Customer Reviews

Frozen Fire

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I just could not finish this book. That's really rare - even with the bad books, I try to sludge through and finish them. This one I finally just gave up on half way through, having decided the world would have to end or not without me.

The dual writer format just did not mesh well in this book - they seemed to stop and start. The author's voice did not flow smoothly and I clearly felt I was hearing/reading two seperate thought patterns, it was distracting. Then there was the irregular flow to the story itself and the fact that bouncing from various perspectives was done badly. That worked brilliantly for Stephen King in "The Stand", but in this book every switch felt like I had missed an entire transitional paragraph making the change from one character or place to the next. Finally.... we did not need to know EVERY SINGLE TINY DETAIL about EVERY SINGLE character in the book even the minor players. Their eyebrow color, the thickness of nostril hairs, the color of the paint in a room from childhood, a pilot's personal feelings about the uniforms of the flight attendant, on and on and on and ON AND ON AND ON with trivial minutia.

The trivial irrelevant details with no real forward movement of the end of the world plot is what finally prompted me to toss the book aside.

To be honest, I barely got past chapter five. I picked up this book and put it right down. I didn't come back to it for several weeks and but than I tried to read it again but had no interest to do so. While I am sure this book may be good, it moved too slowly for me and there was too much description going on. I just wanted to get on to the exciting part. Maybe some day when I have time, I might pick this book up again.

While the premise behind the book is fascinating and could have made for a great read, when the whole thing pans out, all I can say is, "Huh?"

First of all, the book seemed a bit hard to follow at first, jumping around, and it made it hard to keep track of the characters. Second, I found the characters to be inconsistent. Especially Dennis. Is he power hungry? Greedy? Humanitarian? Insane? All of the above? He is seemingly all of these, one at a time, depending on where in the book you are. The other characters are also highly unbalanced, though Dennis takes the cake. Also, what happens in the book is often so far-fetched as to be distracting.

I made it through the whole book but I had to read it a little at a time. While it kept me mildly entertained, I would not have chosen to read this book if I knew then what I know now.

I honestly found this novel difficult to finish.

The scenes are written with an omniscient point of view so you know each characters thoughts, plans and deepest-darkest secrets. I was left with no questions or feeling of suspense, and therefore no desire to read more. The novel is also plagued with continuous starts and stops. For example one chapter ends with a plane exploding in mid air. The next chapter starts not with Dennis' (the lead character) reaction to the explosion but instead gives a history of his underwater diving experiences and how those experiences shaped his life. WHAT?? By the time the author got back to the explosion and Dennis' reaction to it, I honestly didn't care anymore.

I just couldn't finish this book. I really love books and movies involving huge disasters, end of the world stuff and other big event stuff. This books seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. But there were too many implausible things and the writing just didn't excite me. The reviews seem to be either glowing or scathing, so it might be best to read a sample chapter to decide if this book it right for you.

There are good things to say about this book. It's a page turner. It's short, has brisk pacing. The disasters are monumental and people die in interesting and horrible ways. The story is interesting. That's about it.

For the bad...

I didn't care about ANY of the characters. (not counting the generic victims who were introduced and died on the same page) The most sympathetic were obnoxious at best.

Implausible plot holes led to problems maintaining my suspension of disbelief. You know there's a problem with a thriller when, instead of wanting to flip the page to find out what happens next, you're arguing with the story saying, "that's not possible."

The writing style is almost as bad as mine in this review! Look at the first sentence. "The equally high-risk parallels of probable success and possible failure sent twin feeds of adrenaline streaming into Micki Crenshaw's veins as she watched her shadow gradually stretch less and less far across the gently pitching deck of the research ship and submersible tender Wangari Maathai." After the first chapter or two the style calms down a bit - it's a battle to get that far but after that the writers get into a groove and it's not a pain to read.

The bad things far outweigh the good things in this book.

I decided to read this book because I wanted to see how the immense technical problems of harvesting methane clathrates were overcome. It's disappointing to see that the authors chose to solve the problem with a magic chemical. The magic chemical also made the inevitable disaster much worse as it converted the somewhat dangerous methane into a super-toxic poison gas. The clathrate deposit was described as being in the 3 gigaton range. The magic chemical was injected into the deposit for just one day. Somehow, they could pump enough to allow the entire deposit to not only gasify but the chemical was able to alter enough methane to make all of the escaping methane heavier than air (before converting some of it into the super-toxic poison gas. Oh yeah, the poison gas is also more flammable than methane. Why not go all the way and have the gas turn people into fast zombies?)

I could go on and poke at more of the things that made me say, "Oh, come ON!" but that would be piling on.

Summary. It's a page turner, there's enough action. You could do worse if your bookless at an airport and you need something for your flight. But you could do a lot better.

After nearly 150 reviews, this is only the second time I've handed out a single star. After considering the many problems and inadequacies of Frozen Fire, the second novel by collaborators Bill Evans and Marianna Jameson, I contemplated the novel's strengths. There's simply no getting around this fact--there are none.

