Review Detail

I have to admit that I'm sorry to say to goodbye to Mercy Falls and to Sam, Grace, Isabel & Cole, especially since I felt like "Forever" was anticlimactic.

The book is well written and flowed more smoothly than Linger did. It allows for some of the less endearing characters from the previous books to redeem themselves and some of the story's questions get answered but not all. I still have a few.

Grace is a wolf at the opening of this book and Sam is still a boy. She shifts sporadically but not for very long and narrowly misses Sam each time she does. He's at a loss for how to keep her safe. (We are heartbroken for the both of them.) Everyone in town blames him for her disappearance, assumes she's dead at his expense, including Grace's parents. When another body of a missing girl shows up, the livelihood of the entire pack hangs in the balance as the massive hunt to kill them all gets under way.

Sam and Grace as well as Isabel and Cole all have issues to work out not just within themselves but also within their respective relationships. This final book in the trilogy has love, romance (I can't remember the last time my husband brought me home a gift he saw in a window that made him think of me- and the way it would look on me and all the thoughts that go along with that. That could be because he knows if he came home with the wrong size, it would go badly for him.) passion (just the kissing alone...sigh) and loss (characters die...sniff).

I do have a few unanswered questions though like:

Chapter 58? What is up with Isabel and Cole in that one? I kept waiting for Stiefvater to go back (in a few pages, like usual) and explain what that conversation was about but she didn't. I was really confused.

Grace's Mom, Amy. In Shiver, it said that when Grace was attacked by the wolves, Sam shifted back into a human and carried her to her mom. It also said that when Grace introduced Sam to her Mom for the first time, she seemed to recognize him. I thought for sure this would be addressed somewhere in Forever, maybe when Amy invites Sam into her studio to discuss Grace's missing.

I would have really like to have seen an Epilogue that showed a few years down the road...Cole and Isabel working together on a wolf disease cure. Sam and Grace definitely married, finishing college or perhaps already graduated and caring for little Sam's and Grace's. Sam's music career?!

Again, anti-climactic.