Shiver
Maggie Stiefvater

I haven’t read any YA in a while. (I finally got a public library card this week, and man, why did I wait so long? I forgot how amazing public libraries are.) But I seem to remember that even when I was in that target age range, I had trouble not with the complexity of abstract ideas but the language in which they were expressed. In other words, if you explain things simply enough, YA readers can grasp more hard science than adults might think. Writing for YA, you might minimize your linguistic contortions, but you don’t shortchange your ideas.

That, I think, was my biggest disappointment with Shiver–I felt like the book shortchanged itself in its ideas. The introductory scene is bizarre and frightening, and the design of the book, from jacket copy (the cold. the heat. the shiver.) to the temperature measurement under each chapter, sets you up for something really overwhelming, some deep revelation about the nature of cold and heat and winter and wolves. Heck, I would even take a clumsy reference to global warming.

But Shiver stays at the surface level of the idea–the werewolves are human when warm, wolves when cold–and never goes deeper. The mystery of Grace–the main character who gets infected but never changes–is also resolved at this surface level.

There are many good things about this book–the character relationships are minimally but poetically expressed. Here the depth of the characters achieves what the concepts didn’t–their faults and paradoxes are unwrapped like fragile things, gently and lovingly–in a way that rings true but is expressed very simply. And YA readers will enjoy the development of the romance from distant-yearning to love-against-all-odds.

So I guess I’m saying it’s a good book but it could have been much more. It coulda been a contender.