Frostblood by Elly Blake | Book Review

Title: Frostblood

Author: Elly Blake

Series: Frostblood Saga #1

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy, Romance

Publisher: Little Brown

Publication date: January 10th, 2017

Pages: 376

My rating: 

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Seventeen-year-old Ruby is a Fireblood who has concealed her powers of heat and flame from the cruel Frostblood ruling class her entire life. But when her mother is killed trying to protect her, and rebel Frostbloods demand her help to overthrow their bloodthirsty king, she agrees to come out of hiding, desperate to have her revenge.

Despite her unpredictable abilities, Ruby trains with the rebels and the infuriating – yet irresistible – Arcus, who seems to think of her as nothing more than a weapon. But before they can take action, Ruby is captured and forced to compete in the king’s tournaments that pit Fireblood prisoners against Frostblood champions. Now she has only one chance to destroy the maniacal ruler who has taken everything from her – and from the icy young man she has come to love.

“I believe we always have choices. Even Sage can’t tell us what’s going to happen. Only what might happen. And sometimes prophecies are just wrong.”

I’ve been wanting to read this book for ages because the premise sounded amazing, and finally I picked it up. To be honest at first it reminded me of Red Queen, minus the annoying protagonist, but as I continued reading I found that both stories were pretty different.

However, this book wasn’t anything unique or innovative in YA, either. It had basically the same tropes you usually find in young adult fantasy, but I have to say I overall enjoyed the story. Sometimes it was really slow and not a lot of interesting things were happening, but overall I enjoyed the whole plot and the characters.

“But this is not about feelings. This is about traininh your mind. If you can’t master your mind, you will never master your gift.”

I really liked the world building and the gods the author created. I still can’t fully remember the names of all the gods or stories  that were in it, but that’s a personal problem of mine, so I can’t fully blame it on this book. The magic system was nothing special, either, but I liked how it worked in the novel.

I had mixed feelings about the characters. I admit I really liked our main character’s development, because you could see her training throughout the book, and her grownth didn’t appear so suddenly like in other books I’ve read, but I wasn’t the biggest fan of her. I liked that we got to see the process of Ruby trying to master her power, but sometimes the story was purely focused on that and nothing else, and I was a bit bored.

I also wasn’t a very big fan of the romance. It was a bit forced sometimes, and tough I tend to be a sucker for hate-to-love relationships, in this particular book I think it was done quite suddenly. In one scene they hated each other’s guts, and in the next one they were kissing. It came out of nowhere, and I’m still not fully sure if I liked them together or not.

 

“There is always light in the darkness. It may only be a pinpoint, but it is there. Follow it and you will find your way free.”

However, I have to say the last 100 pages were the bomb dot com. All the issues I had with the book suddenly went away. It was really action packed and full of new revelations, some I didn’t expect coming and others not so shocking. Still, those were my favourite parts of the book, because not only you evertything went faster but you got to see more about that society and world.

I think tough it started a bit weak it created a nice layer for the sequel, and I’m still interested to see what’s going to happen next. Overall, even though I had some issues with the characters, and sometimes it was a bit too slow for my liking, it was a solid read and I’m very excited to read Fireblood.

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