Marathon Read!

Dear Readers,

I am so scatterbrained. After a month long vacation in my hometown, you would think I'd have a better handle on life. You know the math: One month + no homework + no job + minimal responsibility + beach + delicious food cooked by somebody else (in my case a very kind sister) = clear head for when reality strikes upon return.

False.

If anything, I resemble a slowly deflating flotation devise more now than I did when I left.

Ugh.

But you know what is the best escape from an overwhelming sense of overwhelmingness?

Reading a book.

So today, that is what I did. I read an entire book. In about five hours. Straight. It felt soooo good. It's also nice now that I live alone. I tend to get really crabby when I am in an intense-reading-session, so the fact that there was no one around to nag me and receive subsequent snarky remarks was good for all parties.

The book I read? Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater. I've seen it on a few blogs I follow, and then saw it in the bookstore today during a therapeutic browsing session. The cover is so beautiful that I couldn't resist reading it. Unfortunately, I am incredibly poor at the moment, so I couldn't buy it. But fortunately, it was at the BYU library. YAY school!

So, was it Shiver that drove my insane reading-feast, or my strong will to avoid reality?
A little of both.

Shiver is a story about a girl, Grace, who falls in love with a werewolf, Sam. Sound familiar? Don't worry, it would have been way too Twilight-esque for my taste if she hadn't fallen in love with the guy while he was still a wolf. More interesting, right? or maybe just weird? Okay, it is definitely a little weird, but rather than acting like Grace's wolf-romance is normal, the characters acknowledge the creep-factor. Don't worry friends, he does turn into a real boy, and the plot really picks up when he does. Basically, Sam (wolf-boy) and Grace (wannabe-wolf) fall in love and must fight to keep Sam human.

I sound like I'm mocking it, but actually, it was really intriguing. Stiefvater did a good job of creating the circumstances around this trans-species romance (can you say Little Mermaid?). The plot held up through most of the book, although about 3/4 of the way through I got a little queasy with the romantic proclamations. And the characters are fairly endearing. I thought Stiefvater could have done a better job with developing here characters because I didn't understand their motives 5/8 of the time. But once again, they are endearing. Grace and Sam, the main characters with a capital M, are a cute couple, with less oogling than Bella and Edward. Stiefvator plays with POV by having both of them narrate, which works okay, except that they start to sound the same after a while. The rest of the cast stay pretty flat and uninteresting, even though you can tell Stiefvater wanted to play with them more.

The best part of the book was Stiefvater's writing. It didn't always flow in content, but she had some figurative language that left my heart in a tizzy. Her metaphors were honest and unique, and while the lyrics she included were a little hokey, they were charming nonetheless.

In the end, I liked Shiver. I don't necessarily want to read the sequel Linger yet, because the characters were not that appealing to me (and I can't find it at any local library), but I am planning on reading her other book, Lament, in the next few days because I was so intrigued by her writing style.

Over all: Better than Twilight, worse than Goose Girl, and right on par with The Hunger Games. B-

And an A for distraction :]