Ice Kissed by Amanda Hocking

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Category: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Content: A sex scene


In the majestic halls of a crystal palace lies a secret that could destroy an entire kingdom…

Bryn Aven refuses to give up on her dream of serving the kingdom she loves. It's a dream that brings her to a whole new realm…the glittering palace of the Skojare.

Ice Kissed starts off pretty much where Frostfire ended. Brynn and Ridley are reporting to the King and later Brynn has a vision sent to her from Queen Linnea telling her to find her. So off they go to find Queen Linnea, and that eventually leads Brynn right back to the Skojare palace. A huge complaint I have here is that it doesn't make any sense that they would bring her back to the place where she felt her life was threatened. It seemed like her disappearance happened for no good reason, even after we get the explanation as to why it still didn't make much sense. It just felt like a wild goose chase, and I mainly found the whole part of the novel spent in Storvatten pretty dull. Plus Queen Linnea is incredibly immature and kind of annoying.

Honestly nothing really happened in this book to advance the overall plot of the series. We get answers as to where Linnea is and why she disappeared and who was behind it, although as I said already it doesn't make much sense; the romantic aspect of the plot advances somewhat, however the love scene was something close to what you would find in a NA book and didn't belong in a YA book; Brynn grows a bit as a person and isn't a selfish jerk, but everything pertaining to the main plot line was pretty much already told to us in book one. It was obvious by things Konstantin Black had said to Brynn in book one, how things would end up in this book. And there were some pretty obvious clues as to who is behind everything, at least some of the who. And speaking of Konstantin Black, he was the most interesting character in book one and I was hoping to get more about him in this book. Unfortunately we get even less of him here. Mostly we just follow Brynn from place to place as she tries to get answers and she never really does until the end and it's nothing I didn't see coming, so it just felt like a waste of time.

I do find it impressive that the author was so successful as a self-published author which is what I guess led to a publisher picking up this series and another one that she wrote. I've never read any of her other works but I will say, compared to most YA fantasy I've read, this series is kind of shallow. I probably will not read the rest of the books in this series, because I think there is much better out there and I would rather spend my time on those.

I received I free copy of this from the publisher through a Goodreads giveaway.



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