Forever

Forever (Wolves of Mercy Falls #3) by Maggie Stiefvater 2011)

This is the third and final book in the Wolves of Mercy Falls series.  My reviews of the first two books are here and here.

Things are looking ever worse for the Mercy Falls wolves. A young woman is found dead in the woods and this becomes the last straw for Tom Culpepper and the other wolf-haters who soon secure permission to exterminate the wolves.  Meanwhile, our friends Sam, Grace, Cole, and Isabel are hatching a plan to move the wolves to safety. They find an unlikely ally and together try to save the wolves once and for all.

Sam and Grace continue their lovefest now that Grace is a wolf and hiding from her parents. While in human form she is staying with Sam at Beck's house. Because of her limited contact with her parents, I found their relationship easier to endure now that they weren't constantly trying to convince other people of how serious they are.

There is an extra element of danger and risk now that Grace is also a wolf. But Cole continues to work on his scientific experiments to try and overcome whatever it is that controls shifting from one form to another, which he is convinced is something other than temperature. This was never completely clarified for me and was one of many unresolved threads in the story. 

I found this book merely ok, mostly because of the lack of resolution. But overall, I found the series pretty good. The audiobooks were a bit uneven as a couple of the readers changed from one book to the next, but that's a minor quibble, and in the case of Sam it was definitely an improvement.

For a young adult series, the pacing was relaxed and the story contained more internal dialogue than usual. Not too much - definitely not enough to be boring - but the storytelling was a slight stylistic departure from many young adult novels. What I liked most were Stiefvater's werewolves. I just liked how it worked in this world, and I liked the pack dynamics, Sam's history, and how that all fit into the larger story. I'm not sure how I got from feeling caught up in Sam and Grace's romance to rolling my eyes at them, but I think that could have been improved in a couple of ways. For one thing, this series took itself slightly too seriously - and I may be biased because I think humor improves pretty much everything. Secondly, I wish it had been wrapped up more in the end. This didn't feel like the last novel in the series, it just felt like a continuation of the middle book. I don't feel like the wolves are safe once and for all, and I don't know how Sam and Grace will continue on their relationship given the states of their wolfishness. 

Overall, I thought this series was good, but not great. Did anyone read this and love it? Please tell me what you loved most about it!

Linger

Linger (Wolves of Mercy Falls #2) by Maggie Stiefvater (2010)

Now that Sam is cured of being a wolf, he and Grace are free to finally be together without worry. But when Grace's parents catch Sam sleeping over, it makes maintaining their relationship much more difficult. Also worrying is Grace's recent illness that becomes progressively worse throughout the book. 

In Shiver, the narration alternated between Sam and Grace, but in Linger two more narrators have been added - Grace's friend Isabel Culpepper and Cole St. Claire, one of Beck's new recruits. For the audio this means the story is now being read by four different people, which was fine as their voices were distinct enough to tell them apart. I was also happy that there was a different person reading the part of Sam.

There wasn't much story progression in this book. Through most of it Grace had a bad fever and other suspicious symptoms so I knew something bad was happening but it took a long time to come. Their relationship woes were surprisingly annoying given how much I enjoyed the romantic aspect of Shiver. But now Sam has become a total emo boy, and Grace is just a whiny girl insisting she cannot be kept from her boyfriend because they are in luuuuuuuuuve. It was all a little much. Yet not enough.

Eventually though, the story progressed in a way that was slightly game-changing and interesting. Although this one was pretty slow I think that may be symptomatic of being the middle book of a trilogy. I plan to go ahead and listen to the final book as well in hopes that it will be better and give me a satisfactory ending to the story.