Cover Review (8): Shiver

Cover Crazy is a weekly meme hosted by Tawni at The Book Worms where a beautiful cover is featured each week for all of us to admire. I am going to use my Cover Crazy posts as an opportunity to review a book cover I love or review any cover (even the ones I don't love) from a book I've read. This week's Cover Crazy is for a cover I both love and have read the book: Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater. 

Previous Cover Crazy posts:

Ascendant
The Adoration of Jenna Fox
More of my Cover Crazy posts. 

I have a love/hate relationship with the color white. For all my girlyness (my love of sparkles, pink, pretty things), I’m actually a lot like a little boy. I’m always getting things dirty and playing rough with my stuff. As much as I love pretty, delicate things, they aren’t long for this world if they’re in my possession (unless I put them on a shelf far away from me and admire them from a distance). So for this reason, I have an unspoken ban on the color white.

But I love it. There’s something calming about pristine white. It reminds me of snow, where everything becomes blanketed in clean, sparkling (!) white. All of the blemishes of the world get smoothed over. Even ugly gnarled trees or paint-peeling mailboxes suddenly look beautiful with a light dusting of snow. The snow also brings with it a hush and stillness, like the entire world is suddenly empty. I love it.

This hush is completely captured by the cover of Shiver. All of that white, I feel immediately taken to a forest blanketed in snow. The light blue heightens this effect. The trees seem at turns both frightening with their bare, pointy branches and yet also inviting with their almost heart-shaped leaves.  I wondered at this contrast. Is there a similar conflict between love and danger between the characters?

The sense of danger is heightened again with the splotch of red dotting the “I” in the title. The bright red mars the beautiful clean white, making it seem even more startling and scary. Who is bleeding? Will they be ok? I wonder how this blood ties in with the story.

The title adds to the sense of coldness and danger. There are a number of situations in which people may shiver. We shiver, most obviously, when we are cold. This association plays on the snowy whiteness and barren branches. We also shiver when we are in a, ahm, romantically heated situation. The heart-shaped leaves and the premise of the story both lend themselves to this particular shiver. Finally, we also shiver when we are frightened. Something scary might “send a cold shiver down our spine” and the sharp, bare branches closing in around the splash of blood underscore the danger implied by the cover.

My favorite part of this cover is something I didn’t actually notice for quite a while: the wolf. He lurks in the bottom right corner, blending into both the branches and the background. His eyes stare out at you, boring into you. Yet they are ambiguous. Is he a friendly wolf? Is he frightened of you? Perhaps he is the hunted and the one who bleeds. Or is he dangerous, staring at you, his prey. His shadowy presence adds a sense of danger and vulnerability. Wolves are stealthy and quiet, able to effortlessly sneak up upon you. Much like real wolves, the fact that I didn’t even notice this wolf until much later on makes it feel like this wolf has also managed to sneak up upon me.

Unfortunately, I did not actually like this book very much. I couldn’t even finish it, but this cover remains one of my favorite covers out there. The cover does compliment the story well, though I did get some incorrect impressions of the nature of the story.

 

What do you think about this cover? Do you like it? Dislike it? Does it make you want to read the book?

Interested in covers? Be sure to check out another Cover Crazy post by Gina from My Precious. 

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