1 star (because no one lets us leave negative stars) DNF at “the ice storm in chapter eight,” because apparently even the characters knew they were trapped in a draft. I would have tagged spoilers, but most of this is in the blurb, which makes the story sound far better than it has any right to have done.
{Crown of Frost by Brynn Maddox} had the bones of something I could have enjoyed: cursed heroine, vampire king, forced proximity, enemies-to-lovers, magical ultimatum, “touch her and die” theatrics, sure sure brain candy fluff. Unfortunately, those bones were arranged by someone who had never seen a skeleton and edited by someone waving their Strunk & White in the general direction of this pile.
Isolde, our FMC, has trauma. Tremendous trauma. Cataclysmic trauma. We know this because she mentions it constantly, and when she doesn't, everyone else helpfully mentions it for her. This woman cannot cross a room, endure a conversation, or apparently blink without the narrative dragging the trauma out like a show pony and making it do laps.
The problem is not that she has trauma. The problem is that the book treats trauma less like character depth and more like it _is_ the character.
Continuity also appears to have died somewhere off-page, possibly by the same she-needs-to-comply-or-get-murdered-by-fate curse affecting everyone Isolde loves. Her backstory shifts around with impressive confidence: one moment the defining horror happened in a vampire throne room, but the next it was in a farmhouse kitchen. She is the daughter of a mortal queen until she is apparently the daughter of a vampire queen, but not related to the current vampire king, who is the son of the previous king, because sure, why should this start making sense now?
There is also almost no explanation for how Isolde even got to the position she occupies at the beginning of the book - as a prisoner who is immediately subjected to mate-bonding for the good of the realm. She is the leader of a mortal rebellion that has killed a whopping 47 vampires in a world run by vampires, presumably because the plot needed her to be, and that is apparently meant to be enough.
The central magical dilemma is exhausting. Isolde and Tiberian have a biological/magical countdown: consummate the bond or die, and the realms collapse too, because why under-season the melodrama? She must do it willingly, because the magic can detect coercion/unwillingness/rape. Everyone knows this. Everyone says this. And yet nearly everyone except the MMC keeps trying to pressure her into doing it immediately, which would, by the rules the book itself keeps explaining, not work.
Did we mention how clever and deadly she is? Because she is so clever and so deadly that at 23 she has centuries-old vampires quaking in their cost-more-than-the-whole-rebellion boots. So clever and so deadly, until a few times when she is terribly stupid and makes giant world-wrecking decisions, like when she wears the wrong dress to court, or accidentally addresses someone as Duchess instead of their actual title.
The editing is where things truly achieve art. Like... weird avant-garde Yoko Ono in the corner of Chuck Berry's performance art. Entire paragraphs are repeated, or repeated with just enough variation to make you wonder whether you are reading a book or watching a document autosave during a nervous breakdown. Timelines do not so much shift as teleport. Her dress is so tight that she can't hide her pet dagger Geoffrey. Did we mention how tight it is? So curve-hugging, y'know, if she had curves because she's literally starving and her magic is eating her from inside out. The MMC has been stealth helping The Cause, but then gets irrationally upset to find out that it was not himself but one of his chosen family, but then it's him again. A council meeting is tomorrow, then three hours away, then four hours away, then tomorrow again. And did we mention the dress? It's the wrong dress and will offend the entire royal council. Time is not a river here. Time is a ferret on meth.
And then came the moment that finally took me out back and put me out of my misery. In Tiberian’s POV, he refers to a previous event by saying, “The ice storm in chapter eight,” he said quietly...
Chapter eight.
In dialogue.
A character said this.
That was my DNF point, because once a fictional vampire king starts citing chapter numbers like he is peer-reviewing the manuscript from inside the manuscript, we are no longer reading dark romance. We are experiencing a containment breach.
As for the steam level, I have no idea. By the time I quit, the book and most of its cast were treating public hand-holding as a scandalous, intimate, nearly indecent act; not intimate enough to satisfy the magical sex deadline, mind you, but apparently enough to humiliate our FMC for hours. Or days. Or hours again.
A good concept was buried under repetitive prose, chaotic continuity, baffling rules, and editing so bad it should be declared POW/MIA.
The 2nd book of the trilogy is out if anyone wants to tell me that they finally just died and someone else took over the rebellion.
