5.5 stars

You know that feeling when you’re floating on water? All your senses are dampened, you are weightless, careless and completely relaxed. There aren’t any loud sounds, you are safe, perfectly happy and everything else seems a mile away... That’s EXACTLY how Maggie Stiefvater’s writing makes me feel. I want to hug this book and never ever let it out of my sight.

Grace and Sam are finally together, but they live in fear. They are constantly afraid that things will go back to the way they were before, and unfortunately, it’s not something either of them can control. There are several new wolves in the woods and it’s up to Sam to take care of them all now – the old and the new. In addition, Grace’s parents finally started noticing things and decided to start honing their parenting skills.

Linger brings us two additional POVs. We get to see some of the events through the eyes of Isabel, to whom we were introduced in Shiver, and Cole, one of the new wolves. The two of them are so very different from Sam and Grace and having four POVs instead of two brought amazing balance to the story. While this would certainly bother me in Shiver, I was thrilled by it now.
That doesn’t mean that I like Grace and Sam any less. In fact, if I had feelings for those characters before, it was nothing compared to how I feel about them now. They are both beautiful and strong in their own way. I’ve noticed that my favorite quotes usually come from Sam’s chapters, although Grace has her moments, too. There’s a reason for that, of course. Sam is just the type of gentle soul I can start loving in a heartbeat, and after all, he’s supposed to be good with words. There isn’t a character in YA literature I could ever love more than I love Sam. A look in his eyes is all it takes to make me cry!

I did my best to find a flaw in Linger – this may sound odd, but I wanted to have at least one small thing to complain about because I thought it would add credibility to the rest of my review. I tried my best and failed miserably. Oh, I’ve read my friends’ reviews but I simply don’t agree with any of them. The first half was not slow for me, it was soft and beautiful. Isabel and Cole weren’t irritating, they were troubled and interesting. The prose wasn’t purple, it was… I already said that, didn’t I? I could go on and on for days, but it wouldn’t do much good. This is the second book in a series that needs to be read in order. If you liked Shiver, you are going to like Linger too, I have no doubt about it.