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lu_wilson's review against another edition
2.0
Such a great idea, started off good, ended rediculously badly with the worst 'happily ever after' I have ever read!!
linaelini's review against another edition
5.0
Just great..not your typical vampire book but it kept me on the edge of my seat and just couldn't put this book down. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes vampires but is getting tired of the usual ones... this one caught me by surprise! :)
caitsidhe's review against another edition
2.0
More reviews onmy blog
I picked this up on one of my semi-regular charity shop runs, intrigued by the cover and by the book description. I’ve developed a bit of a liking for supernatural stories set in polar regions – witness my love of Dark Matter.
But would this one do anything for me?
I was suspicious, sadly, right from the prologue, which was completely overwritten and melodramatic. Still, I held out hope, and after that it seemed like things were improving. Until I was half way through, bored and wondering why – and then I realised! Nothing was happening.
Seriously. I was two thirds of the way through before any of the plot lines started to intersect or pay off. And when they did pay off, it was deeply disappointing – the climax was too easy, everything happened. Despite the deaths and the trauma, there was no real sense of danger, or creepyness. The tragic love story wasn’t tragic, or a love story.
It’s a shame, a real shame, because there was so much here that could have been great. But Masello tries to do too much with too little, and as a result the story drags and the characters feel like cardboard cutouts. I felt nothing, and I’m a woman who cries at books, who gets deeply entrenched in the world of a story, who treats characters like real people. But in the world of Blood and Ice, nobody is a real person. Events don’t happen naturally because of their character traits, things happen because they are made to happen, no matter how out of character it is. Foreshadowing is obvious, the sense of danger is not there, there is no real oomph.
It’s a big, thick chunk of a book, and could easily have had at least a quarter edited out without doing any harm to the story. In fact, I think it would have done it good. It might have been better with more focus on the victorian lovers and their history, properly building up how unnatural they were. It certainly would have been better if the fear had been slower building, the awful events had seemed to actually matter, and if all the ‘horror’ hadn’t happened in the last third of the book.
This gets a lower mark than it probably deserves, just because I’m so disappointed. 2 stars.
I picked this up on one of my semi-regular charity shop runs, intrigued by the cover and by the book description. I’ve developed a bit of a liking for supernatural stories set in polar regions – witness my love of Dark Matter.
But would this one do anything for me?
I was suspicious, sadly, right from the prologue, which was completely overwritten and melodramatic. Still, I held out hope, and after that it seemed like things were improving. Until I was half way through, bored and wondering why – and then I realised! Nothing was happening.
Seriously. I was two thirds of the way through before any of the plot lines started to intersect or pay off. And when they did pay off, it was deeply disappointing – the climax was too easy, everything happened. Despite the deaths and the trauma, there was no real sense of danger, or creepyness. The tragic love story wasn’t tragic, or a love story.
It’s a shame, a real shame, because there was so much here that could have been great. But Masello tries to do too much with too little, and as a result the story drags and the characters feel like cardboard cutouts. I felt nothing, and I’m a woman who cries at books, who gets deeply entrenched in the world of a story, who treats characters like real people. But in the world of Blood and Ice, nobody is a real person. Events don’t happen naturally because of their character traits, things happen because they are made to happen, no matter how out of character it is. Foreshadowing is obvious, the sense of danger is not there, there is no real oomph.
It’s a big, thick chunk of a book, and could easily have had at least a quarter edited out without doing any harm to the story. In fact, I think it would have done it good. It might have been better with more focus on the victorian lovers and their history, properly building up how unnatural they were. It certainly would have been better if the fear had been slower building, the awful events had seemed to actually matter, and if all the ‘horror’ hadn’t happened in the last third of the book.
This gets a lower mark than it probably deserves, just because I’m so disappointed. 2 stars.
canadianbookworm's review against another edition
3.0
This thriller, set mostly in Antartica, turned out the have a touch of the paranormal to its plot. The main character is a journalist, Michael Wilde, who has retreated from his life after a terrible accident that put his girlfriend into a coma. When he is unexpectedly offered a last-minute assignment to go to a research station at the South Pole, he jumps at it.
He meets some other interesting people at the pole, each there for their own reason, and makes particular friends with the two who arrive the same time as him, a marine biologist and a doctor.
When offered the chance to do a dive into the frigid Antarctic Ocean, he again jumps at it, and makes an unexpected discovery of what seems to be a woman frozen into the ice. It turns out to be a couple.
We jump back in time to the world the young couple belong in, that of the 1850s, and gradually discover the events that led to them being trapped in the ice where Michael found them.
As we discover their past, we also learn how the discovery of them affects the residents of the research station for both the good and the bad.
I liked most of the characters, yet found the plot, while fast-moving, a bit forced at times. I also felt that the ending left a lot of things unresolved. The story was interesting and the plot inventive.
He meets some other interesting people at the pole, each there for their own reason, and makes particular friends with the two who arrive the same time as him, a marine biologist and a doctor.
When offered the chance to do a dive into the frigid Antarctic Ocean, he again jumps at it, and makes an unexpected discovery of what seems to be a woman frozen into the ice. It turns out to be a couple.
We jump back in time to the world the young couple belong in, that of the 1850s, and gradually discover the events that led to them being trapped in the ice where Michael found them.
As we discover their past, we also learn how the discovery of them affects the residents of the research station for both the good and the bad.
I liked most of the characters, yet found the plot, while fast-moving, a bit forced at times. I also felt that the ending left a lot of things unresolved. The story was interesting and the plot inventive.
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