The Scorpio Races, Maggie Stiefvater

Every year, the cappail uisce, wild water horses, come out of the sea onto the isle of Thisby. Captured and trained for the Scorpio Races, there is no real taming of these beasts, and to ride them is to take one’s life in one’s hands. Kate “Puck” Connolly, an orphan, is the first female volunteer for the Scorpio Races. Entering on her beloved mare Dove - a land horse - in an attempt to keep herself and brother from being evicted from their home, she meets with not a little opposition from traditionalists. But she has an unexpected ally in Sean Kendrick, four-time winner of the races. But Sean, too, risks everything in the race. Only one can win, while the other must lose all they care about.

She’s done it again! I adore Maggie Stiefvater’s evocative, sensual prose. With a few choice phrases, I could visualise the island of Thisby, all rugged and windswept. I could hear the crashing of the waves, the pounding of the horses’ hooves. Although Stiefvater keeps it ambiguous where and when this island is, I was reminded of my trip to Ireland a few years ago - there is a very Celtic feel to this place, a community steeped in tradition and changeless over the centuries. It’s a tiny community, old-fashioned and insular, with tourists flocking there at October and November to witness the races that are like none other. (I love Stiefvater’s story about all the cliffs she had to visit as research for this book.)

And the water horses! Years ago I fell in love with a trilogy called The Bitterbynde by Cecelia Dart-Thornton, which drew on so many forgotten myths and fairytales (one day I’ll dig out my old reviews of these books and post them here) but most memorable to me were the water horses - each uisge in that version. And in that version, the each uisge shape-shifted into handsome young men before sweeping their victims off to a watery grave. At first I was a little disappointed that this aspect of the myth didn’t feature in The Scorpio Races, but that would have been too much to fit into the novel. It worked perfectly well without what Stiefvater later described as “the creepy red-headed water boys with kelp in their hair.” In fact, it worked much more than “perfectly well.”

Slea Head, Co. Kerry

Both Puck and Sean are desperately trying to hold onto the things they love - in Puck’s case, the island and her home, in Sean’s case his cappal uisce, Corr. But times are changing, and it’s hard to carry on their way of life in a changing world. If Thisby isn’t exactly the island time forgot, time hasn’t been paying it an awful lot of attention. Jobs are scarce and the young people are gradually leaving the island for a more prosperous future on the mainland. (Boy, that strikes a chord with this island-based blogger!) 

Thisby and its residents get under your skin and into your blood. The Scorpio Races is a wild and exhilarating read - once the race had begun, I held my breath for a long time. How would this end? Could both the characters have a happy ever after? I felt guilty for backing either narrator, because victory for one must surely mean heartbreak for the other - and I wanted so desperately for them both to get their hearts’ desire.

The Scorpio Races is a definite “one more chapter” book - I’d intend to close the book, and the next thing I knew I’d got through another fifty or so pages. Highly recommended!

Mini-Reviews: Forever & Amy and Roger's Epic Detour

Forever - Maggie Stiefvater:

In Shiver, Grace fell in love with a boy with golden eyes, who was a wolf in winter. The book ended with his cure. In Linger, the werewolf virus that had lain dormant in Grace for so many years kicked into life, and we were left staring after her as she shifted and ran off into the night.

Now Grace and her friend Olivia are, for all intents and purposes, missing. Sam, Cole and Isabel know the truth, but who else would believe it? And when Olivia turns up dead, Isabel's father Tom Culpeper makes plans for the extermination of the Mercy Falls wolves. Even when Grace is in her human form, she can't go home, so this book is much more pack-based than its predecessors. I had a sense of the loneliness of living a life that no one else can be told about. Grace can't even let her friends and family know she's alive, and it seems like survival must be impossible. If Tom Culpeper and his cronies killed her while she was in wolf form, her disappearance would never be explained. Sam, Grace and Cole are faced with the near impossible task of moving the wolves out of the woods to a safe place.

This volume is more of a werewolf race-against-time than the love story of the previous two volumes, and I kept turning the pages with a desperation for everything to turn out all right, but a dread of the more likely outcome. Forever is a beautiful end to a simple but exceptional story.

Amy and Roger's Epic Detour - Morgan Matson


I bought this book after having seen a lot of reviews on other people's blogs, and, I confess, because it has a pretty cover. After her father's death, Amy Curry is charged with bringing the family car from California to their new home in Connecticut, but she won't drive any more. Enter Roger, an old family friend, and the pair decide to make a proper road trip of the journey, taking the scenic route.

