Shiver

“As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air.”

Throughout the novel, books represent knowledge and sanctuary. The sense of home Sam feels in the Crooked Shelf is reflected in his perspective of the bookstore. The books appear “gilded” in the warmth of the afternoon sun, while the scent of ink and unread words wafts over the shelves like a comforting aroma.

“I picked up my sweater from the floor and crawled back into bed. Shoving my pillow aside, I balled up the sweater to use instead.

I fell asleep to the scent of my wolf. Pine needles, cold rain, earthy perfume, coarse bristles on my face.

It was almost like he was there.”

Grace often evokes Sam’s presence through his scent: The vivid descriptions of the scent are an example of Stiefvater’s use of sensorial imagery. Depicting Grace as exceptionally attuned to scent foreshadows her eventual transformation to her lupine form.

“Mercy Falls was all about rumors, and the rumor on Jack was that he got his short fuse from his dad. I didn’t know about that. It seemed like you ought to pick the sort of person you would be, no matter what your parents were like.”

Stiefvater uses Grace’s inner monologue to reveal key elements of her character arc. Here, Grace grapples with the existential question of nature versus nurture in her assessment of Jack, revealing her tendency to view the world in black and white at the beginning of the novel. As the plot progresses, Grace’s perspective becomes more open.

“At the moment, Isabel was staring into her locker as if it contained other worlds. Olivia said, ‘She’s not wearing black.’ Isabel snapped out of her trance and glared at us as if she realized we were talking about her. I looked away quickly, but I still felt her eyes on me. ‘Maybe she’s not in mourning anymore,’ I said, after we’d gotten out of earshot. Olivia opened the door for me. ‘Maybe she’s the only one who ever was.’”

Olivia’s observation about Isabel introduces a more nuanced perspective that begins to transform Grace’s initial assumptions about Jack’s sister. Olivia suggests that for Isabel, symbolically wearing and taking off black implies mourning has a shelf life and that a refusal to perform one’s grief publicly doesn’t make it less acute.

“Some days seem to fit together like a stained-glass window. A hundred little pieces of different color and mood that, when combined, create a complete picture. The last twenty-four hours had been like that. The night at the hospital was one pane, sickly green and flickering. The dark hours of the early morning in Grace’s bed was another, cloudy and purple. Then the cold blue reminder of my other life this morning, and finally, the brilliant clear pane that was our kiss.”

Sam uses the simile of a stained-glass window to capture his first day with Grace. The comparison of moments to colored glass panes underscores Sam’s desire to preserve these moments so he can remember them when he is no longer human, emphasizing the stakes of the plot. Sam believes that his time with Grace is limited, highlighting the textual motifs of love, loss, and longing.

“‘What do you eat?’

‘Baby bunnies.’ She narrowed her eyes, so I grinned and said, ‘Adult bunnies, too. I’m an equal-opportunity bunny-eater.’”

This funny exchange between Sam and Grace exemplifies Stiefvater’s use of levity to lighten the novel’s tense plot. The reference to an “equal opportunity bunny-eater” provides an example of contemporary humor that grounds the book’s teenage characters in a contemporary context despite their paranormal settings.

“‘So, Grace, how’s school?’ I asked myself.

Dad nodded, eyes on the baby koala now struggling in the guest’s arms. ‘Oh, it’s fine,’ I continued, and Dad made a mumbling noise of agreement. I added, ‘Nothing special, aside from the load of pandas they brought in, and the teachers abandoning us to cannibalistic savages—’ I paused to see if I’d caught his attention yet, then pressed on. ‘The whole building caught fire, then I failed drama, and then sex, sex, sex.’”

Dad’s eyes abruptly focused, and he turned to me and frowned. ‘What did you say they were teaching you in school?’”

This passage provides an example of Grace’s use of humor to highlight her parents inattention, imbuing the scene with a bittersweet tone. Her mention of sex gets her father’s attention, but not before he ignores the mention of cannibalism and a fire at school. Grace’s dad’s absentmindedness reinforces Grace’s feeling that he’s simply going through the motions asking about her day, without any real interest in the answer.

“‘They’ll stay away from us,’ Sam said, as if he still had to convince me. ‘Jack’s the only one who would approach us.’

I looked over to him with a crooked eyebrow. ‘Yeah, about that. He’s not going to come at us all slathering and horror movie, is he?’

‘It doesn’t make you a monster. It just takes away your inhibitions,’ Sam said. ‘Did he slather a lot when he was in school?’

Like the rest of the school, I had heard the story about how Jack had put some kid in the hospital after a party; I had dismissed it as gossip until I’d seen the guy for myself, walking the halls with half his face still swollen. Jack didn’t need a transformation to become a monster.

I made a face. ‘He slathered a bit, yeah.’”

