BOOK REVIEW: Shiver the Whole Night Through by Darragh McManus ★★★☆☆

A small Irish town.

An uncontrollable passion.

A message from the dead.

WARNING. MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.

Bullied and heartbroken for several months, seventeen-year-old Aidan Flood is on the verge of suicide. But his plan is put on hold when the local sweetheart, the beautiful Sláine McAuley ends up dead, in the haunted Shook Woods. The police think she died of hyperthermia, literally frozen to death. Taking the mind of his own problems, Aidan is curiously drawn to her investigation and confirms something is dark at bay when one night he gets a message, scratched in ice on his bedroom window: 'I didn't kill myself.' A dark secret dating back to the Irish Famine puts the small town in danger. Only Aidan can connect the dots between the new arrival, the murder and the dropping temperatures engulfing the land.

Author, journalist, playwright and screenwriter, Darragh McManus’s Shiver the Whole Night Through is his first Young Adult book. His previous works are two crime novels, Even Flow (2012) is a vigilante thriller and The Polka Dot Girl (2013) is an all-female cast, noir-style mystery. As a journalist, he has written reviews, features and opinion columns for several papers, including The Irish Independent, The Sunday Times and The Guardian, a career spanning over a decade.

McManus lives in the west of Ireland and so this novel is set in a small town of Ireland, which I love because it really made me want to go there, despite how the author creates the dark, scary and haunted Shook Woods, I still want to go. Plus the fantastic discovery of the Irish Famine linking to the present day disturbing deaths is spooky. The mystery unravelling, the twists, the plot and the way it’s been written are seemingly sufficient for a young adult book.

I’m on the fence with Aidan. He’s an eloquent guy for someone his age and an edgy character that feels relatable to those readers who have been bullied. McManus did an excellent job at creating a believable seventeen-year-old male, who suffers a despicable amount of suffering, procrastinating and obsession, from the way he speaks, telling his story to the reader to the way he goes about his day, really nailing the whole moody teenager voice. Although the book is in first person narrative from the protagonist point of view, there aren’t many thoughts on the other characters, so it solely is based on Aidan’s version of the events.

I also like the opening of the book:

I stood on the bridge and tried the courage to jump. I stood there and I thought, if it’s good enough for Kurt Cobain, it’s good enough for me.

This ties in beautifully with the title and the fact that Kurt Cobain did a cover of the same title. McManus has also popped in a page of ‘guide to the pronunciation of Irish Gaelic words’ which is very helpful because I couldn’t pronounce the names and places. Similar to Joe Schreiber’s Pretty Lethal where the author encourages the reader to listen to the soundtrack, McManus has mentioned a Spotify playlist on the second page and I’ve checked it out and it as he’s promised, ‘music with a chilly, brittle, spooky and melancholy feel’.

I liked the supporting characters more than the main if I’ll be honest. Aidan’s only friend Padraig (PAW-drig) is a geek with a huge massive forgiving heart, the only person who stuck by him throughout the bullying. The sad thing is, Aiden doesn’t let his only friend in on what’s he’s discovered and Padraig doesn’t push him into telling him. What a good friend. And I like that Aidan isn’t the stupid kind when it comes to knowing who his friends are because he appreciates what Padraig has done for him.

Now I know not every character is perfect because it makes the book interesting if characters did have flaws. I personally didn’t understand Aidan’s weird obsession with people’s incorrectness of pronouncing their names. His ex-girlfriend Caitlin, who cheats on him, pronounces her name ‘like the American version Kate-lin, not Cat-leen’. Then in the next sentence, he’s not even sure why he’s getting worked up on it. I guess people have things that tick them off and mispronouncing people’s names is his tick.

I think at one point, just past the halfway point, I found it hard to finish with, like the will to read it to the end. I wasn’t bothered with his complaining about how nearly the whole school bullied him, but the damn the cheesiness with Sláine I wanted to pull the trigger. The whole “my guardian angel’ malarkey. He’s basically put himself in a relationship with a dead girl. I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m not thinking like a young adult because I’m in my early twenties, maybe that’s why I was rolling my eyes whenever he says things like ‘day three without Sláine’ or something along those lines. Sure he’s helping her out, but how can they be together? Plus it’s unclear if she is a ghost because Aidan does mention that she can be seen by others and she doesn’t look really dead, more like a vampire. So I probably had this confused look as I read through it.

As tempting to give this book a four star, I’m giving it three and a half for the following reasons. Yes, the book was good on how it captured Irish scenery and the storytelling vibe, but it’s one of those books you’ll read just the once because you know what happens, and if you tried reading it again, it wouldn’t really be the same. Plus the ending wasn’t very clear and McManus just adds this little bit which annoyed me because I didn’t see any clues leading up to the climax. (SPOILER – the new guy Sioda Kinvara has a twin named Joseph who’s basically the villain and the cause of the deaths and coldness). I do recommend it to those who like supernatural, detective style with a hint of romance.

Rating 3.5/5
Publishers: Hot Key Books
Publication Date: September 6th 2014
Genre: Yong Adult/ Paranormal/ Thriller