#look the cashgrab point started turning into a more general rant so i cut it

[wander-wren]

okay so i AM going to talk about the problems with shiver but in a serious way. keeping in mind i’ve read the books a few times but it’s been at least a year or two since i did more than pick through them, so. memory shot

i’m also trying to be as factual and neutral as possible but i will give my personal opinion on everything and i’m biased bc i love this book so it is. generally critical-positive.

shiver & neurodivergence/mental health

while it’s not explicitly stated, grace’s mom (potentially dad?) and her best friend rachel are both heavily adhd-coded. rachel is described as “ditzy” and is always hyper and excitable. i think she’s a little bit stereotypical, a little over the top, but nothing about her strikes me as especially bad rep. grace’s mom, on the other hand, is incredibly distracted and always off doing The Art, and neither of grace’s parents ever have time for her or remember that she exists. so. there’s that.

idk i have adhd and i don’t really have a problem with it, i feel like rachel’s coding was very deliberate and the parents’ less so. the parents’ actions are definitely never excused just bc they’re flighty and distractible, which is correct, it’s still their job to raise their kid regardless of their issues. but i won’t speak for everyone.

second, salem is one of the minor wolf pack members, characterized by his “running eye” and the implication that he’s not All There. we don’t see enough of him in flashbacks to really tell what’s going on there, but he seems to have a solid place in the pack as both a wolf and a human. i always felt like him Looking Crazy was overkill, but again, we only see him as a human in flashbacks, and very rarely, so i can’t draw many conclusions.

there’s also shelby and jack, two side characters who are frequently referred to as “psycho” or “psychotic.” mostly by isabel. i’m inclined to let this slide with a critical look bc the book did come out in 2009, and isabel is absolutely the kind of girl who would use those words. she’s mean. but the language and the implications are there, and ofc i don’t experience psychosis so i can’t say it’s fine or not definitively.

we see shelby more. she seems to lack empathy and have a sadistic side, as shown by her torturing a bird and releasing mr. darrio’s dogs to attack (and nearly kill) paul. beck implies once that she comes from an abusive home, so it’s possible she has a personality disorder caused by trauma. i don’t know enough about personality disorders to attempt to diagnose her, though. she’s also shown to have an obsession with sam, who is about her age, talking about them being mates as wolves someday when they’re both pre-teens. she likes being a wolf for the escapism, which is fair, actually. she does attempt to kill both grace and sam a couple of times and successfully kills grace’s friend olivia. i think shelby is super scary and interesting but there’s also definitely some very ugly implications there. she dies unredeemed.

jack is isabel’s brother who is presumed dead in a wolf attack until he shows up as a werewolf. pre-wolf, he’s known to be violent and a bully, and actually provoked the pack to attack him by shooting them with a BB gun. as a wolf he is mostly unstable and violent, but doesn’t kill anything more consequential than his family dog. ouch. he does, however, kidnap grace at one point in an attempt to find a “cure” for werewolfism, and would have killed her if she didn’t comply. he just seems to have a lot of anger management issues, to be quite honest. he does die in the process of actually curing his werewolf-ness and this is treated as sad. it’s definitely a horrific way to go (untreated bacterial meningitis. the idea is you burn the wolf out via fever, then hope you can treat the meningitis in time. did not work for him). i think jack is just generally a dick and isabel calls him a ps*cho bc that’s how she is.

finally, there’s cole, who as i mentioned is deeply suicidal and he does drugs and becomes a werewolf about it. he also gets a whole book to himself, it’s great. he’s…basically just your standard bad boy rockstar who’s actually a tortured genius who’s actually an asshole, but he has Growth. i love him, personally. i can’t think of anything wrong with his portrayal in the books but i thought i’d include him in the interest of thoroughness.

shiver & representation.

there are zero (0) characters of color in shiver. it’s set in minnesota. the one exception MIGHT be paul, who is described as “dark” (not dark-skinned or dark-haired, just dark) and is black in wolf form. if you do decide that paul counts, he does die, but so do like, a fuckton of characters, and he does make it through most of three books iirc. werewolves are NOT a racism allegory in this series. and i’m white, so again, not my place to decide, but i think “no poc” is at least a step above “poc but they’re all treated horribly.”

originally this was just a race section but i’m back to add that (other than the section above), there are no characters from marginalized groups at all. again, it’s better than bad rep, and sign of the times and all, but it’s…definitely a thing.

shiver & cliches

yeah now that we’ve gotten through the ~problematic~ bits we gotta address the “twilight knockoff cashgrab” allegations. i have not read twilight (i feel so unqualified to be doing this?? i have no expertise on anything), BUT my main impressions are:

vampires

super special immune to vampires MC

werewolves

love triangle

so, shiver has werewolves. that’s it. the werewolves in shiver turn into regular old wolves every winter, then to humans in the summer. every year, it takes less cold to turn them wolves and more heat to turn them human, shortening their human time, until roughly 20 years in they become wolves forever. no special powers, no imprinting mess, nada.

(if you’re curious the book explains that moving to a warm climate doesn’t work. some of the pack moved to texas, but the constant heat just made them hypersensitive to cold and one of them got turned by air conditioning. you can cure werewolfism with an extremely high fever, but this also obviously has a high chance of killing the human as well.)

no vampires. no love triangle. one dude has an obvious crush on grace but she brushes him off even before sam is an option.

technically grace is a little bit special because she was attacked by wolves but didn’t turn. this is bc soon after she was locked in a hot car by her parents while also having the flu, and, you guessed it, got hot enough to cook the wolf out of her. she does still have some wolf traits like the ability to communicate with them in their telepathic image-language a bit. her experience is how they figure out the cure later on, but it’s not permanent and she does eventually become a werewolf as well. she and sam do have a Special Connection, but it’s because he was the wolf who dragged her away from the pack when they attacked her as a kid, and she remembered and watched him in the woods after that while he developed a crush.

the only twilight things i know a lot about are breaking dawn pt 2 the movie and that is absolutely nothing like shiver, lol. there’s no politics in shiver, there’s barely even a wolf pack by the time the current plot happens.

i will actually talk about the “cashgrab” element in another post bc it started getting too long so stay tuned

shiver & unproblematic crimes

i think the book uses “sexy” as a descriptor like, four times, and i hate that.

i think rachel is kinda annoying.

sam has never done anything wrong ever in his life and has so much plot armor. actually i don’t think this is a problem. i love him and he deserves everything

“lovely summer girl” is not actually that great. it’s very sweet but eh. some of sam’s other bits of lyrics throughout the book are cool though

the tl;dr of all of this is that shiver has some uncomfortable issues. but i don’t personally think that they make it unreadable or not worthwhile if you’re interested in that kind of thing. it is a little bit cringe at times, it’s not stiefvater’s best, but it’s good at being disturbing and devastating and romantic, which is the point.