RITA Reader Challenge Review

Followed by Frost by Charlie N. Holmberg

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Harper Gray. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the YA Romance category.

The summary:

Seventeen-year-old Smitha’s wealth, status, and beauty make her the envy of her town—until she rejects a strange man’s marriage proposal and disastrous consequences follow. Smitha becomes cursed, and frost begins to encompass everything she touches. Banished to the hills, hunted by villagers, and chilled to the very core of her soul, she finds companionship with Death, who longs to coax her into his isolated world. But Smitha’s desire for life proves stronger than despair, and a newfound purpose gives her hope. Will regrets over the past and an unexpected desire for a man she cannot touch be enough to warm Smitha’s heart, or will Death forever still it?

Here is Harper Gray's review:

This has been a rather difficult review to write, but then, Followed by Frost was a rather difficult book to read. Not because it was a bad book. Far from it: Holmberg writes with an engaging, readable narrative, and once the plot really got going I was glued to the book right up to the end. But Followed by Frost’s plot felt like it suffered from a series of false starts, which meant that it took nearly two-thirds of the way into the book before I felt invested in Smitha or her plight.

Smitha is herself not a particularly likeable character. She begins as a fairly typical pretty, large fish in a small pond full of ordinary fish; she is petty and deceitful in the way of teenagers, but nothing really out of the ordinary. Although she toys with the affection of those she fancies, Smitha doesn’t appear to be extraordinarily cruel, which is one reason why Mordred’s Mordan’s extreme reaction to her rejection seems so…odd. None of Mordan’s own circumstances really help here, either: he’s a wizard starting over as a non-wizard, keeping his head down at the one place in town that would give him work, so why would he sacrifice literally everything he had built up for himself in a fit of pique? Sure, Smitha’s not a fantastically considerate person, and her first-person narrative doesn’t present her to the reader as a particularly likeable one either, but I had trouble reconciling the strength of Mordan’s response with the actual degree of hurt inflicted. He seems to be set up as an extreme version of a thwarted ‘nice guy,’ which made me extremely uncomfortable for reasons I’ll come back to in a bit.

For now, we can forget about Mordan. He flounces off and is never seen or heard from again. Smitha, now cursed to be ‘as cold as her heart,’ is driven out of town in short order because of her own personal blizzard, has some chat with Death (whom she can see and hear because of her not-quite-alive-not-quite-deadness), refuses his offer to become his Persephone, and feels sorry for herself. Ah ha, but since a wizard cursed her, a wizard must be able to remove the curse, yes? Well, we get as far as the wizards’ creepy gateway, and Smitha decides it’s not worth the trouble anyway. Welp. Okay, then.

So she wanders. And wanders. All the while Death pesters her: he offers to take her to his realm, and although Smitha refuses him, she never really tells him to eff off and not come back, since he’s her only companionship. At one point she does agree to go with him, but as she feels herself die she changes her mind. Smitha tells us that it’s because in the depths of her despair she discovered an inextinguishable love of life and not a fear of death, but the narrative shows that she’s as motivated by fear as anything else she’s done. But Death flounces off, and Smitha wanders. And regrets. And wanders.

It’s this first third of the book that I found rather worrisome. It’s not difficult to read Smitha’s plight as that of a young woman who survives assault and subsequently suffers from PTSD as a result. Her small village, unable to cope, ostracises her, and due to an inability to find proper help or treatment she becomes increasingly unable to cope with society herself. In this context, I found her condoning of Mordan’s actions and condemnation of her own quite uncomfortable. I realise the feelings of regret for how she treated others in her village and her forgiving Mordan were likely supposed to be the first steps of thawing her cold heart, but it read more like appeasement than contrition. And what, pray, did she need to be contrite for? Smitha isn’t the one who needed a comeuppance, or even a change of heart on this scale, and to give her one feels like the story is endorsing the idea that Smitha effectively brought her attack on herself.

Death also attacks her later on, once Smitha has found her Romantic Partner. If Smitha’s rejection(s) of Death was intended to be empowering or character building she fell somewhat short; Death never adheres to even the most vehement of entreaties to leave Smitha alone, and when he eventually does it’s not a direct result of anything Smitha has said to done to specifically make him leave. Emotional and (on one occasion) physical abuse isn’t given a romantic cast here, but used awkwardly as a ploy for character development in a way that I found increasingly uncomfortable.

Salvation, for Smitha and the society in general, comes in the shape of Prince Imad and his soldiers, whose desert country is suffering a drought and who believes that her snows will save them. Figuring she’s got nothing to lose, Smitha goes with them. This is where the real plot more or less begins, though it took us three years to get here, and even now the story throws a red herring in the form of Imad. It took finishing the book to realise that this was the beginning of the plot, though; it’s unclear what goal the narrative is ultimately working towards until that goal is very nearly realised, which tries the reader’s patience considerably. There’s no real mystery to the resolution; it takes the reader probably 200 fewer pages than Smitha to suss out the curse’s word play. But the resolution of the romance itself (which only appears in the last third of the book or so) is both tense and sweet. I see the reason for the epilogue, but it felt phoned-in: I would have been much more satisfied with a more fleshed-out look at New Smitha rather than playing Where Are They Now. (Apologies that this last bit is so vague; the fits and starts of the plot make it difficult to judge just what is spoiler and what not.)

As I said, it’s not a bad book; it just left me with a collective feeling of ‘meh’. As a romance, it’s a bit odd that revealing the Romantic Partner feels like a spoiler, but they do meet at least a third of the way into the book and the perspective remains with Smitha the entire time. I would have given it a B-, were it not for the distressing elements that I described above. For the squicky feeling that just kept coming back I had to take it down to a C+.

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Followed by Frost by Charlie Holmberg

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  1. cleo says:

    Thanks for your thoughtful review. C reviews seem to be the hardest to write.

  2. VERAY CARTER says:

    I think that you missed the point of this story. It is a fairy tale story and so can’t be looked at in the same way we do real stories. It’s about a very spoiled, bratty young lady that goes through a difficult and awful experience that teaches her to see others and forget about herself, which in turn makes her a better person. It’s a moral to the story kind of thing. I thought it was a wonderful story and made me go looking for more of her books. I give it an A for originality and true fairy tale style writing.

  3. Ashley Nicole Hunter says:

    Fairy tales ARE real stories, and hiding behind a particular STYLE of story does not excuse a theme of justified abuse.

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