Beasts of the Frozen Sun
Jill Criswell
3/5
I liked the synopsis of this book a lot more than I liked the book, that's always disappointing. Not to say it wasn't a fairly enjoyable read, it just let me down. It's a Viking mythology story that follows Lira, a chieftain's daughter with the power to read soul's with a touch, and Reyker, an abused warrior who has done evil things and thinks he's beyond saving. Not a super original premise with the base terms, but when you have such great historical elements to work with, you have a lot of room to make any plot amazing.
I did like many elements of it, the history was fun, the fighting was great, but the relationships just felt too surface-level. This book was just kind of difficult for me to appreciate, I wasn't rooting for the characters, I didn't feel particularly strong about whether or not any of them lived or died. That made it hard when it felt like they were being injured every five minutes, stuff like that usually stresses me out, but it just kind of felt overdone and over-dramatic.
I was just struggling because it was like everything that happened felt like it was trying to be much deeper than it was given credit for. Things happened too sporadically for me to feel their impact, a character was evil and attacked another character and then five seconds later was doubting it then five seconds later was evil and back and forth constantly without any real depth to it. I understand where Criswell was coming from and I appreciate a lot of it, however I do feel like there's room for improvement.
I think it deserves three stars because uh Vikings obviously. The historical fiction element of it was great, as plots goes it had a lot of drama while maintaining an element of reality through the history. I just think it probably wasn't the type of romance I typically like to see, like being love-at-first-sight but trying to reason it off as legit by using off-page reactions. As a debut, it's good- with the potential of a great sequel.
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