ARC Book Review: Frozen – Erin Bowman

Frozen
Author: Erin Bowman
Series: Taken #2
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Dystopia
Release Date: April 15, 2014
Publisher: HarperTeen

Goodreads | Amazon | TBD

Summary:

 
First Sentence: We have been walking for two weeks.

I received a copy of the book from the publisher in exchange for a honest review. All opinions are my own and I was not compensated for this review.

My Review:

Anybody that knows me really well knows that books with gorgeous covers are my weakness. When I see a book with a gorgeous cover, I have to have it, no matter what. I remember seeing the cover of Taken last year and knowing that I just had to get the book in my hands because really, have you seen its gorgeous cover? However, after reading Taken and not being impressed with it at all, I was still a bit excited and willing to read Frozen, hoping it would redeem the series in my eyes. Frozen‘s gorgeous cover also helped convince me to give the series another chance. Sadly, Frozen didn’t impress me much either. In fact, I personally think Frozen is worse than Taken was, if that was even possible.

I catch myself smiling.
Because there’s a sense of tranquility among us, an optimistic current you can’t ignore.
We’ve made it. We’re nearly there. (ARC 83)

Frankly, Frozen bored me to death. Right from the very beginning, I had a bad feeling about Frozen. The first couple of pages didn’t drag me into the story and the first half of the book didn’t capture my attention either. The pacing of Frozen was horrible – the book mainly consists of running, hiding, fighting, hiding, running, fighting, rinse and repeat. Honestly, if I haven’t received a physical ARC from the publisher, I would have DNF’d Frozen when I was three chapters into it.

Another main issue I had with Frozen was that all the characters were so clueless, Gray, his team, and their enemy included. I was literally screaming at them multiple times in my head to please grow a brain and to stop being so foolish. That sadly didn’t happen.

[MILD] SPOILER: Examples include: 1. You visit a town and discover that nearly everyone but one person living in it is dead because of a virus. You don’t know anything about said virus. So obviously you touch the last person left alive, not caring about the fact that you KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE VIRUS and that YOU MAY CATCH THE VIRUS BY TOUCHING THAT PERSON BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW HOW THE VIRUS SPREADS. I’m surprised they’re not all dead by now.
2. You do NOT leave a small child with your enemy. It doesn’t matter if your enemy is tied up and can’t escape; your enemy can still speak and you know how gullible children are. The enemy can easily convince the child to release them like that, DUHHH.
3. The enemy successfully ambushed Gray and his team. Some people on Gray’s team survived and comes back to the battle wreckage the very next day to check things out. You would think that the enemy would be smart enough to plant some spies there just in case, no?
I can go on and on, but I’ll spare you my pain.

And that’s not all. I had an issue with the world-building in Frozen too. The world-building in Taken was easy to understand, but the world-building in Frozen is a whole another story. First of all, in Frozen we learn more about Gray’s world through cheap info-dumping through “stories” told by the characters. I usually won’t mind that too much, but the “stories” the characters told in Frozen was so confusing. I couldn’t keep track of what was what and who did what. Believe me, I’ve tried to understand the history of Gray’s world; I read those info-dump parts four times and still didn’t get what the characters were talking about until I had no choice but to give up.

Everyone who have read Taken knows that Taken ended with a love triangle. I am sad to say that there is still a love triangle in Frozen. To make things worse, I didn’t feel any of the romance. In fact, the romance parts in Frozen was one of the parts that bored me to death. I could care less about who Gray ends with – I can barely tell Emma and Bree apart except for the minor fact that Emma is a nice caring person while Bree is more rough and in your face kind of girl.

“Because maybe we’re not right, Bree.”…”You and me…Maybe we’re too aggressive for each other. We’re either at each other’s throats or we can’t keep our hands to ourselves.” (ARC 92)

There was this one big shocking twist in Frozen that was meant to make readers go all “what?!” and “unbelievable!” but sadly, the twist didn’t work on me, even though I wasn’t expecting it. By the time I finally got to the plot twist, it was already a little too late to redeem the book. The only thing the plot twist did was make me even more angrier at a certain character. (People who read my review of Taken will probably know who I’m talking about.)

I sadly can not think of one positive thing to say about Frozen, besides that I love its gorgeous cover. I’m just looking at my notes right now as I write my review and I see nothing positive written, nada. I wish I can compliment the villains in Frozen, but that one move they made (explanation in the above spoiler) changed my mind about how smart they are.

Overall, do I recommend Frozen? Sadly, no. If you thought Taken was a frustrating read, wait until you meet Frozen. It had me raging in anger.