Frozen (Heart of Dread #1) by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston

 (Book Review)

Started: I have no starting post for this blog, because I started it in the old days before I decided to keep track of my starting and finishing dates.  So in other words, sometime before August 13, 2017.  Possibly a few months before.
Finished: November 1, 2020

Why I Read this Book 
So, this is part of my "Read More Junk" project.
I talked about the rationale behind this project before in a previous book review, but for the purposes of making this blog post stand independently, I'll restate myself briefly.
Over the past few years, I've become frustrated with how little reading I get done.  I seem to lack the self-control to stop watching Youtube videos and crack open a book.  I've come to believe that at least part of the reason for this is that my reading list is too ambitious.  I was trying to read a lot of classic books, but I only had the brain power to engage with these books at certain times of the day.  If it was too early in the morning, or too late in the evening, I just didn't have the power to focus on any difficult reading.  And so this is why I always wasted time surfing the Internet instead.  (Or so I told myself.)
The solution, therefore, was to balance out my reading list with some junk--some pure escapism or guilty pleasures--that could tempt me away from wasting endless hours on the Internet in the evening.
[I'm also influenced by Stephen King, who in his book On Writing stated that if you want to develop your literary skills you should read as much as possible, and it doesn't so much matter what you read--a bad book will develop your writing skills just as much as a good book.  And by Steve Donoghue, who is the kind of intellectual I wish I was, and who reads omnivorously--he's just as happy discussing trashy romance novels and comic books as he is discussing Homer or early Church historians (*1).]

So, I went to the bookstore in search of some junk--some light reading with absolutely no redeeming value other than an imaginative story.
As always, my reading selection is limited by the fact that I'm living in Vietnam, and have limited access to English books.  The larger bookstores in Saigon do have an English section, but it's only a handful of books.  And the fantasy section is, for whatever reason, mostly YA. (*2)
But, when you're looking for guilty pleasures, YA fits the bill just fine.  After all, there are a lot of really imaginative YA books out there.

So, as I perused the bookshelf, looking for which YA fantasy book to choose, this one looked mildly interesting to me.  
I made the mistake of getting enticed by the blurbs that the publisher had put on the back cover. (When will I learn!) But it seemed to promise a fantastic imaginative world with a complex plot and several moving parts.  It sounded really interesting--like the YA version of Game of Thrones.  

"As Fearless as a futuristic Game of Thrones"
--Margaret Stohl
"The well-paced action is taut, the characters divers and finely drawn....Fully satisfyingly."
---New York Journal of Books

There were also plenty of hints from the blurbs that the target audience for this book was teenage girls (as if that weren't obvious enough from the cover design):

"Ice Cold Hotness"
--MTV.COM
"The mix of adventure and fantasy will have you ADDICTED!"
--SEVENTEEN.COM
"A one-sitting read. ... You'll really feel like you're traveling through this frozen, post-apocalyptic country [with] the setting, the realistic characters and the fast pace."
--Romantic Times

So, all indications would be that there was some cheesy-teenage romance mixed in with the epic fantasy story as well.  Teenage romantic books aren't really my jam, but I figured that was part of the YA genre, and a bit of cheesy romance could be all part of the fun if I went in with an open mind.  I could handle some cheesy YA drama mixed in with my guilty pleasures, right?
So, I decided to buy the book.

My Experience Reading this Book
I started this book around August 2017, got about 30 pages in, got bored, and soon got distracted by other things.  As usually happens with books I abandon, I never really intended to abandon this, I just picked it up less and less and gradually forgot about it.

I mentioned it in my April 2018 Vlog--The Books on my Shelf



It stayed on my shelves, though, and in 2019, I decided to give it another go.  I got about 100 more pages into it, and then got bored again, and stopped reading.

I'm embarrassed to admit all this.  I'm not embarrassed to admit the book bored me.  (It was a pretty boring book, after all.)  I'm embarrassed to admit that I stuck with it for 3 and a half years.  What I should have done, if I had any sense at all, was to just quietly abandon this book, and move on to something more worthwhile.

