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| TITLE: Dark Frost (Mythos Academy #3) AUTHOR: Jennifer Estep PUBLISHER: Kensington PUB DATE: May 29 2012 |
Summary from Goodreads:
"I've seen so many freaky things since I started attending Mythos Academy last fall. I know I'm supposed to be a fearless warrior, but most of the time, I feel like I'm just waiting for the next Bad, Bad Thing to happen. Like someone trying to kill me again. Everyone at Mythos Academy knows me as Gwen Frost, the Gypsy girl who uses her psychometry magic to find lost objects and who just may be dating Logan Quinn, the hottest guy in school. But I'm also the girl the Reapers of Chaos want dead in the worst way. The Reapers are the baddest of the bad, the people who murdered my mom. So why do they have it in for me? It turns out my mom hid a powerful artifact called the Helheim Dagger before she died. Now, the Reapers will do anything to get it back. They think I know where the dagger is hidden, but this is one thing I can't use my magic to find. All I do know is that the Reapers are coming for me and I'm in for the fight of my life."
Rating:
Christmas break is over and it’s back to Mythos Academy for Gwen Frost. On the day before school starts, Gwen, together with Daphne and Carson, head over the Crius Coliseum, showcasing special artefacts of the gods and goddesses, to finish up some homework given to them over the holiday break. Much like everyone else in Mythos, these kids waited up until the last minute to do their work which meant the coliseum was the place to be. Unexpectedly, the Reapers came crashing in, flinging swords, stabbing and killing the innocent. They are searching for the Helheim Dagger, the last piece of artefact that can release Loki from his prison.
With all the violence that had occurred, Gwen is more eager than ever to finally find the Helheim Dagger which her mother has successfully hidden for years, and hide it somewhere new, away from the clutches of the Reapers...
I am torn between giving this a 3 star and a 4 star rating (I don’t give half stars, in case you want to suggest that. :P). There are so many elements I’m trying to weigh over before I made my final decision. So let’s sort through it, shall we?
I can’t really say there is anything remarkable about Gwen in this book. She is better at fighting now than from the previous books, and her psychometry although got scarier, was cooler than ever, but personality-wise she’s pretty much the same. At least Logan’s getting better though. Before, even though he was hot, he was all too uptight, but now he’s showing more of his sensitive side, even flashing his feelings to Gwen about his past.
Now I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of getting annoyed over the flashbacks of the previous books. It’s just sooo redundant. I’ve read of a certain part at the beginning of Dark Frost that I’ve already read from the first book, repeated in the 2nd one and then again here as well – word per word! I’m not even going to be surprised if I see it again in the succeeding books from this series. I mean, it’s okay to have summaries of whatever happened previously but does it really have to go lengthy that much?
But enough of that. Let us get to what I really want to dig into – the plot. This is where I might rest my case for that darn rating. From all the Mythos Academy books that have been published lately, Dark Frost is the darkest and most emotional book among them. That’s good for me. It isn’t extremely dark but dark enough for readers to distinguish this to have a heavier substance than the first two books. A lot more is at stake and the air around Gwen is a lot more intense.
What bothered me was how predictable the storyline and Gwen’s actions were. Okay, so maybe not as predictable as Kiss of Frost, still predictable is predictable. Gwen goes off to solve the mystery, finds clues, works at the library, goes finding more clues, fights reapers, something tragic happens, silver lining, and the end, to be continued. If you have read the other two, my guess is, like me, you feel that we’ve seen this all before. The only thing new from it was at least you got more than one suspect over who Loki’s champion is.
I’m slowly getting tired of all the clichés. It’s not as fun anymore. One thing I keep rolling my eyes at was the fact that Metis keeps telling Gwen she’d be safer in the academy, when in fact every darn bad thing that happened to Gwen was when she was actually in the academy [sans the Coliseum event]. So how is she safe there? Explain.
Still, I wanted to give this a higher rating because I had shed more tears while reading this than Touch of Frost and Kiss of Frost combined. This was the more emotional side of the Mythos Academy series and I value that. I am also finally happy that Gwen and Logan are hitting it off – officially! About time they got there.
The ending was, well, kind of expected. From the beginning of the book I could already tell that there would come a time that the Loki incident would happen.
So yeah, I’m not exactly happy about everything, but I’ll see this series through the end.