This passage illustrates Stiefvater’s thematic exploration of The Tension Between Human Emotion and Animal Instinct. Sam observes that the lupine state only exposes the violence of those already prone to it. Jack will act monstrously only if he behaved so as a human. The reference to “slathering” is a nod to popular horror cinema with its drooling werewolves and zombies.

“Sam laughed, a funny, self-deprecating laugh. ‘You did read a lot. And spent too much time just inside the kitchen window, where I couldn’t see you very well.’

‘And not enough time mostly naked in front of my bedroom window?’ I teased.

Sam turned bright red. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is so not the point of this conversation.’”

An example of the text’s use of contemporary, irreverent humor, this passage also illustrates Sam and Grace’s romantic dynamic. Sam is deliberately chivalrous with Grace, which Grace interprets as stuffy and old-fashioned. She often teases him for his modesty, making him blush.

“The brilliant nimbus of the sun half blinded me, making stark silhouettes of the trees, and suddenly I was seven again. I saw the star pattern of my old bedspread so clearly that I stumbled. My fingers clutched the fabric, balling and tearing it under my grip. ‘Mama!’ My voice broke on the second syllable. ‘Mama, I’m going to be sick!’ I was tangled on the floor in blankets and noise and puke, shaking and clawing at the floor, trying to hold on to something, when my mother came to the bedroom door, a familiar silhouette. I looked at her, my cheek resting against the floor, and I started to say her name, but no sound came out. She dropped to her knees and she watched me change for the first time.”

Stiefvater uses graphic, visceral imagery to capture the pain of Sam’s transformation, as well as the tragedy of his parents’ betrayal. Sam relives his first change when he is struggling to stay human in Beck’s house. The painful image of a child in duress is compounded by his cries for his mother, especially since the reader knows Sam’s mother will betray him soon in the worst possible way.

“It is possible to be in love with you just because of who you are.”

Whenever Sam discusses Shelby’s attraction to him, he frames it as a bid for power, highlighting the distinct dynamics of the pack. Grace’s observation that Shelby could genuinely care for him reflects an attempt to show Sam, who tends to be self-deprecating, that he is lovable—a subtle confirmation of her own love for him.

“They were like busy little brainless birds, fluttering in and out of their nest at all hours of the day or night, so involved in the pleasure of nest building that they hadn’t noticed that it had been empty for years.”

Flawed parents represent a recurring motif in the text. With parents who are neglectful or abusive, the young protagonists are forced to grow up and assume the responsibilities of adults. Sam uses the simile of misguided birds to capture the carelessness of Grace’s parents. Grace’s parents are busy with the material building of their home and overlook the emotional needs of their child. “Busy little brainless birds,” an alliteration, showcases Stiefvater’s use of figurative language.

“‘Ulrik was born in Germany,’ Sam said. ‘He has all kinds of interesting children’s stories about werewolves.’ He turned onto the main road through downtown and started looking for a parking space. ‘He said people would get bitten willingly, back in the old days.’ […]

‘Why would they want to do that?’

‘In the folktales, they’d turn into wolves and steal sheep and other animals when food was scarce. And some of them changed just for the fun of it.’”

Ulrik’s story about werewolves adds little-known socioeconomic context to the folklore, framing the longing to turn into a wolf or an animal as stemming from chronic hunger. Unable to find food in periods of starvation, people were willing to become wolves to ensure their survival. Though werewolves are real in the novel’s universe, Ulrik’s tales suggest a real-world context for the proliferation of folklore about werewolves. In this reading, the longing to shift shapes is linked with a scarcity of resources.

“Books are more real when you read them outside.”

When Sam takes Grace to the Crooked Shelf, he asks her why she tends to read outdoors, when most people like to read in an indoor sanctuary. Grace’s answer reveals that she, like Sam, is a creature of both the indoors and the outdoors, highlighting the tension Grace feels between her dual natures. Though Grace has the sanctuary of a home and a human existence, she still feels the call of the wild. Thus, she reads in her cold backyard to balance both aspects of her personality. Sam, who spends most of his time in the wild, wants to be human, the height of which is curling up with a book indoors.

“‘Sensitive’ I tried.

Sam translated: ‘Squishy.’

‘Creative.’

‘Dangerously emo.’

‘Thoughtful.’

‘Feng shui.’

I laughed so hard I snorted.

‘How did you get feng shui out of thoughtful?’

‘You know, because in feng shui, you arrange furniture and plants and stuff in thoughtful ways.’”

Though Grace and Sam’s lives are fraught with various kinds of danger, Stiefvater establishes that their romantic dynamic as young, irreverent, and playful. After Sam calls himself “wishy-washy,” Grace protests, using more complimentary words to describe Sam’s gentle personality. Sam teases the subtext out of each of Grace’s adjectives, humorously insinuating that she thinks he is a squishy, “emo” guy obsessed with feng shui.

“‘You’re beautiful and sad,’ I said finally, not looking at him when I did. ‘Just like your eyes. You’re like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again.’