In the old days, I would have totally abandoned this book.  But since I've started keeping track of all the books I start and finish on this blog (as well as all the books I abandon), it feels like a personal failure to admit I've abandoned a book.  There are only a couple hundred pages left in this stupid YA novel.  Surely it's less trouble to just finish the thing off than it is to write up a blog post explaining why I abandoned it.

A few weeks back, we were going on a trip, and I needed a light-weight book that I could easily fit in the travel bag.  This was the smallest book I was currently reading (*3), so I threw it in the bag.  With no TV and no Internet on vacation, I had some distraction free evenings to read, and finally finished off the book.

The Review
Well, what can I say?  This book bored me.
Now keep in mind throughout this review that I am not in the target audience for a book like this.  (I should have known better than to take it off the bookshelves in the first place).   So take everything I say with a grain of salt.  But for what it's worth, these are my thoughts on the book.

I'll start with the positives:
This book is part of a trilogy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_de_la_Cruz#Bibliography

I was fully expecting it to end on an annoying cliffhanger, but it actually does a fairly good job of telling a self-contained story while still leaving a few unresolved plot-threads handing for the sequels.  In other words, even though I have no intention of continuing on with this trilogy, I didn't feel cheated by the ending.
The plotting of this book is competently done in the sense that there are a lot of mysteries in the beginning of the book, and most of them have a resolution by the end of the book.  The beginning starts out a little bit confusing.  (Who is this girl?  What is this voice in her head?  Who are all these people?)  But after I finally finished the book, I went back to the beginning, and realized that most of the things I had been confused about initially had been answered later on in the story.  In other words, the book does a good job of setting up questions and then paying them off.  (There are a few questions remaining, but I'm going to give this series the benefit of the doubt and assume these will all find answers later in the sequels.)
A couple of the action scenes in this book are decent.  For example, there is a Mad-Max style chase scene in which the characters are trying to escape from the city in their hummer while being chased and shot at by other vehicles, and they have to manage both the driving and firing the guns at the same time.  It's a cinematic scene that the authors do a good job of translating it onto paper for the most part.  (It's a bit more difficult to visualize in your head where are these vehicles are in relationship to each other when it's on the printed page instead of the movie screen, but it works for the most part).  There's an exciting energy to the scene even though it does resort to cliches.  To quote from a small section of it:

Two more bullets sailed through the cabin.  One nicked Farouk's arm.  "Snap out of it, boss!" the kid shrieked from the back.  "Next one will be through our heads!" 
"It's the sniper--take him out already!" Wes yelled back.

"He can't hide from me," Daran promised, peering through his scope for the elusive shooter.

"Over there!" Zedric yelled, pointing to the top of the nearest building.  "I see him!" They let off a few rounds, but the bullets continued to whiz by their heads.
A shell exploded just aft of the LTV, rattling the vehicle and sending them spinning.

"This is some escape," Nat said, rolling her eyes.  "You're going to get me to the water? You can't even get me out of the Strip."

"Hey now, a little confidence would be nice," Wes snapped. "Trying to keep us alive over here."

"Get that tank down!" Daran yelled, while Shakes fought to keep the truck upright.... (...and so on. From pages 67-68)

The chase scene goes on for 4 pages, and it's decently written, although, as you can see from the above excerpt, the book is so crammed full of cliches that it's difficult to get immersed into the story without some cliche jumping out at you and reminding you of another story (*4).  And much of the book is like that.

The world building in this book is intriguing in the broad strokes, but disappointing when you get into the details.  At the beginning of the book, we're presented with an intriguing overview of a post-apocalyptic world populated by many different fantastical lands and creatures.  Below is a quote from one of the opening chapters, which sketches out the various creatures which populate this strange new post-apocalyptic earth:

The marked children could do things--read minds, make things move without touching them, sometimes even predict the future. Enchanters, they were called, warlocks, "lock-heads" and "chanters" in the popular slang.
The others who came out of the ice were smallmen, grown men the size of toddlers who were gifted with rare talents for survival, able to hide in plain sight or forage for food where none could be found; slyphs, a race of beings of luminous beauty and awesome power, it was said their hair was the color of the sun that was no more and their voices were the sound of the birds that no longer flew across the land; and finally the terrifying drau--silver-haired slyphs with white eyes and dark purpose. Drau were said to be able to kill with their minds alone, that their very hearts were made of ice.
The smallmen were rumored to live openly with their taller brethren in New Pangaea, but the slyphs and the drau kept to themselves, hidden in their remote mountain glaciers. Many doubted they truly existed, as very few had ever seen one (p.19)

So, there's not a lot of detail there, but it sounds intriguing enough, right?  It sounds like it could turn into something really interesting.

