Reviewed by Tina(MsMiz)
Title: Icebound
Author: Corinna Rogers
Series: Mortals & Myths Volume 1
Heroes: Shane Conell/Drake Young
Genre: M/M Urban Fantasy
Length: 156 Pages
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers
Release Date: September 25, 2014
Available at: Harper Collins, Amazon and Barnes & Noble
Add it to your shelf: Goodreads
Blurb: It’s been ten years since Shane Conell sold his soul to the Ice King in order to save the life of the man he loves. Correction, loved.
After ten years, it’s growing difficult to remember love, and hate, and laughter – until a chance appears to get back the only thing his frozen heart still wants…
Drake Young is doing fine. Really. He’s got a good job, nice benefits, and the soulless husk of his old lover only comes by to torment him every so often. However, it only takes the appearance of a creature from the Etherworld wreaking havoc on the decidedly nonmagical city streets to drag him out of retirement, forcing him to team up with the one person he can’t bear even to look at!
Now, Drake and Shane must race against the clock to keep their city from being destroyed, even if it means working together. And no matter how difficult it is to catch the creature, it’s a hell of a lot more difficult to resist the urges that ten years haven’t managed to kill.
Review:
Drake and Shane work as a team to fight monsters that should not be in the human world. Their last one goes horribly wrong, and Shane is left with a crushing decision – let Drake die or give his soul to the Ice King in exchange to save him. The book begins ten years after this event with an opening chapter that is confusing at first, because the readers are not familiar with the characters (we are inside Drake’s head, yet what is going on in his room is with another person). In addition, the book is written in third person, present tense, which tends to keep you away from really feeling the characters and getting invested in the story.
Since Shane has essentially made the biggest sacrifice any one can make for another person, Corinna works extremely hard to show us that Shane is completely lost to the Ice King. Who he was will never be again, and there are brutal examples of this throughout most of the book. Now, while I appreciate harder core books, the deeper they go, the more hard hitting they are, the more yummy a book is to me. However, Cornina tried to make this as scandalous as she could, but what she didn’t do was make me feel at all for the characters, and after awhile, we get it, and the storyline was not advanced by the constant reminder that Shane has become a soulless ass. However, there were times throughout the book where I felt the author was giving me contradictory thoughts that left me thinking, wait, what????
Typically, I am not a fan of flashbacks. They tend to be disruptive to my reading experience and rarely they help me enjoy the story. Corinna has flashback chapters called Interludes that tell Drake and Shane’s early story and show us who they were together. They give us a look into what Shane was before he sold his soul. If it was not for these, I would have thrown the book down at 20%.
The story is short, and the action is fast-paced, which I think detracts from the overall experience. I can only assume it ends in a very contradictory sex scene because the author will continue their story. Overall, this story left quite a few unanswered questions, the author did not endear me to her writing, and I really hope if this is a readers first introduction into the M/M genre, they will give another better story a look before turning away.
Overall Impression: It was okay, but not good.
*I received a copy of this book from the publisher in return for a fair and honest review.*
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