Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Grace is fascinated by the wolves in the woods behind her house; one yellow-eyed wolf in particular. Every winter, she watches him but every summer, he disappears. Sam leads two lives. In winter he stays in the frozen woods, with the protection of the pack.n summer, he has a few precious months to be human . . . until the cold makes him shift back again. When Grace and Sam finally meet they realise they can't bear to be apart. But as winter nears, Sam must fight to stay human - or risk losing himself, and Grace, for ever .

So...Shiver, what do i say about this book? I read this book but didn't finish a couple of years ago. I don't remember why i didn't finish, although i do know it wasn't because i disliked the book. I decided it was time to re-read and finish Shiver. I guess now i know why i might have just stopped reading and wasn't too bothered about finding out what happened.

Firstly lets talk about the good things about Shiver:

• It was great to see a different spin on Werewolves - they change according to the temperature. And for most of the Werewolves it seems more of a disease than something sexy and cool as is often depicted in other Werewolf themed books.
• I did enjoy the writing, and there were some great descriptions throughout.

I'm sorry but i can't think of any real positives worth writing here - there must have been some or i surely would have given up. The negatives and things that let the book down for me are more prominent.

Now for the negatives:

• Shiver seemed to drag on and on. It took me a lot longer than it should have done to read this book. There were so many times where i felt not much was going on. I did say i liked the descriptions and writing - i just feel there were too many. Saying that i guess it did pick up towards the end.
• Some smallish details. I don't want to go into too much detail because it may be spoilers, but Grace has an "argument" with one of her best friends. While i was reading that scene i didn't even think it was argument, so much that i forgot about it, until it was brought up again several times in the book and seemed like a much bigger deal that i thought it was. I know this seems like a minor point but it does lead to a bigger plot point later in the book.
• The side stories. There were a few other story lines going on around Grace and Sam's. Which isn't bad in its self but i do feel like they weren't explored enough and many of the other characters were also not explored enough, with too many boring scenes with Grace and Sam. I do understand this is part of a trilogy so they could be explained better in the next books, but it still bothered me slightly.

So there are my main pros and cons for Shiver. I have the next two in this series Linger and Forever and will be reading them sometimes soonish i hope. I just hope that the pace picks up a bit in them. I really do hope i am not offending anyone with this review as i know a lot of people love the Shiver series. This is only my opinion and i am looking forward to reading the next instalments.

So overall i thought Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater was an okay book, i just wish it was a bit more fast paced. Therefore i will be giving Shiver 2.5 stars out of 5.
Have you read this book or the entire series? I would love to hear what you thought!