In a cover letter in the ARC of Shiver that I received a year ago Stiefvater said it best. “When I wrote Shiver, I committed the cardinal writerly sin of falling in love with my characters. My objectivity was toast.”I’m afraid that has happened to me as well. Grace, stoic Grace, all hard angles and pragmatic - Sam, lovely Sam, all open wound and broken. When I closed my copy of Shiver I cried a little. It was such a beautiful ending I didn’t want to let them go. Now Stiefvater continues their mesmerizing love affair but adds several new layers. Grace now deals with a reality that may separate her from Sam permanently while Sam struggles to believe in his cure. Throw in Isabel (whose brother’s death has left her angry and sharp tongued as she refuses to fake her way through a happy life) and Cole (the rock musician with several different personas all of which want, more than anything, to die) and you have a new twist on a story that will thrill fans of Stiefvater’s original creation. Shiver was a weird book for me. I struggled in places to finish it. I wasn’t feeling the mood or the characters... something I can’t explain. But somewhere along the line I fell utterly in love with everything about it… with Stiefvater’s glorious writing, which is some of the most original sentence and word structuring I have ever read… with the characters she creates, who feel so real you envision them in the room having the conversation before you… with the story, so simple and yet so complex. With Linger I have reawakened that passion and let it completely absorb and overwhelm me. I wasn’t 100 pages into the book when I was sobbing openly over the story and believe me, I do not often weep at books. I cried more than once reading “Linger”. Does that make it a better book?Stiefvater accomplishes something lyrically amazing here… she turns words into weapons, into daggers and into darts… but she also turns them into soft sighs and smiles and gives you lifts and falls that you cannot comprehend. It would be a shame for me to ruin Linger for you by telling you what happens in it. Just, be assured, that if you are a fan of Stiefvater, or Shiver, or Sam or Grace, or the Wolves of Mercy Falls that you will be an ardent fan of Linger and the possibilities of this simply crushing emotional journey. I’ve been done with the book for a few days and I still can’t extract myself out of the words. Mercy Falls won’t let me go. Again. Blast you Stiefvater, again! How do you manage to wrap yourself around my brain like that?