Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater
Shiver is a supernatural romance that is being promoted as the next thing for Twilight fans to read.
It’s about werewolves, not vampires and it’s tone is very different from Meyer’s Twilight.
Sam is a sensitive werewolf who suffers the burden of knowing his time as a human is growing short. Stiefvater’s werewolves respond to temperature turning wolf in the fall and returning to human form in the spring. Werewolves find their summers in human form grow shorter each year until one year they remain wolves and stop shifting at all.
Grace is underappreciated by her often absent parents and obsessed with the wolf pack in the woods by her house – especially the wolf she feels is her wolf. The wolf who watches her and comes each winter. She was bitten by wolves as a child and rescued by the wolf she will come to know is Sam.
The story builds slowly in chapters that are sometimes from Grace’s perspective and sometime’s from Sam’s. Grace and Sam have a secret relationship. Sam is deeply damaged by his parents attempt to kill him when they realized his werewolf condition was permanent. A newly created werewolf is angry and stalking the school and his old human haunts posing a risk for all he comes in contact with. Sam spends time trying to keep the new werewolf in check and trying to stay human so he can have as many moments with Grace as possible.
Sam is fragile and damaged and needs protecting. He is so far from Edward Cullen it’s almost funny. While Edward is powerful and the boy every girl in school wants but can’t have, Sam is the boy who has no powers he can control and who no one but Grace even knows exists. This supernatural romance was quieter and the school side of the story didn’t feel as real as the moments Sam and Grace spend alone together or when Sam connected to his pack.
I think this book is better suited to readers who liked Kindl’s Owl in Love than those who reveled in Meyer’s Twilight. At moments, it felt underdeveloped for me but on the whole an inventive supernatural romance.