Shadow Frost (Shadow Frost Trilogy, #1)

by Coco Ma

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

Disclaimer: I received this book for free from NetGalley and in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The first word that pops into my mind to describe Shadow Frost is “indulgent”.

This isn’t, strictly speaking, a bad book. It’s relatively entertaining, but it’s extreme and predictable. It has that Disney-esque quality of good triumphing over evil. The characters are highly powered with limited training and few consequences. There were some pretty cool ideas in the skeleton of this novel, but I just didn’t believe it. At all.

And, yeah, okay, this is a fantasy and requires suspension of disbelief. I get that, I really do. But I also have a problem with characters who achieve the highest levels of power so quickly. While I don’t mind a runaway royal here or there having her own adventures (hello The Storm Crow) I have a difficult time with multiple royals running around without interference and doing dangerous things. Like – no big deal if you, the only heir dies! We’ll figure it out! The lack of rules and consequences holding the characters in this world made it so they could run around doing whatever they wanted.

For me, that’s a deal breaker. I love beautifully crafter worlds. I want to see the characters grow and fail and overcome and struggle beautifully. Without consequences, these characters had no apparent growth. The love stories came quickly and too easily. The friendships were uncomplicated. I wanted more depth to these people besides dead parents and lightning fast reflexes.

The one thing I wanted so badly to experience in more detail was the magic system. At the beginning of the book, I felt like Coco Ma had this beautiful, complex, fascinating magic system. Especially in the first chapters, I expected to see more about how this worked, and learn alongside the princess and she struggled to gain control. But that, too, fell aside. The reader was given a once-over of the rules of magic and the rarity of the different types, just enough to follow the plots… then everyone became rare magical experts real fast. I was so disappointed.

In as far as the plot goes, nothing surprised me. There were a lot of things going on to the characters, to the point where it seemed like the author wanted each character to have an equally, dramatic storyline. This novel had six different POVs and a complicated world-building system that was introduced in awkwardly timed flashbacks and a lot of telling.

Please don’t misunderstand – I didn’t hate this book. I think that the ideas in Shadow Frost were fun and interesting, and the characters had potential. But it felt raw and underdeveloped and I expected more. I was disappointed, but I believe that those less thoroughly read in epic fantasy would enjoy this one a lot. It was written as though it was an HBO series, with romance and adventure and fight scenes. There’s an audience out there for Shadow Frost, but it fell a bit short for me.