I found the plot of Amy and Roger to be fairly standard for a real-issues teenage novel. I'd read too many books with the main character dealing with bereavement and family upheaval (Fixing Delilah, The Sky Is Everywhere, Tiger Eyes, Hold Still, The Truth About Forever to name but a few) for this to really stand out as a story. It was the travel that made this book different. I loved reading about the different places Amy and Roger visited: Yosemite National Park, America's Loneliest Highway, Graceland, Utah and there was a scrapbook effect with photos, ticket stubs, receipts and iPod playlists, which added to the feeling of being a passenger in the car. Along the way, Amy and Roger meet up with some lovely supporting characters, who open their homes and hearts to strangers. When Amy visited Graceland, a trip she'd always been meaning to take with her Elvis-mad father, I found myself close to tears and realised this story had drawn me deeper in than I'd previously thought.

Lament, Maggie Stiefvater

Lament is the first novel from Maggie Stiefvater, author of Shiver and its sequel Linger, but it has only been published in the UK this year. The story is familiar to a connoisseur of teen fantasy fiction. Teenage girl starts a romance with a strange and handsome boy, only to discover that there's more to her new boyfriend -and the world - than meets the eye. Her new boyfriend has a dark and dangerous past that is catching him up and the teenage girl finds that a lot of people want to kill her. Stripped down to the basic plot outline, this could be Hush, Hush, or Twilight or one of many other dark fantasy romances. It might have been vampires, or angels, or werewolves. In this case it's the fair folk - the faeries.

The power of Lament is in the details. Ms Stiefvater writes with humour and lyrical prose which is highlighted by the theme of music throughout the novel. Heroine Deirdre is a skilled harpist, and it seems that her musical genius is more than just a talent. Dee is a "cloverhand" - one who can see faeries, and who has some magical, psychic abilities of her own. Music is no earthly art here.

I found that the first half of the book read as a fairly generic teen novel with an Interchangeable Magical Boyfriend Creature, and the platonic childhood best friend of the opposite sex who could be the third corner of a potential love triangle. As is often the way, I felt more inclined to wish for James the Best Friend to win Dee's heart rather than the more glamorous, troubled Luke with his faerie background.

I was rather taken aback that after Dee discovered the details of Luke's terrible past, she seemed more concerned that he had expressed his love for her than that he had been sent to assassinate her! After her initial anger, I thought Dee was too forgiving too soon, but it is to Ms Stiefvater's credit that she evoked sympathy for the couple even if I rolled my eyes a little.

Despite his otherworldly ways, uncanny knowledge of Dee's life and his habit of calling her "pretty girl," Luke is - or was once - human. When we get to meet the fair folk themselves, the book seemed to shift from YA "paranormal romance" to a more traditional, mythical fantasy genre. The fair folk are not interchangeable with the un-vampiric vampires and fallen angels that are in many books; these are definitely the faeries of old: amoral and fascinated by the humans with their funny notions of good and evil. They are majestic, dangerous, very inhuman and mischievous - from an era long ago when the word "mischief" had far more sinister connotations than it does now. These faeries are of the race of Oberon and Titania, whose quarrels put nature in turmoil. When I was at university much of my creative writing was influenced by the tales of the fair folk of old - not Tinker Bell and the cute little pixies that people tend to think of when they hear the word "fairies." Maggie Stiefvater's fair folk were of the same sort, and so well-written that I half wondered if the author had faerie blood herself, or was a cloverhand like Dee. Certainly she seems to be able to create any kind of art she tries her hand at: creative writing, painting and music.

Lament is a powerful, enchanting novel that, like the four-leaf clovers that play their part in awakening Dee's powers, opens the reader's eyes to that beautiful, deadly other realm.

If you enjoyed this, you might like:
The Bitterbynde trilogy by Cecelia Dart-Thornton
Ash by Malinda Lo

Linger, Maggie Stiefvater

Linger is part two of a trilogy about werewolves living in Minnesota. In book one, Shiver, Grace is an ordinary high school girl with a less ordinary obsession: the wolves who live in the woods around her town. As a child, she was attacked by a pack of wolves, but one saved her, a distinctive-looking wolf with golden eyes. At seventeen she met Sam, a boy working in a bookshop whose unusual eyes looked awfully familiar. It turned out that he was a werewolf: human in the summer and wolf in winter. Only, with each passing year, his time as a wolf grew longer and when winter approached he feared that this time he would stay a wolf forever. Shiver ended when, after a risky experiment, Grace and a classmate manage to find what seems to be a cure...

While Shiver was alternately narrated by Grace and Sam, Linger introduces two new voices. One is Isabel, Grace's classmate, whose brother went missing after being attacked by wolves. Through most of Shiver, Isabel and Grace do not get on, but by Linger, they have become friends, brought together by their shared knowledge of the existence of werewolves. Isabel is a spiky, irritable character, but being portrayed in the first person, a gentler side to her character is shown. All the same, I felt that her narration, at least in the beginning, was a little shaky, her voice not quite as authentic as the other three.

