Forever.

Brilliant characters, tense narrative, and the wonderful balance between real life issues and the paranormal – Linger is every bit as good as Shiver, if not better. I now will be wishing my life away for this time next year to arrive so I can lay my hands on Forever.

What’s Not So Good

Maggie Stiefvater’s name is very hard to spell. I am a spelling moron.

Rating: 5/5

Teaser Tuesday: Linger

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I’m so happy to finally be reading this series! Took me long enough to jump on the bandwagon, but I haven’t been disappointed – both books are fabulous! (so far, obviously for Linger, can’t comment on the whole thing yet) I love the UK covers of these books. So stark and dramatic

My Teaser:

And I leaped at him. I flew off the stairs, my arms spread out on either side, and I saw panic cross his face just as his assistant jerked her camera up and the flash blinded me. ~ pg 183, Linger, Maggie Stiefvater

Review: Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Title: Shiver

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

Series: The Wolves of Mercy Falls #1

Genre: YA Paranormal Romance

Publisher: Scholastic

Summary (From Goodreads)

For years, Grace has watched the wolves in the woods behind her house. One yellow-eyed wolf—her wolf—is a chilling presence she can’t seem to live without. Meanwhile, Sam has lived two lives: In winter, the frozen woods, the protection of the pack, and the silent company of a fearless girl. In summer, a few precious months of being human … until the cold makes him shift back again.

Now, Grace meets a yellow-eyed boy whose familiarity takes her breath away. It’s her wolf. It has to be. But as winter nears, Sam must fight to stay human–or risk losing himself, and Grace, forever.

What’s Good About It

Where to start? There’s good reason why this book has huge hype on the blogosphere. It’s fabulous.

There’s real danger with these ‘two teenagers, one of whom is supernatural, are destined to be together’ stories. A) they come off like badly put together Twilight rip-offs (and let’s face it, Twilight as a starting point was pretty badly put together) B) the main characters are totally unrelatable because there only purpose is to be in love with each other. No matter how much you love another person, generally you have other things going on in your life besides them.

Stiefvater manages to avoid these pitfalls. Somehow. Despite the fact that Grace and Sam’s romance is very instant, it never feels forced or false. They are three dimensional, realistic characters with concerns and problems of their own, outside of each other. Their relationship isn’t the all consuming purpose of the plot, and the rest of the plot is enough to feel like it wasn’t just a carrier for the romance, without getting in the way of the romance – the absolute perfect balance. Because we all read these books to see X get together with Y and live their romance vicariously, but for the book to be memorable and brilliant, rather than just a fast beach read you forget as soon as you close, there has to be enough else going on besides swooning and snogging.

The peripheral characters were good too, which is another common flaw in YA Paranormal Romance. I genuinely like and cared about the minor characters, even Isabel, Mercy Falls’ own Mean Girl.

The alternating viewpoint also worked well, adding further dimensions to the story. And I loved the werewolf mythology. I griped on Twitter earlier about the temperature thing, and why couldn’t all the wolves move to Mexico to avoid changing, but even that loose end (which wasn’t bugging me that much, but I am a bit of a plot hole Nazi) was neatly explained away without the narrative ever becoming too distracted.

I’ll stop blabbing now… You probably get the picture. This book is ace, and if you haven’t read it – you really should.

What’s Not So Good

The fact that the last installment isn’t out til this time next year… That’s EVIL!

Rating: 5/5

Book Blog Hop 5

It’s that time again…

Last week were were asked what book we couldn’t wait to get our hands on. I said Shiver. This week we are being asked what we are currently reading… same answer! I finally got my copies of Shiver and Linger yesterday and I’m really enjoying Shiver so far. Totally as good as all the hype! What are you reading right now?

Book Blog Hop 4

It’s Friday and time for the hop!

This week we are being asked what book(s) we can’t wait to get our hands on. For me it’s Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater (because I am a bit behind the times) I’ve seen so many rave reviews I’ll be buying my copy as soon as I am paid! What books can’t you wait for?