Iced: A Dani O'Malley Novel (Fever Series) by Karen Marie Moning Edition: Hardcover Price: $15.00
If I Hear That Word One More Time!, November 11, 2012   This review is from: Iced: A Dani O'Malley Novel (Fever Series) (Hardcover) Iced by Karen Marie Moning By no means should one expect while reading this, that you are simply picking up the "Fever" series and continuing on with all that you've know. You WILL see many characters you discovered in the past books, but the ones you've come to know and love will be taking a back-seat - for now at least. We will be digging deeply into characters we have mostly only read about for short periods in the last series. It has been one year since the `wall' in Dublin has crashed and we are about to see events from 14 year old Dani O'Malley's perspective. We must remember that Dani has never been 100% human and with this book, she may be even a little less. It is imperative that you read the other books in this series to get up to speed with this one. You will feel sorely lost without knowing what has been going on in our world until now. My issues with this book are many. This is the first time I have ever read a book and so disliked the protagonist. Dani is a 14-year-old girl...not an adult no matter what kind of past life she has had and no matter what kind of life she is making for herself now. She is a child and really does act that way. Many have said that this is not a young adult novel and I could almost agree since Dani does not even seem to have the maturity of a young adult sometimes. Many times while reading this book I feel like I am reading a very wordy manga and not a true book. Dani has a voice that is so childish that after a while I thought I would scream if I saw the authors' use of the "F word spelled incorrectly" or "dude" just one more time. I realize that this is an affectation to show how young she is supposed to be, but the usage simply just makes the book less palatable. The fact that Dani seems to have the attention of at least one adult male (yes he is `other' but still) makes this a little hard to take. Perhaps if the book had been written at a time a few years in the future with Dani being older than 14, this one fact wouldn't rankle so many people. Dani can be dislikable on so many levels, but that does give hope that she will grow in coming books. There was no character growth with this book. This book was written with Ms Monings usual sense of style, beautiful word paintings and excellent timing during the action scenes. New mysteries will be ours to solve and new bad guys will be coming out of the thin air. However, I just cannot get past the childishness of the protagonist or the overly adult situations throughout the rest of this book. I am also hoping that Ms Moning will find a way to redeem Christian. I have read Ms Monings books, ALL of them and a MacKeltar except for one never went this bad, and the one that did go `bad' redeemed himself. This book ended on a cliffhanger so be prepared.