By Singing Light

Opening: "I can be so, so quiet."

SO! The third and last chapter in the Mercy Falls trilogy. To be honest, it's been long enough since I read Linger that I didn't remember all of the plot points. Oh, the big ones, yes, but I could have done with a refresher course.

At any rate, I think Forever is my favorite of the three books. It ends things nicely, and I loved the complexity of the relationships between our main four narrators--Grace, Sam, Cole, and Isabel. And that's not just the romantic relationships; both Sam and Cole and Grace and Isabel have some great interactions.

Throughout this book especially, I felt like all four were real people, dealing with difficult situations and yet growing and learning. None of them was right all the time, but none of them was wrong all the time either. The fact that we had shifting points of view, that all of them had a voice and an opinion and that all of them gave us a different perspective on each other, helped immensely with this. (I am really tempted to go all English-major here and talk about how the finite, limited perspectives of each build into a cohesive narrative and how utterly cool that is, but I'll try to restrain myself.)

I also never got the sense that any of the characters were reduced to their quirks. And, let's face it, they could so easily have been. The rock star, the rich girl, the musician. And yet, they were never simply defined by that. They were also wolf, not-wolf, once-wolf--but not simply that, either.

Another thing I really loved was the fact that I felt that they weren't static characters, that change was both possible and necessary, and that they had demonstrably changed over the course of the books. Grace and Sam's relationship works for me, largely because I believed that they were not simply the couple that fell in love in Shiver.

There is a plot too, but for me this book was largely about the characters and their decisions, so that's what I've focused on.

I'm quite excited for Scorpio Races, which sounds very neat.

Book source: public library
Book information: Scholastic, 2011; YA

Maggie Stiefvater, previously