Poudelivre

There are a lot, a lot, of young adult novels out there. I’ve read quite a few myself and a lot of them are excellent. It doesn’t matter if you’re fifteen or thirty, young adult novels can still give you a lot, so don’t get fooled by that young adult. But sometimes, oh, sometimes I wish there was a little sign at the back of the book, like at puzzles and games, which says which age the book is directed too.

I first heard of Frozen way back last year (which feels like a lifetime when you wait around for the paperback version) and I was very keen to read it. I already knew what it was about, a sixteen year old girl living in a frozen world with powers that were illegal and thus was imprisoned. She was to head out on a very dangerous trip in search of the mythical place that could save her, the Blue.

What I didn’t know was that the female main character was named Nat and worked as a blackjack dealer. I didn’t know there was a male character named Wes, also sixteen, who worked as a runner and had one job. To get people out of New Vegas and, for most part, to the Blue. This is quite a hard job to have, since no one knows where the Blue is. Most people think it’s just a myth, but for Nat it can be the thing that saves her.

Like said, this story takes place way into the future, in New Vegas. The world has gone through a huge change and is now mostly covered in ice. There’s real food and water – for those who can pay. But most people must learn to eat produced products and come to terms with the fact that they get to eat soy burgers, not real burgers. The world is cold and hard and filled with garbage. The seas are poisonous and the sun never shines. Many children are orphans, war rages the boarders of what’s left of the USA – the RSA, and kids enter the army when they’re twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Wes, with his sixteen years, is practically considered a veteran.

Though the world of Nat and Wes’ is dull (and by that I mean gray and cold) I find it brilliant. Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston have together created a world that ours might as well turn into. The characters live in the leftovers from their ancestors, us, and I think it’s very important to think about just what might happen in the future. Exactly what kind of state are we leaving our planet in, to our children and children’s children? I know, this is not something new, but still equally important. Unfortunately, I found this to be the only good thing with this book.

I knew that the story was written by both de la Cruz and Johnston and even though I didn’t know how they had written it, I didn’t have any references since I haven’t read a novel by either before, part off me still thought I would be able to tell who wrote what. That there would be a change, even if just a little one. Something that tipped me of that she wrote that and he wrote this. There wasn’t and it’s not a problem, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it throughout the book. At first I thought that maybe every other chapter was out of Nat’s perspective and every other from Wes’ and that de la Cruz wrote one and Johnston the other. A few chapters in I realized that that wasn’t the case, either. It was easy in the beginning, seeing from which chapter the story was told, but soon that blurred together and it seemed to be more of third-person kind of telling, mixed with what they both thought and felt.

That was something I found quite confusing and I might not had the writing not been so bad. It didn’t at all live up to my expectations for what good writing is. When I read it I felt like I was reading a story written for a twelve year old, language wise, but the story itself didn’t skip out on the pain and blood, so to speak. I couldn’t decide whether the novel was targeting younger people without caring if certain parts were scary or if I was just way too picky when it came to the writing. Either way I didn’t like it.

The story itself has a lot of promise, which is why it intrigued me in the first place. It’s about a girl with a dangerous secret living in a world where she isn’t safe and she needs to escape. Like I said before, I loved the idea with the frozen world, to see how broken and ruined it was. Unfortunately, the story didn’t live up to the settings and that failed the whole book. The characters lacked depth and it all felt flimsy. They were young, all of them, sixteen or younger, and you could tell by the way they were thinking and acting. Everything happened so fast, and so fleeting, that I never really felt like I got a foothold, a grip to the story.

This is only the first part of a trilogy, so it might just get better. I, for one, will not stick around to find out. Sometimes I read the first part of a trilogy and say I won’t continue only for my curiosity to get the better of me. This time though, I know for sure that I won’t waste any money on the sequel. I didn’t like the characters or the actual story and I certainly didn’t like the writing. There was nothing in the ending that convinced me to get the next book. I’m disappointed, because I had great hopes and Frozen let me down on every single one of them. There is nothing good with finishing the first part of a trilogy and not for a second seeing yourself continuing it.