The Legendary Shiver

Alright. I’m going to start this review with two disclaimers. 

1. The author sent me a free copy of The Legendary Shiver in exchange for an honest review.
2. I’m generally not a fan of anything in the Romance genre. While this book isn’t outright Romance (it’s a Contemporary), there are a lot of Romance undertones.

With that taken care of, let’s get onto the review! The Legendary Shiver by J. H. MacAl is a story about the pop music industry and all of the good and bad that comes with it. It follows William (Will) Cooper as he follows his best friend Ruby (Shiver) Magenta as she chases stardom. It was interesting because, while Will was the narrator and the ‘main character,’ Ruby seemed to be the actual protagonist. I haven’t seen much of this particular form of storytelling, but I like it! 

Now, as I mentioned before, I’m definitely not a Romance person. One of my problems with Romance is that there tends to be a lot of pining. When it comes to pining, it’s very difficult for me not to roll my eyes. I always feel like the character pining is more whiny than anything else, and it’s difficult for me to sympathize with them. But! This is just me. I have little to no patience for it, but if you do, then this book might be one to add to your list.

This story was told chronologically over the course of five (or more… I can’t really remember) years. I tend to struggle when any story spans longer than a year, and here’s why: extensive exposition. In order to have so much time pass in one cohesive book, the writing style has to lean very heavy on exposition, which leads to the typical writing pitfall of telling instead of showing. When books are telling/exposition heavy, it feels like everything we the readers are reading is backstory instead of the real story. 

In all honesty, I didn’t feel like the real story of The Legendary Shiver started until two-thirds of the way through the book (there were a couple of times before then I felt it almost started via plot twists, but each of those times ended up being a false alarm). This story had a lot of plot twists, but I felt like most of the twists didn’t actually alter the plot. They had the wow/shock factor, but some of them didn’t have the followthrough. However, two-thirds of the way through the book, there was a plot twist that kept me invested through the end of the story.

Also, there are some really important things that showed up in this book, particularly on the topic of mental health and the effect that stardom has on already fragile people. Mental health, particularly in celebrities, is not usually something that fans worry about, so having this book acknowledge that it’s a problem was good. On this same note, I want to mention that the characters felt very real. I think this is because the author let them be real people, with all the struggles of life, mental health, and personal traumas.

The last thing I want to say is that the very last line of the book is now on one of my quote walls. I’m obviously not going to share it here, since the ending lines of books are sacred and need to be discovered by oneself, but it was a really good line.

The Legendary Shiver by J.H. MacAl

The Ascendance Trilogy (my next read) by Jennifer A. Nielsen