Review: An interesting theme that needed a little bit of working.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 23, 2012
An interesting theme that needed a little bit of working. The ideas of the book seemed a jumble between Aladdin or the Prince and the Pauper and Casper (the movie). I wasn't sure if I wanted to like the main character or hate him, mostly because I wasn't certain what was going on in his life or his mind. There are times when the book just assumes you know something, sometimes it will even say "everyone knew what that meant" instead of telling the readers what it meant. So readers are left wondering why they're in the dark about something everyone knows. When I started this book I felt like I had come in on the end of a series, not the beginning of one. And there are typos, contrary to the author's insisting that what people are calling typos are actually British-English spellings, there are grammar and spelling issues in the copy I was given that have nothing to do with British-English. I would know the difference, I married someone who is from the UK, after 10 years of life together, I know my way around.The plot WAS unique in some ways. I found the idea of calculating the amount of icefire magic stuff refreshing, instead of the usual people who run around books, brandishing balls of flame or bolts of lightning without a thought to size, shape or catastrophe it may cause if overdone. More could have been done to develop the idea of this icefire stuff in the minds of the reader. The eagle army was interesting, as was the society around them. I would have liked to have read more on many of the smaller aspects of this book, but though I was excited to find I'd won Fire & Ice, I felt a little too left behind as a reader to want to go through the next in the series in order to get closer to the items that interested me.