For a long moment there was only the whirring sound of the tires on the road, and then Sam said softly, ‘Thank you.’”

This romantic exchange between Grace and Sam emphasizes the sincerity and intensity of their love for each other. Although Grace claims she is not poetic, she expresses her feelings for Sam in a lyrical fashion. Grace’s description of Sam as a song subverts traditional descriptions of the romantic male hero.

“I fell for her in summer, my lovely summer girl,

From summer she is made, my lovely summer girl,

I’d love to spend a winter with my lovely summer girl,

But I’m never warm enough for my lovely summer girl,

It’s summer when she smiles, I’m laughing like a child,

It’s the summer of our lives; we’ll contain it for a while

She holds the heat, the breeze of summer in the circle of her hand

I’d be happy with this summer if it’s all we ever had.”

Sam’s song for Grace illustrates his love and longing for her, and contributes to the text’s symbolism around summer and winter, sun and snow, and dark and light. To Sam, Grace is the embodiment of the summer sun, her warmth making him stay human. At the same time, summer also implies fragility and impermanence, since it is a fleeting season, highlighting the constant threat of danger and mortality in the text. Sam is aware that his days with Grace—his summer girl—are limited, as short in span as the circle of her hand.

“If that moment had been a real thing, it would’ve been a butterfly, flapping and fluttering toward the sun.”

An example of Stiefvater’s lyrical writing, this passage describes the tense moment between Grace’s father shooting Shelby and Shelby collapsing in Sam’s grip. By comparing the moment to a butterfly—a universal symbol of beauty and fragility—Sam emphasizes the transient nature of life and time. One moment or one gunshot is all that stands between life and death; in a split second, life can take off like a butterfly toward the sun.

“Grace. I held on to that name. If I kept that in my head, I would be OK.

Grace.

I was shaking, shaking; my skin peeling away.

Grace.

My bones squeezed, pinched, pressed against my muscles.

Grace.

Her eyes held me even after I stopped feeling her fingers gripping my arms.

‘Sam,’ she said. ‘Don’t go.’”

These lines emphasize the idea that Grace is important to Sam not only because he loves her, but because his ability to love her reminds Sam that he is human. In moments when he is close to transforming into a wolf, Sam thinks of Grace to force himself to remember what it feels like to be self-aware, human, filled with words and thoughts. Grace’s name becomes almost a talisman against the painful transformation for Sam.

“I would say that by virtue of your not acting parental up to this point, you’ve relinquished your ability to wield any power now. Sam and I are together. It’s not an option.”

After Grace’s mother expresses her concern about Grace dating Sam, Grace reminds her that it is too late in the day to act parental, emphasizing the tension between them. Grace’s sense of certainty and confidence in her love for Sam underscore the novel’s thematic interest in found family and The Importance of Finding One’s Pack.

“We didn’t talk about the looming possibility, but I felt I could always sense the chill of the shadow it cast over us. I’d read a story once, in a really dire collection of Greek myths, about a man called Damocles who had a sword dangling over his throne, hung by a single hair. That was us—Sam’s humanity dangling by a tight thread.”

With mortality and loss central subjects in the novel, Grace’s happy days with Sam are always colored by the awareness that he will soon change. She uses the allusion of Damocles to capture the anxious state of this tension that undergirds the novel’s thematic interest in both The Power and Limits of Love. In Greek mythology, Damocles is a courtier forced to sit at a banquet with a sword—suspended from a single, fragile thread—hanging over his head. If the courtier leaves the table, the king will view it as a sign of disrespect and order his death, but if he stays, the thread will eventually snap. Thus, the sword of Damocles symbolizes a terrible fate one cannot escape.

“The evening was steel gray, the sky an endless expanse of frozen clouds waiting for snow and for night. Outside the SUV, the tires crunched along salted roads, and sleet tapped on the windshield. Inside, behind the wheel, Isabel kept complaining about the ‘wet mutt smell,’ but to me it was pine and earth, rain and musk. And behind it, the sharp, contagious edge of anxiety.”

Stiefvater uses the external landscape to capture the emotions of her characters. The steel grey sky and the salted roads reflect the bleak mood enveloping Grace and her friends as they head to the clinic for the meningitis injection. Grace’s awareness of the scents of the wolves shows her affinity with them, and provides an example of the author’s use of sensory imagery to evoke the world of her characters.

“Kneeling by his head, I said, ‘Jack, are you awake?’ I smelled puke on his breath and wondered at the hell he and Isabel had been living in for the past three days; it twisted my stomach. I tried to convince myself that he somehow deserved this for making me lose Sam, but I couldn’t.”

Grace’s empathy for Jack in his last moments shows how far she has come from her more rigid perspective early on in the book. Grace has always believed Jack is a bully, but now she can see he too is a flawed, complex person.