And this comes from a reader highly predisposed to like this novel. I have a thing for "trashy underwater fiction." Can't get enough of it. And Frozen Fire definitely falls into that territory. It's the story of a megalomaniacal island despot who wants to use his immense wealth to mine methane hydrate from the depths of the sea. And it's the story of the sociopathic eco-terrorist who wants to stop the operation and bring as much destruction as possible to the earth in the process.

Wait a minute... An eco-terrorist who wants to destroy an operation which may bring cheap, clean energy to the planet, and instead decides to wreak havoc upon the environment, speeding up global warming exponentially? You may be thinking, That plot makes no sense. Bingo! The plot and the actions of the central characters make no sense at all.

The only thing worse than the plot was the characters. It was like they were all competing to be as unlikable and unbelievable as humanly possible. There wasn't a single character to empathize with or root for. The best thing I can say is that there were a couple that weren't completely detestable. There was absolutely nothing to invest in with this story. For a thriller it plodded. The science was bad. And the use of language was deplorable.

I'm very sorry. I don't make a habit of doing this. If anything, I'm overly positive about books, but this novel has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

I thought much of this book was awful. But to be fair, for the first half of the book when the situations were being setup I would say that it was worth about 3 stars. Then it quickly completely dissolved into a maelstrom of worthlessness. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this book even as 2 star material because of how terrible it became.
The last half of the book was so inane, and predictable, and filled with such terrible dialogue and plot twists that it might have made a fantastic B-Movie -one that you'd laugh at with friends because it was so bad. Here is a sample... "If that storm... moves towards (the island), you could see a hurricane form that would make Katrina and Rita and Simone look as scary as a Beastie Boy reunion tour." (What???)

It was so poorly structured and written that I felt betrayed at the use of my time in reading it. Every character eventually acts completely out of character, and every proclamation of 'oh my god! the world is ending!' was quickly followed with 'there is no way to stop it!... unless... unless... my god, this can't possibly work... releasing microbes to combat the methane is so inane, so ludicrous, so crazy, that even if it works I still have to sit here and fight against the idea because it makes for a higher word count and doesn't advance the plot at all...'

It is a testament to the inanity of the writing that I struggle with how to explain the weakness of the characters and just how bad it was. But let me give it another shot...... one of the evil characters, an eco-terrorist, seduces women rather easily and in the course of a couple of months of sex and whispered sweet nothings is able to convert TWO supposedly super-strong patriotic women into suicidal traitors... -one of them is a triple decorated war hero... and the other happens to be the only other person in the entire underwater base who has all the security codes needed to cause all the problems... and another character at the end of the book is conveniently a CIA spy, who then turns around and gives an entire island nation to the US government, even though if he were revealed as the spy halfway through the book he could have eliminated the entire plot of the book by going to the government earlier... but wait... there is another spy who ends up killing the eco-terrorist at the end of the book, even though he is only introduced to the reader a page earlier. So much for character development... it just gets worse, so I am going to spare us both the agony of going on.

I love apocalyptic disaster novels, but this one ended up being such garbage that I am going to try to put it out of my mind forever. Ugh...

Overall, "Frozen Fire" was a less-than-average way to pass the weekend. There are some interesting ideas presented, but they alway seem to be mixed with a little bit of cheese in the form of oddly written lines and out-of-context sexual situations (especially one of the final situations where the sex was flat-out ridiculously placed).

I liked that the book delved in to a potential disaster that I had not seen or heard of previously in science fiction movies or books, but did not care for the way solutions came about magically and quickly at the onset of every deadly situation. One thing that was particularly distracting were the character names, they were a little clumsy and hard to read over and over again.

There are some tense moments in the book that are well-written, but they are quickly undone by the above issues. It's short enough to be worth a read, just don't expect to be blown away by it. There is some interesting science behind the book, but it's never really laid-out for the reader - if it was made in to a movie it would be on-par with "The Core" and just below "The Day After Tomorrow".

Okay, first we have an eccentric genius of unbound wealth who wants to make the world a better place, so he tampers with an energy source so dangerous that it might DESTROY THE ENTIRE PLANET.

So this egomaniac buys and island in the middle of the Bermuda triangle and sets up an entire country, complete with an ambassador to the United States. Of course, he has a very small army of ex-Navy seals, but they seem to be enough to deter larger countries from coming in to see what they are up too--even though there are suspicions they are up to no good. On this island he manages to create a secret world 4000 feet below the water where he is going to drill for a gas that is so volatile and dangerous it could DESTROY THE ENTIRE PLANET. But he is not concerned that it will happen. He has "safety" shields all over the place.

His enemy, also an eccentric genius, hides behind the façade of a huge world-wide conglomerate to "save the world's resources" from idiots like the above mentioned trillionaire. Now this guy is so charismatic he manages to "overwhelm" several women who work for the other guy, and convince them to help him destroy the island, performing suicidal missions all because of mind-blowing sex with this guy. Never mind that his plan will also DESTROY THE ENTIRE PLANET.

The entire political powers of the world appear to sit on their collective backsides watching this play out while doing nothing to stop them from DESTROYING THE ENTIRE PLANET.

The characters are wooden and unrealistic for the most part. If you like comic strip action and graphic descriptions of rotting bodies you will love this book.