Frey by Melissa Wright

Overall Rating: 1 Star

Date Finished: August 1, 2016

I did not finish this book. I made it about 25% of the way through the book before giving up.

I’ll start by saying that I liked this version of the cover and after reading the excerpt I was expecting a character just like on the cover, strong, in control and powerful. And instead, I ended up with Freya. She basically spends the whole first part of the book without saying anything. Her response to everything is to hang her head and not say anything. She sees a guy for literally 2 seconds and she immediately starts obsessing over him and spending all her waking time investigating him. She was not a likable character at all and it got to the point where I really just didn’t care what happened but she was not a character that I was interested in learning more about.

The other big issue that I had with this book is that it is very disjointed. There is really no world building at all and so there are random comments made that hint at the type of world they live in but nothing is ever clarified. And most of the book felt summarized. It felt like we were skipping over all the important parts. For example, her first real conversation with the male character and all she says is his name. That’s it. And then the rest is summarized by saying that conversation came freely after that. Really? What conversation, because I seemed to have missed out on all of that. She’s been obsessing over him and now she is actually talking to him but we don’t get to hear anything they’re saying?

And then later when she is on trial, Freya keeps losing focus and all we hear is ..dark magic…sentenced…blah blah blah. See, this whole trial and saying she’s using dark magic seems like a pretty important part of the whole plot and yet we don’t get to hear any of it because Freya can’t seem to keep focus for more than a few seconds at a time. And don’t you think this would be an important time for her to be paying attention. I mean, she runs out without even knowing what the heck she was sentenced to or why!

The other thing is her randomly trying to curse or kill everyone. She avoids people, doesn’t talk, always hangs her head and yet she randomly get annoyed because a bird is singing so she kills it. And she curses a group of people just because she’s upset that she can’t hear what they’re saying. And then she tries to kill a council member, not because he supposedly sentenced her for a crime (see, I’m not even sure he actually did cause, hey, I didn’t get to hear any of that), not for accusing her of black magic, but because while reading off her family history he says her mother’s name. Really? He’s reading your family history, pretty sure you mom’s name was going to come up in there somewhere.

The whole thing was just a really frustrating read and hard to get through, hence why I didn’t waste my time trying to finish.