The problem, though, is that later in the book when we actually meet these creatures, they are really boring.  The smallmen, for example are simply people that are small.  There's some vague hints of magic, but they are just as boring and bland as all the rest of the characters in this book.  Ditto for the slyphs.
The reason people pick up fantasy books like this is for a chance to immerse themselves in a fantasy world.  But this book is doing everything it can to prevent you from getting immersed.  Nothing is described in any sort of immersive detail.  Take for example, this piece from page 93.  Our main characters are driving through a post-apocalyptic landscape in their hummer.

Outside, the blizzard had stopped, and the air was clear again.  Wes fiddled with the music player, switching through songs until he found one he liked.

So, what kind of a music player is this?  Is there radio in this world?  Or is he flipping through tracks on a CD?
I realize I'm just nitpicking one minor detail, but when I saw this sentence, it struck me as emblematic of how the whole book is written.  This kind of lack of detail is all throughout the book.
Take another random example:

They settled down to eat their meal.  Nat marveled at the texture--she'd never had vegetables like this before, never had meat that hadn't been processsed or wasn't just tofu made to taste like meat. It was a revelation.  Still--just as in New Vegas--everyone drank Nutri.  Clean water was rare, even in K-Town. (p.125)

The drink Nutri is mentioned several times throughout the book, but never really explained or described.  What is in it?  How is it made?  How do they even make the drink if there is no water available to use as a base?

Now, granted, too much detail and world building would kill the momentum of the story.  But too little keeps the reader from buying into this world.  And this book is definitely erring on the side of too little.  And what detail we do get doesn't always make logical sense.  (*5)

But the main problem with this book is the characters.  The characters are all really flat and boring.  And many of them are unlikeable.
There's Nat, the main character, and Wes, her eventually love interest.  Both of them are walking cliches (she's the chosen one, he's the scoundrel with the heart of gold), but at least they have enough identifiable characteristics to be recognizable as characters.  Almost everyone else, though, is completely flat. 
Most of the book is spent in the company of Wes and his crew, which consists of Shakes (Wes's loyal right hand man), Farouk (the nervous kid) and Daran and Zedric (pretty much the same character twice over, the surly crew members whose loyalty can never be trusted.)  And I've pretty much told you most of what you need to know about them already.  (They get a little bit more characterization than this, but not much.)
Daran and Zedric are just annoying as surly teenage boys.  Granted, they're supposed to be annoying.  (The reader is meant to hate them, so that we can sympathize with the rest of the crew when Daran and Zedric's betrayal finally comes.)   But in a book in which we spend so much time with this just these 6 characters travelling along a deserted post-apocalyptic landscape, it's a pity we don't have more likable characters to keep us company.

Wes and his crew are all grizzled, world-weary army veterans, who've dropped out of the organized military service and are employing their expertise as hired mercenaries now.  And they're all between the ages of 14 to 16. 
The authors were obviously going for some kind of Han Solo type archetype for Wes's character, but the world-weary cynical character they want should be at least 35.  But, because this is YA and everything has to pander to the teen-audience, Wes has to be 16.  It's explained that in this world everyone starts the army at a very young age, and so everyone gets very cynical and jaded at a very young age.

(...I don't know, maybe?  Maybe in the a world where everyone is a child soldier, you could get world-weary and jaded characters like Wes at 16?  It didn't feel realistic to me, because I feel that even if you have traumatic experiences at a young age, you still have to get a bit more life experience under your belt before you can become as desensitized to it all as Wes has. But this is admittedly a judgement call.  Maybe it could feel realistic to someone else.)

But this kind of pandering to the teenage reader is exactly what you sign up for when you pick up a cheesy YA book like this, so for the most part I didn't let it bother me and considered it all part of the cheesy fun of the genre.

