Frost - Marianna Baer

The Gist

Frost
Buy it here and support our blog

Now that Leena Thomas is a senior she gets to choose where she rooms at her boarding school, and she and her friends choose Frost House: the cozy Victorian house usually reserved for boys.  But she certainly didn't choose head case Celeste Lazar to live there with them.  Celeste is assigned to live with them for the first semester, and there's no way to change that, so they all have to move on.  As the school year starts up, weird things start to happen in Frost House.  Little things, like pictures falling and doors locking.  Celeste blames her roommates, and the other girls all blame Celeste, with Leena trying to act as mediator between the groups to get into Celeste's brother David's good graces.  With all these new scares and changes, Leena doesn't know if she can handle it.  Is she crazy, is her roommate crazy, or is there really something strange about their new life?

What We Think
Reviewed by Living Destiny
Number of Pages: 402
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of this book is: huh?  It was a little confusing.  The beginning was like a cheesy teen book.  All about dorm life at boarding school and the cute new guy and the weird roommate.  Nothing too bizarre, just very giggly and cliche.  The sort of book that makes me want to tear my hair out and then cry for all of humanity.  That sort of thing.  Then it starts to get strange, but it still isn't very spooky.  Slightly out of the ordinary, but not bad.  Then it gets really weird, then it resolves very quickly.  That's not very good pacing if you ask me (which evidently you did, if you're reading this).  The action isn't spread out very well.  Not that it was a bad book.  It wasn't, really.  It just...I don't know.  I didn't not like.  But I didn't really like it either.  It was very meh.  I didn't like the main character, Leena.  She was super stressed about everything, and she had this one character flaw that I hated.  It's kind of a big thing, so I won't give it away, but it made me angry.  It wasn't pointless per se, but I doubt it was necessary for the advancement of the story line.  I didn't like Leena's friends either.  They were so blah I can't even remember their names, but I remember one was really harsh and mean and unforgiving, and one had no backbone and just did what the other one did until the very end.  I liked Celeste and David.  They were both good characters.  Celeste seemed a little too crazy to actually be crazy, which is what she was supposed to be.  She was a strong minded girl who believed in herself, which was nice to see, but it was also interesting to see her slow decline as her mind was twisted and turned.  David was loyal and kind.  He knew what he was doing most of the time.  He got annoying, but then, doesn't everyone?  I do have to say, I really didn't like the ending of this book. At all.  It feels...lame.  Half-hearted.  Almost like the author stopped caring about what happened, so everything that did happen was mediocre and unsatisfying.  I was not pleased.  Bad wrap up to the climax and adventure, bad wrap up to the relationships within the book.  Not.  Pleased.  The first line of the book sounds like it's trying too hard to be spooky.  The whole book is told in past tense, and the first line mentions "before any of this happened".  Guess who wants to sound mysterious?  This book does.  The last line holds a lot more power.  While I didn't like the ending, I did like the very last chapter.  The end of the end, I guess.  It was much more final than the few chapters before it that tried to hold the resolution.  The last line was definitive, and it was well done.  There wasn't anything really wrong with this book, but I can't think of many awesome things to say about it either.  That's really it.
Real Teen Rating~ C+: Well, I guess it was good.