The Wolves of Mercy Falls: Book Three: Forever

by Maggie Stiefvater, 390 pages

The third and final installment in Stiefvater's The Wolves of Mercy Falls series, Forever opens with Grace and Sam's roles in the previous volumes reversed: now she's alone in the woods and he's watching and waiting for her. He's also a prime suspect in her disappearance. As if the dormant-for-now werewolf doesn't have enough to worry about already! His roommate Cole is an insanely popular suicidal genius rocker whom the world thinks is dead. His adoptive father has probably shifted for the last time and will never again be more than a flash of grey fur between the trees, taking his secrets with him. And Sam doesn't know if his "cure," concocted by a startlingly industrious and invested Cole, will stick or if it will work on anyone else. Cole says he just needs time to work out the details; but when a girl's mauled body is found in the woods near his home, Sam and the others find time isn't something they have.

Ooh, I liked this one much better than the second book. Sam and Grace are interesting again as they try to reconnect and start their altered worlds over from scratch, facing challenges they couldn't bring themselves to deal with before. Cold Isabel gets some redeeming character development. And relationships with realistically imperfect parents of all sorts get re-examined. But the real draw for me this go-round is Cole. He's a great character, full of complex emotions, creative energy, wit, and surprises in spades as he tries to work out a cure and the question of who and what he is now and what he wants out of life (wanting life at all is a new concept for him). My one complaint here is the inartistically abrupt end. You finish a page and then start at the top of the next, thinking it must be a short, final wrapping-up chapter, only to realize it's the acknowledgements. Huh? You ought to know an ending is an ending when you read it! Ah, well.

If you haven't read the first two, do so (and even if you have, a refresher before diving into this one is recommended), as Steifvater gives no helpful, subtly inserted memory-joggers as to who's who and what's happened to them in the past. I think half of my frustration with the second book was that it had been too long since I'd read the first and was lost. This final one makes up for all that and then some.