Also introduced is a new character, Cole, a former rock star and drug addict, and a new werewolf. Bitter, full of hatred for both himself and the world, I was surprised to find myself liking him. Cole is a well-realised character with the most distinctive voice of the four narrators, but I was surprised to discover that he is only about nineteen. He is full of the world-weariness of a much older character and until it was revealed that he was little older than Sam, I had pictured him in his late twenties or earlier thirties. With Cole, Stiefvater explores a different theme to those usually found in werewolf stories: the question of why someone would choose to become a werewolf. Instead of longing to hold onto his human self, Cole is frustrated that it is difficult to keep in his wolf form - harder for him than for those who would rather be human.

Sam is now 100% human, but still he feels that affinity with the wolves. He has been left in charge of the pack, and both he who used to be a werewolf, and Grace who was bitten but never changed, find themselves wondering where they belong. Both are, physically, human all the time, but feel as though they should be werewolves, and now, ten years after her attack, Grace is getting ill.

I didn't need to reread Shiver to be drawn back into the world of Grace and Sam. Although the characters are the same age as the protagonists of Twilight, I found myself more inclined to take their side than dismiss them as immature, and I felt Grace's anger and frustration at her parents. After leaving her from her early teens to bring herself up, when they find out how serious her relationship with Sam is, they ground her, forbid her from seeing him and tell her she's only a kid and it won't last, and when she turns eighteen she can do what she likes. I found this attitude somewhat baffling. (Do parents really ground their seventeen-year-olds? My parents never used this punishment but it seems ridiculous for someone who's nearly an adult.) Yet at the same time, it felt entirely realistic: After years of ignoring her, Mom and Dad suddenly find out that Grace isn't a little girl any more and try too late to make her what they want her to be by threats and force. I found myself getting angry at them and rather irritated that they blow ordinary teenage behaviour out of proportion while being completely oblivious to the more sinister forces at work under their very noses.

Linger certainly matches Shiver for quality, and I await part three with impatience.

Shiver, Maggie Stiefvater

It would be impossible to review this novel about a teenage girl who falls in love with a werewolf without comparing it to Twilight, so I won't even try. Indeed, there is a lot that is similar about the two books, including the peripheral mythical-creature characters who seem to have come from the same mould: benevolent father-figure, angry female, rather unhinged, angry one. However, it is a shame to me that Twilight is the one that is in the centre of teen culture at the moment, and that Shiver is overlooked as yet another paranormal romance, a bandwagon-jumper. I won't deny that it fits right into those categories, and don't claim that it is Great Literature, but it is, at least, better. (And not because I like werewolves, and am sick of vampires, especially of the Black Ribbon variety out of the context of the Black Ribbon.)

Firstly, the relationship between Grace and Sam is more than mere idolisation/"I want to drink your blood." When Grace was a little girl, she was attacked by a pack of wolves that lived in the woods behind her house, but saved by one of their own, a wolf with bright yellow eyes. As she grows up, she becomes fascinated by the wolves to the point of obsession. She is an introverted, lonely girl who longs for her parents to give her more attention. When she meets Sam as a boy her own age, and recognises by his yellow eyes that he is the same wolf who saved her, a werewolf, yes, it is a strange love-at-first-sight moment, she is obsessed with the wolf, so inevitably if he is also human and eligible, she can't do anything but fall in love with him. But when she was attacked, she was bitten. She should be a werewolf too, but for some reason she never changed. But there is something of the werewolf nature in her. She has this shared experience with Sam, and shared memories, even shared dreams.

We see their relationship developing as boy-and girlfriends, read about them making breakfast together, spending time in a bookshop, doing normal couple-things and coming to know each other. But Sam is struggling against his nature as werewolf. Unlike Edward "Mr Sparkle" Cullen, this battle is visible, not just his saying, "I'm dangerous. No, really, I am." Because the werewolves of Shiver are not subject to the phases of the moon, but the changing seasons. They are human in the summer, and wolves in the winter. Yet with each change, they lose a little of themselves. They stay wolves for longer each year, and shorter times as humans, until eventually they are wolves the whole year round. This is Sam's last year as a human, and it is a real battle to keep from changing that last time, to spend as much time as he possibly can with Grace.

Stiefvater's descriptions of the Minnesota setting as the year approaches winter are, in my opinion, the most vivid part of the book: atmospheric, isolated and chilly. The small details come together subtly, woven into the narrative so that I didn't really notice them until I realised that I knew exactly what Grace's home looked like: a large, wooden house with a long porch/verandah along one side. It is the only house visible, set back from the road with a large, frosty yard. Behind the house, all you can see is miles and miles of trees. It is not actually snowing in my mind's picture, but the frost is on the ground turning it white and crunchy.