Forever by Maggie Stiefvater
In Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver, Grace and Sam found each other. In Linger, they fought to be together. Now, in Forever, the stakes are even higher than before. Wolves are being hunted. Lives are being threatened. And love is harder and harder to hold on to as death comes closing in. is one of those books that, after you've finished it, you have to sit there for a little while and decide if you liked it or not. At least that's how it was for me. But let me start from the beginning :)
I was hesitant to read
Forever at first because I felt like it's predecessor,
Linger, had set up the beginnings of a love triangle. After
Twilight and all of the Team Edward versus Team Jacob drama, I'm pretty much worn out of any love triangle; they turn me off! Don't get me wrong, I enjoy reading about each man and how he kisses, I'm just tired of all the "I don't know who to choose" or "I love them both so much." You love one more, just pick them and get it over with! However, I was greatly relieved to find that there is no such love triangle in
Forever.
Overall,
Forever was a good read. It had angsty Sam, now human for an unknown amount of time, and Grace, who is now a wolf. Because of said wolfiness, Grace is out running around in the woods doing who knows what and is declared missing. Poor Sam, is then thought a murderer by the town and that leads to him being ostracized hard core. Talk about having a complicated relationship right? Well spring/ summer finally comes around and Grace starts to turn back into a human in true werewolf style- on again off again. And that's when it starts getting into the nitty gritty of the story.
The town has already tried to kill the wolves themselves, illegally I might add, and of course it didn't work. But this time around, after Olivia's body is found torn apart by wolves (we'll get to that part next!) and Grace is still "missing," Tom Culpeper gets the ok for an aerial hunt to kill all of the wolves. So Sam and Grace (and Cole and Isabel) decide to try and find somewhere safe to move the pack before the hunt.
Back to Olivia; Shelby apparently has gone nuts and decided to just kill everyone she can in the pack. Why? Who knows, she's crazy. I myself thought that it was sort of just randomly thrown in there as an "Oh, by the way, I really wanted to convey how evil Shelby is to you so I had her kill Olivia." I could be wrong though, maybe I didn't read far enough into it?
Long story short, Sam and Grace, with the help of a cop who believes they're all wolves, find a place to move the wolves, Shelby dies in the process, and they do it while the aerial hunt is going on. Isabel saves the pack from her father getting her into lots of trouble, Cole almost dies, and besides that everyone lives happily ever after. At least that's what I'm assuming. I felt that the end of the story/series was left open ended and it wasn't very satisfying. There was some talk of trying to cure Grace like they think they might have cured Sam and that was it. In truth the ending sort of ruined the whole thing for me. I much more prefer stories that leave nothing wanting; you know exactly what happened. I would still recommend
Forever, or the whole series for that matter, to anyone looking for a good read though!
My rating for
Forever is 4 out of 5 stars; pretty good but not the best.
