Rating: DNF
Buy Links: 
 Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novel


Cyrus Winters, an omega wolf and an ice mage is dangerous to others. After running away from his birth pack at an early age, Cyrus traveled from place to place in hopes of finding a pack that would accept him. But once they realized that he was no ordinary omega wolf, they quickly turned their backs on him. Alone and shunned as a monster, Cyrus has kept himself hidden at the top of the Wichita Mountains where nobody would reach him. That is, until he hears the song of his fated mate.

Dorian Lovell once had the family he’d always dreamed of, but after the death of his son, his whole world fell apart. When he begins having dreams about a white wolf at the top of a mountain, howling for him, Dorian realizes that he may have found his fated mate. Joining his friend Tobias’ pack in the Wichita Mountains, Dorian sets out to find the wolf from his dream; but once he meets Cyrus, he quickly realizes that mating with the frosty omega won’t be as easy as he thought it’d be.

An omega with a heart of ice, and an alpha who’s destined to thaw him out. With a threat to Cyrus’ life approaching, the two must learn to come together as one. Can Dorian’s pack accept the gifted omega, and can Cyrus trust his life and future to his new pack, and the alpha the fates paired him with?

I was drawn to Frostbite from both the blurb and the lovely cover, but unfortunately this one ended up being a DNF for me due to editorial issues. Almost from the start, I was noticing editing errors and typos. Most of the time when I see these types of problems, they are minor enough that I am able to ignore them and focus on the story. However, in this case, there were just so many issues that they quickly became all I could see. By 10% into the book, I was more than distracted by the errors, and by the time I reached 25%, I realized there was no way I could do a review of this story justice as I was unable to focus on anything other than the numerous editorial problems.

So let’s talk specifics. Here are some examples of issues I found and these are by no means isolated occurrences, simply illustrative of problems I encountered multiple times in the portion of the book I read:

The author frequently makes clauses into standalone sentences. This is one of the things that distracted me the most because it happens often and they are incomplete sentences left to stand alone. (I’ll also note that the comma here is misplaced after “dreams.”)

The gorgeous white wolf that I had seen for months in my dreams, stood at the peak. His shiny blue eyes looking down right at me.

Here is another example:

Groaning, I turned and faced Dorian, who was seated on my couch. His beautiful multicolored eyes watching me.

As another issue, this sentence mixes together the singular and plural, as well as uses the semicolon incorrectly (emphasis mine):

The first several hours of my journey was easy enough, stopping every now and then for a water and food break, then I got back up and kept moving; not wanting to waste more time than necessary.

I totally get that semicolons are something that the vast majority of the population doesn’t understand, but any professional editor should be more than comfortable using them correctly (and any published book should have a professional editor). Semicolons were incorrectly used to separate clauses like this over and over in the part of the story I read.

I also noted mistyped words (in this case I have to assume the author meant “table”):

The living room also counted as the bedroom with a small kitchen to the left and a rounded dining cable to the far right.

There were also many places where verb tenses were off or where there wasn’t proper subject/verb agreement. The mixing tenses became a particular problem as at one point they are talking about someone’s brother and suddenly switch to past tense when referring to him and I thought the guy was dead, when it turns out it was just a change of verb tense for no clear reason.

I also got distracted by the fact that sometimes Cyrus refers to his inner wolf as “him,” as if it is a separate being, and sometimes as “we” or “our” to indicate they are one being. This may not seem like a big deal, but the inconsistency confused me because I thought at first he was talking about some third person. As far as I could tell from what I read, this was never explained as something world-building related, so I am assuming this was just an inconsistency.

Ok, so at this point some of you are nodding along with me and the rest of you (probably most of you) are thinking I am insane. And I get that with my journalism degree and my day job as a tech writer/editor that I notice this stuff way more than the average person. So if you read the above examples and they don’t bother you at all, that is awesome. Definitely look into this story if the blurb sounds appealing because chances are none of the things that disturbed me are going to affect your enjoyment at all. But the bottom line here is that even if I am noticing things that most people don’t, these editorial issues are still incorrect and should have been resolved in editing.

While I think the world building here was interesting and the set up works well, I just couldn’t get past the editorial issues long enough to actually sink into the story the way I wanted. I didn’t think it would be fair to review it when I knew I couldn’t concentrate on the story and I was just too distracted to enjoy it. As I said, if none of this stuff bothers you, go forth and enjoy!