The other thing that I think must just be part of the genre is a very slow-burning romance in which there's a lot of flirting, a lot of casual touching, sleeping next to each other and some innocent pre-sleep cuddling (*6), but absolutely no sexual tension.  The big climactic moment near the end is when Wes and Nat finally kiss.  

I haven't read enough YA romance to say, but I'm guessing that must just be part of the genre, right?
What is the target audience for a book like this?  The main characters are all about 14 to 16, but usually kids like to read about characters just slightly older than themselves, right?  So the target audience is 11 to 12 year old girls?  So no wonder the book is presenting a very innocent view of teenage romance.  And yet, it still felt strange to me that there weren't more hormones in these encounters.
(Perhaps the problem is that I haven't read enough to habituate myself to the genre, and therefore I keep getting pulled out of the story by the unrealistic elements which I should really just accept as part of then genre?)

GoodReads

So, since I'm clearly not in the target audience for this book, I thought it was only fair to go over to Goodreads and see what other people were saying about this book.  It looks like although most of the reviews are positive, all of the top rated reviews are one-star.  And since there are some brilliant take-downs of this book, I can't resist quoting from a few of them:

From Gillian Berry: 

There's no beating around the bush. Frozen is a bad book. It's a bottom-of-the-slush-pile, never-gonna-happen, mish-mash-mess of a book you'd expect from someone who just woke up one day and decided to be a novelist. It is stupefying and fascinating in its awfulness. It contains poor grammar, poor plodding plotting, flat characters, and world-building that's entirely without focus. Is it a fantasy? Is it dystopian? Who knows? And, more important, who cares?

Why did I finish this book? Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps it reached such a high level of hilarribad that I was physically incapable of looking away from it. Maybe I wanted the book to deliver on its promise so much, even though I knew it wouldn't, that I had to give it a chance.

Ah, good.  Glad to know it's not just me then.

From Khanh, first of her name, mother of bunnies's Reviews:

This book is plagued with so many problems, I hardly know where to begin. Ms. de la Cruz is an extremely prolific author, and a successful one, but sometimes I think that there is a problem with quantity over quality.

This book was such an utter mess. The plot is barely held together by the weakest of smear from a grade-school quality glue stick. The world building is slapdash, haphazard, nonsensical, inconsistent. The characters are devoid of personality and emotion

Yeah, my thoughts exactly.

From Giselle:

I haven't read a book I could describe as truly terrible in a long time. I was surprised at every turn of a page that I was still reading it. I'm not really sure why I kept reading. 

Yes! Me too!

To be completely fair, though, I should be clear that after you get through the first 4 top-rated reviews (all of which are beautiful epic take-downs of this book--I've only quoted small parts of each, but click on the links above for the full review), then it does appear that most of the readers really love this book.  Much more common is a book review like this:

This book is beautifully written. The authors build such an intricate world, and this book introduces you to a whole new dimension. I personally loved how all the characters interacted. I loved the plot, and the story never once bored me. Frozen is definitely one of the most original books I've read in a long time. I admire the authors for being able to do enough world building throughout this book without leaving the reader confused or overwhelmed. 

Well, not my opinion, but  to each his own I guess.
But then, after a flurry of 4 and 5 star reviews, once you continue on into the middle rated reviews, the ratings become a lot more mixed.  "I absolutely loved this book!" type reviews seem to alternate with "flat characters and really boring" type reviews. 
So, in summation: I know I'm an old man and completely out of touch with the YA scene.  But its worth noting that the reaction to this book even among its target audience seems to be mixed.  At least half of the target audience has the same view of this book that I do.

