Frigid - Review

Frigid (Frigid, # 1)

By: J Lynn

Published: July 15th 2013 by Spencer Hill Contemporary

240 pages

Genre: New Adult, Contemporary

Source: Personal Kindle Library

( Goodreads | Amazon | The Book Depository | Booksamillion.com )

*Note: The above links to Amazon, The Book Depository, and Booksamillion.com are affiliate links. Affiliate links support giveaways for Somewhere Only We Know readers.

Goodreads description--For twenty-one-year-old Sydney, being in love with Kyler isn't anything new. They'd been best friends ever since he pushed her down on the playground and she made him eat a mud pie. Somewhere over the years, she fell for him and fell hard. The big problem with that? Kyler puts the 'man' in man-whore. He's never stayed with a girl longer than a few nights, and with it being their last year in college, Syd doesn't want to risk their friendship by declaring her love.

Kyler has always put Syd on a pedestal that was too high for him to reach. To him, she's perfect and she's everything. But the feelings he has for her, he's always hidden away or focused on any other female. After all, Kyler will always be the poor boy from the wrong side of tracks, and Syd will always be the one girl he can never have.

But when they're stranded together at a posh ski resort due to a massive Nor'easter, there's nothing stopping their red-hot feelings for each other from coming to the surface. Can their friendship survive the attraction? Better yet, can they survive at all? Because as the snow falls, someone is stalking them, and this ski trip may be a life-changer in more ways than one.

I've never really understood how bloggers pick and choose books that they write reviews for versus writing reviews for everything they read. Or maybe even the mini-reviews, I've never really understood that either. I've always very much been a write-a-review-for-every-book-I-read kind of blogger. Well until Frigid. I mean I'm still doing that--writing a full length review--but this is the first time I've understood why some people don't. To be honest, I don't feel much like writing a full length review for Frigid despite how much I like Jennifer L Armentrout (she's writing under the pseudonym of J. Lynn for this book).

I read Frigid in one day. After imposing a self-inflicted reading ban from a Thursday evening until Sunday, I devoured Frigid in one sitting. The writing was pretty good, full of wit and sarcasm. The characters were mediocre and the plot about the same. Had I read this book a year ago, I probably would have loved it. But instead, there was nothing different about it from the dozens or so other New Adult reads that I've come across in the last 6 months to a year.

And that's what I really struggled with the most--the cliches. I talk about this all the time in my reviews. It's hard to come up with a new idea, I know. I'm not even sure I could do it. But we've got a best friend situation between two characters who have some majorly built up tension. One friend--the girl--is completely aware that feelings have long since moved from friend territory into something more. The other friend--the guy--comes off as completely oblivious and bangs every female he can. This situation is over written. This guy is overwritten. And surprise...the conflict and resolution is overwritten too. Even the way that things wrap up where our leading male proclaims that he has in fact always been in love with our female lead is just too much. It's too clean--too pretty.

Sydney is still somewhat psychologically damaged from a comment made to her over a year ago. And while I can completely understand that, because I've been known to hold on to a comment like that in my past, it wasn't always fun to read about her insecurities and freak outs. Kyler wasn't much better. I'm pretty sick of reading about this type of guy character. Considering how many New Adult and Adult novels star males that are pretty much the spitting image of Kyler, I think it's obvious that we, women like our men to be manly men, and this is just one way that it comes out in literature. Other than that, I'm not sure what the point is in having so many male characters like this. Or maybe it's our desire to tame the "bad boy." We want to be the one girl who's special enough to turn him from all his undesirable ways. So even though that doesn't really happen in real life so much, we still crave reading about it. Maybe? I don't know. Either way, I'm tired of this type of leading male.

Frigid was all around average. Though there was a mysterious aspect to the novel, there really wasn't anything surprising or mysterious about said mystery. The characters fit into cookie-cutter stereotypes. And the conflict was typical and somewhat stupid, as well as the resolution entirely too neat and pretty. Frigid gets 3 stars from me--that's the best I can do.

Have you read Frigid? What did you think? Let me know!

Side note, does anyone else think this cover is ridiculous? Snow and a bare chest? Really????