Ugh. Great, wonderful idea but BAD execution. This story suffered from some serious plot pacing and character problems which made this book a chore to read. When a book is still, on page 300, setting up atmosphere and introductory relationships... Really? I mean, come on. The book could have used some serious editing. I like lush prose as much as the next person (read: quite a bit), but not every single character action and thought needs to be described in meticulous detail. I don't need to know every detail, all the time, of what the character is wearing, their inner thought process, what the wall looks like, the sound of their shoes on the metal hallway...especially when the author keeps repeating the same basic details over and over again.

The characters were completely lackluster, as well. The only thing we get to know about the main character is that he has long, black hair and his girlfriend is in a coma. He has no personality, no family or friends or interests or anything that would make the reader care about him. The couple in the ice are equally poorly drawn; they were stock characters devoid of any real, consistent characterizations.

The writing structure, the actual sentences, were well-constructed, but everything else was utter crap. Pass on this. Total dud. 2 stars = D grade. ( )

Photojournalist Michael Wilde has been dealing with the aftermath of a climbing accident that put his fiancee in a coma. When he's offered a chance to go on a month long assignment to the South Pole, he hopes that the work and isolation will help him get back on track. A few days after arriving, he goes on a polar dive and discovers the bodies of a man and a woman frozen in a block of ice. Through dual narratives of 1854 and modern day, we meet the two lovers, Sinclair and Eleanor and discover how they ended up frozen in chains. As the ice around the murdered lovers begins to melt, we learn more about their terrible secret. I enjoyed this book and it's obvious that the author really researched both Antarctica and the Crimean War. It felt like it was two separate books, one set in the 1850s and the other set in modern day Antarctica. I thought the main character could have used a bit more detail but the secondary characters were interesting and really came to life. The first part of the books was slow, filling in details that we need to know about later. Overall, an enjoyable read and I would like to try another by this author sometime in the future. " ( )

Masello, Robert
Blood and Ice

Horror
It's 1865. A couple is chained together and forced off a ship into an icy ocean. Forward to the present. Following a tragedy, a young travel journalist is offered a trip to Antarctica. Shifting between the past and present bring these two seemingly separate and unrelated events closer and closer together until they meet, with spectacularly haunting results. Masello's writing brings the reader so close to what is transpiring that the fictive events almost become an actual experience in your memory. You watch the scenery change on your way to the Antarctic. You suffer on the side of a mountain following a climbing accident. You ride in a sled pulled by barking, jostling dogs. You hear, see, and smell what is conjured on the page. Look for Masello's next book, The Medusa Amulet, coming out in April, 2011.
Recommended March 2011

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. ( )

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. ( )