Howdy YAL!

You’d think with the success of Frozen that there’d be more YA Snow Queen retellings.  But Crown of Ice was only one of the only few that I’ve seen.

That being said.

I didn’t finish it.

Really, this has not been my week with books.  It’s like everything that looks good ends of sucking.

Why I should’ve loved this plot?

There’s so many reason The Snow Queen, anti-herorines, quests, but none of them were successfully used by this book.  And to be honest, this makes me sad.

I think I’ll break up the review by talking about these three things:

1) The Snow Queen

The actual fairytale is a bit too moralistic and like a great deal of Anderson’s tales are, but it has lots of potential.  Look what Disney did with Frozen and I really liked Weavil’s blurb.  That (not the horrible cover) was what made me pay any attention to this book.

But the actual take of the fairytale on paper…sort of a snore.

Which is shouldn’t be.  But in the fifty percent I read, it wasn’t that different or that unique.

Yes, some extremely cheesy bits were added and the audience was info dumped with pieces of plot information, but it didn’t add to the story.  It just made me feel like this book was written for overgrown fourth graders with hormones.

In other words, at times the prose seemed a bit condescending.

Yes, if you info dump heavily and have 1D characters your writing can seem condescending.  Sad but true.

Oh, I didn’t talk about the 1D characters yet?

Well, it sort of goes with the info dumping.  I mean, if your characters are going to robotically tell you everything you need to know, then they’re probably not going to be that developed.

I’ll probably dive more into just how bad the narrator was in the second topic, but the side characters were not peaches either.  Being 1D affectedme from having any sympathy towards anyone.

And to be honest, I don’ t like being apathetic about books.  Especially Snow Queen retellings.

Sigh…I guess, I’ll just have to let it go.

2) The Anti-Herorine 

Or try the anti-likable character.

I really tried.  I really tried.  But Thyra was not likable like Elsa.  Or even like Regina when it’s a halfway decent episode of Once Upon a Time.  She’s just an awful YA heroine who happens to mention she’s the snow queen every other page, even though she’s NOT a queen.

Well, not the queen in the sense you think of a queen.

I don’t know about you, but when I think of a queen I think of someone in charge not someone’s minion.

Okay, to give Weavil some credit, the puppet master did somewhat play a role in the original.  But come on, here he only serves the purpose to make Thyra a sympathetic character.

And she’s not.

She’s absolutely not.

I mean, how can I feel for a character who so callously causes a destructive blizzard to destroy one’s town and then lies to said victim to keep them at her ice palace?

Seriously, what do you expect me to do hug her?

 

No.  This is what I wanted to do to Thyra.

Thyra’s backstory (while sad) doesn’t even make her likable.  Not even her sense of self preservation.

I just did not like her.

There’s no redeeming quality there.

It would’ve been one thing too, if Weavil didn’t want me to sympathize her.  But the prose is clearly slanted in such a way that suggests that I should like this character.

My suggestion: create a horrible half sister who’s ten times worse than Thyra, then maybe I’ll like her (hey, it worked for Regina).

3) Quests

There’s nothing like a good quest to get the blood pumping and the pages to fly by.  Unfortunately, I’ve seen better quests in children’s programs.

First, we must talk about the chatty Cathy reindeer.

No, one likes talking reindeer. Talking snowmen, yes.  Not talking reindeer.

Just watch The Santa Clause 2 if you need any further proof to why talking reindeers are not likable.  Especially when they’re named after the Dark One’s son.

To be honest, Bae sort of creeped me out.  It was like, hey there’s a talking reindeer that’s going to serve as one of the quest buddies and he was just sort of half baked.  And for a talking reindeer, that’s saying a lot.

The whole quest had a half baked sense to it.  Take for example,how math was suppose to be an answer to these characters’ problems.

Yeah, I got that but…you never explained it.

I’m not a numbers person.  Why do you think I went to law school not veterinary school?  But I did want some more information into how math played a role to this puzzle other than a lackluster explanation that I got.  I was actually pretty excited in the flashback when Thrya talked about her past math encounter with Kai.  That could’ve been a really cool plot line to explore.

Le sigh.

But no.

I think this one might’ve been a bit of a downer for me because I had a lot of hope for it.  It wasn’t exactly terrible.  Apathetic feelings aside, it had lots of potential.  But having potential and being a good book are two different things.

Overall Rating: Tough but I’m going to go in the  C-/D+ area.  While I liked a lot of the things Crown of Ice had to offer, in the end it wasn’t for me.