Breaking the Ice

by Mandy Baggot

[Leah]

When routine driven box office assistant Samantha Smith meets the stars of ‘Skating on Broadway’ her life is turned upside down. Immediately attracted to lead skater Jimmy Lloyd, Samantha does her best to deny her feelings. But when all you can do is burst out laughing and hyperventilate every time you’re under pressure, keeping things under wraps is a hard task. When the future of her beloved Civic Hall is threatened Samantha must rise to the challenge to ensure its survival. Constantly scrutinised and criticised by her zany sister Cleo and her brogue wearing boyfriend Jeremy, can Samantha save her job, save the Civic Hall and stop her panic attacks just long enough to give away her heart?

Earlier this year I received Excess All Areas by Mandy herself to review for the site, but I never found the time to read it. Not to mention, the cover was a bit bland and I’m not the biggest fan of self-published novels. However, when I received a copy of Mandy’s newest book Breaking The Ice, I read the first couple of pages and it interested me so because I had nothing else to read, I decided to give it a go. It wasn’t the best book I’ve ever read, but at no point did it make me want to give up!

Breaking The Ice isn’t a particularly unique Chick Lit novel but it is a book you can easily get lost in. It has some lovely characters, characters you really feel for, and the story line doesn’t feel contrived despite the fact that I found Samantha’s panic attacks a bit much sometimes. It’s a tale oft-told: girl meets (famous) boy, she feels he’s out of her league, she barely has a life and lives for her work and ends up having to save her job or something similar and that is Breaking The Ice in a nutshell. It does exactly what it says on the tin and it was all I wanted at that moment in my reading time!

But, it has to be said, it is fairly obvious the book is self-published. It seemed a bit long and it could have done with being sent to a freelance copy-editor as words were mis-spelled (yeh instead of yeah, nan instead of naan etc), every single spoken sentence ended in a full stop rather than a comma (for example: ‘”I love you.” Samantha said’ rather than ‘”I love you,” Samantha said’) and I did find that insanely annoying. Surely, every writer knows to put a comma after a quotation marks when adding “xx said” to a sentence. Whenever a time was mentioned, there was no AM or PM which is again another easy error that should have been corrected.

I would have liked to have seen more characterisation too, as I found Samantha and Jimmy were a little 2D and although I liked the developing relationship between the two, I did wonder why Jimmy would be interested in someone who was, to be honest, a bit of a wimp. Yet for all of the bad things I’ve said I can see potential in the book, it just needed streamlining and it needed to be looked over by a copy-editor. If you’re going to self-published then you do actually have to invest in your book if you want it to stand out because otherwise people will think it’s a pile of trash that was only published because the author wanted the glory of seeing a finished copy of her book. So yes, I did enjoy Breaking The Ice but it could have been a much better novel with a little bit of TLC before it became an actual book.