Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

In Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver, Grace and Sam found each other. Now, in Linger, they must fight to be together. For Grace, this means defying her parents and keeping a very dangerous secret about her own well-being. For Sam, this means grappling with his werewolf past . . . and figuring out a way to survive into the future. Add into the mix a new wolf named Cole, whose own past has the potential to destroy the whole pack. And Isabelle, who already lost her brother to the wolves . . . and is nonetheless drawn to Cole.

Since the final book in the series, Forever, comes out tomorrow (and because I’m going to a signing on Thursday!) I had to catch up on Maggie Stiefvater’s werewolf series. I’m so glad I did. This is a very good book. It does suffer a little bit from “middle syndrome” (the thing that makes the plot seem to be stalled for the majority of the book because it’s really the lull before the climax of the third part, see “Empire Strikes Back”) but it has enough going on to make it stand up on its own as well as work well to advance the story. Although Grace and Sam seemed to be in a holding pattern, character-development-wise, the work on Isabelle and Cole more than made up for it. Although I think the ‘foreshadowing’ on Cole’s secret was laid on a little thick (especially since the reader already knew the secret, and especially because nothing came of it), but his interactions with Isabelle were great, and I like the match of the two of them. They both seem to understand the other’s pain without condescension or a time table, and although they deal with it differently they still respect the other’s choices. There’s also subtle foreshadowing that there’s going to be a fight about their different approaches in the future. The major plot point is interesting. I like how there’s more exposition on how the “werewolfing” works and how the “cure” served Sam even though they didn’t quite know what they were doing. My only disappointment was that we didn’t see much of the new wolves other than Cole. Hopefully all that will be resolved in the third book, though.