Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The first time I read this book, I adored it. However, it's been a few years since that first time, and I hadn't reread it in a long time.
When the opportunity came to check out an audio edition of it from my local library, I jumped at the chance. I have a Ridiculous Commute (TM). Two days of the week, I drive three hours. The other two days, I drive two hours. Spending ten hours a week driving cuts into my reading time quite a bit, so I've been turning to audiobooks for the last year in order to give me the fiction fix that I need.
Since this book has been out so long (and I'm fairly certain I wrote a review for the text version), this review is solely of the audiobook.
This was one of the best audiobooks I've ever listened to. There are two narrators--one for Grace, and one for Sam. The Grace narrator has a suitably wistful tone to her voice, especially when she talks about "my wolf" in the first few chapters. The Sam narrator is also excellent. His voice lends a believable credibility to the character, making him seem slightly less emo. Sam's song lyrics are still rather obnoxious, and it would we nice if the narrator had actually sung at least one set of them ("Summer Girl," for example, since Sam the character sings that song in the book). Since I'm not musical, I can't look at lyrics and imagine the sound of them set to music very well.
Overall, the performance of this book was top-notch. If you're only vaguely interested in this book, I'd recommend this audiobook to you. While I can't say that the audio was better than the book itself (so those that hate the book will likely still hate the audio), I can say that the audio minimizes the book's flaws nicely.
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