Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater
I’ve been mulling something over for the past couple of days…
I stumbled across a review/ill-tempered rant about Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater on an industry blog. I’m not going to link to it, because quite frankly, it was MEAN. And we don’t exactly need more mean in the world (unless it’s fictional mean, in which case, the more the better in my opinion). So Blogger X didn’t like Shiver. Like, really REALLY didn’t like Shiver. Which is fine, because life would be mega-boring if we all liked the same books. And Blogger X really really REALLY didn’t like Twilight. In fact, the ‘review’ of Shiver rapidly descended into an anti-Twilight diatribe.
BX’s main gripe with both Twilight and Shiver was the supposedly ‘pathetic’ heroines, who constantly have to be rescued by their supernatural boyfriends. Apparently this sends out a ‘bad message’ to teenage girls. Interesting point. And it may well be true in the case of clumsy Bella (bless her!). But anyone who’s read Shiver (at least with their eyes OPEN) can see that Grace is a very different character. SHE’S the strong one in the relationship. Wolf-boy Sam is always getting himself into wolfy scrapes that Grace has to save him from. Hmm… maybe BX didn’t actually read Shiver after all.
The second gripe is that Bella and Grace both turn into googly-eyed crazyheads when they fall in love with their vamp/wolf fellas. Crikey! A teenage girl falling obsessively in love! Shocker! That NEVER happens in real life.
I for one don’t believe that writers for teenage girls have a responsibility to create perfect, strong heroines for their readers to emulate. That. Is. Patronizing. In. The. Extreme. To sum up: it’s fine to have an opinion, but let’s not attack individual authors for not writing the book we want them to write. If we feel so strongly about it, why don’t we just write something ourselves?
Rant over.
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