Post Mortem
So, given that it took me over 3 years to finish this book, it's time to admit my "Read More Junk" project isn't working (*7).  The problem isn't with my book list.  The problem is just that I'm a terrible reader.  I want to be literary, but the truth is I'm not as bookish as I pretend to be.  (Although to be fair to myself, I've never made a secret of that on this blog, and have tried to be always be open about my limitations as a reader).  Well, ultimately I am who I am, faults and all.  I'll try to be more focused in the future, and stay focused on the books I start so that it doesn't take me over 3 years to finish some stupid YA novel.  
I also think it's time to admit my "Read More Junk" project is not working.  The mistake was in assuming that because something was lowbrow, it was therefore pleasant to read.  But poorly written YA books can be a real chore to wade through, as I've discovered.  Better to spend my time with authors who are more regarded.  I'll still be reading Science Fiction and Fantasy books, but I'll try to pursue more worthwhile Science Fiction and Fantasy books.  Asimov, Tolkien, Philip Jose Farmer, Frank Herbert, et cetera. Finding books is always the key in Vietnam.  I likely won't be able to find all of these authors, but I'll stumble across a few of them if I keep my eyes open.  After all, I found Zelazny in a used bookstore here.

Footnotes (docs, pub)
(*1) Although Steve Donghue would not be happy being mentioned in the same breath as Stephen King, because he hates Stephen King's books. 

(*2) I'm not exactly sure why YA tends to dominate the English book selection in Saigon.  I have two guesses though: 
    1) Most of the Vietnamese people who are proficient enough to be able to read novels in English are young. Or,
    2) There's a lot of expatriate families with children living in Saigon.
Quite possibly its a combination of the two.

(*3)  The Chronicles of Amber collection was too thick to easily fit in my small suitcase.

(*4) Another example from many.  Page 134.
"This is what I won? This is your legendary ship?  I say we give it back to the Slob!"

(*5) At various points in the book, water, oxygen, and salt are all described as being expensive luxuries for the rich.  (Three of the characters are described as being oxygen addicts.  "The Slaine brothers and Farouk disappeared into a nearby building with a pharmacist's symbol painted on the door.  Oxygen addicts.  The clean-air craze" (p.122)) The authors are obviously intending this book to be a warning about protecting our environment, so I guess they get points for idealism, but not for realism.  It's difficult to imagine the type of society that they describe (organized armies, casinos, 5 star restaurants for the very wealthy) functioning without the basic necessities of human life being available in greater quantities.

(*6) From page 267-268: 

Wes spoke directly into her ear, his strong arms around her, and she had never felt safer.  "You have to accept who you are, Nat.  Once you do, you can do anything you want."  He chuckled softly. "Or maybe, to tap into your power, all you need to do is think of me."(p.267 end of Chapter 40 )
Nat felt shy the next day, when she woke up lying next to Wes, his arm still slung across her torso.  She picked it up gently, trying not to disturb him. (First lines of the very next page, Chapter 41)

When I was first reading this, I totally assumed that the door was being left open for the reader to imagine they were having sex off-screen (or off-the-page in this case).  But then later in the big climax, when such a big deal is made of them finally kissing for the first time, I realized that all this cuddling and sleeping next to each other had been just that and no more.

(*7) Also in my Read More Junk project: The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner, The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell by Chris Colfer and Age of Myth by Michael J. Sullivan.

Video Review
Video review HERE and embedded below.
But before you watch, a word of apology about the quality of the video.  I have now officially entered the stage of parenthood where I'm sleepy all the time and never have any time to myself.
The only time I can get some time to myself to film these videos is after the toddler has gone to bed.  The  toddler never wants to go to bed.  And I have to wake up early every morning for work.  
I was so sleepy the night I filmed this video, but I'd been putting it off for weeks and I knew that there was no point in postponing it anymore.  I'd be just as tired the next next.
I needed some sort of liquid energy to get me through the video, but I didn't want to drink coffee because it was already past my bedtime.  I thought coca-cola might give me just enough of a slightly caffeine and sugar jolt without keeping me up all night, so I was drinking coke.  But drinking a carbonated beverage isn't ideal because then it makes you burby.

Also, I was even more tongue tied than usual, because I had a sore on my tongue (caused by drinking too many double-espressos at work.)
I'm trying my best to get through this stage of life without giving up on my hobbies completely.  My hope is that if I keep up the habit of doing videos and writing book reviews, someday I'll have more time to myself once again, and then I'll be glad I kept the habit going.  But it's probably going to get worse before it gets better.  Anyway, here is the video.  Feel free not to watch it.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky - Universal Grammar, and Unresolved Questions