I read Black Ice with a lot of hopes. Hopes that Fitzpatrick was writing something brave and different, a departure from Hush, Hush which was a total abomination for me. Still, I was willing to give it a fair shot. Unfortunately, it seems Fitzpatrick has a formula that she refuses to veer from and that made this book every bit as painful as Hush, Hush was. And all the temptation that maybe Fitzpatrick was doing something brave and hard was washed away with every page I turned.
Black Ice is the story about a girl who goes camping and gets kidnapped by criminals who force her to navigating the freezing terrain in order to help them escape. Things become complicated when she starts to develop feelings for one of her captors.
Fitzpatrick set this up as a Stockholm Syndrome tale and had everything at her disposal to make it great. It to make it brave and edgy and real. Instead she bowed to whimsical fantasy and romantic notions in order to twist it into something it should never have been. A love story.
So let’s start with the formula that Fitzpatrick can’t seem to let go of.
1 Very Bad Boy + 1 Annoying Heroine + 1 Best friend who can die in a fire = Kat is going to kill something.
Mason kidnaps her, drags her through frozen tundra, lets his friend hold a gun to her and keeps up this charade as a villain all through the novel. But because he is occasionally kind to her and hot, Britt, our leading lady, falls for him.
Britt, is not quite as annoying as the heroine in Hush, Hush. She does some clever and brave things. This almost saves it for me. Almost. But her obsession over Calvin drove me mad. The story kept dropping history between her and Calvin which was quite boring and ultimately needless. She was a flawed heroine and that’s okay. She was probably the best thing about this novel, even if that’s not saying much.
Korbie. Korbie, rather like Vee was the most annoying character in this book and the very fact that she wasn’t in it much was her only saving grace. One more page of her and I might have bashed this book against my head several times just to numb the pain.
The ending. Let’s talk about the ending here because I know most of you aren’t planning on reading this shit, so being coy about it.
Spoilers Ahead
Mason’s not really the bad guy, see? He’s just pretending to be a hardened criminal so that he can find his sister’s killer. Who just happens to be Calvin, Britt’s ex boyfriend and Korbie’s brother. See? Britt really fell for a hero, not the bad guy. He was only pretending to kidnap her. So this makes everything about 100 times shittier. Instead of doing the brave thing and having Britt tragically need to hand in the man who kidnapped her and endangered her life, she turns summersaults to turn him into a hero. So that they can be together.
This refusal to commit to reality made the novel so much weaker and less tense. It lacked the emotional impact because it veered so far into fantasyland that I was almost ready to believe that Britt was hallucinating the end of this novel as she lay in a snowdrift dying.
If you want a book that is unapologetic in its handling of Stockholm Syndrome then I honestly suggest you skip this one and try Stolen: A Letter to My Captor by Lucy Christopher. Hauntingly beautiful and emotionally charged, it will fill the hole that Black Ice leaves behind.
Kristen@My Friends Are Fiction
Grrrr. This book pissed me off so much. I 100% agree with you. If only things had been different it could have been great.
Carina Olsen
Nooo 🙁 Gorgeous review Kat. <3 But oh. I am so sorry that this book was so damn awful. Noo. Because I own a hardcover of it. And now I'm starting to regret that.. sigh. I shall read it one day. Probably. But now I'm pretty sure I won't like it either :\ Sigh. Anyway. Thank you so much for sharing your honest and awesome thoughts about it 😀
Natalie Monroe
I commend you for having the guts to read this. I turned tail at the blurb.
Steph
I appreciate your honest review. Hush Hush is one of my top 5 most hated books because of all the reasons named, and there was no way in hell I was reading anything else from BF. It baffles me how this crap ends up on bestseller lists and on the shelves in Target. It’s atrocious.
Zareena
I’m sorry to hear you didn’t like Black Ice 🙁 I’ve really liked all of Becca Fitzpatrick’s books, including this one, but I guess it doesn’t work for everyone. Nice review though 🙂
Jess @ A Book Addict's Bookshelves
Britt really annoyed me in this. I was really disappointed with Black Ice seeing as I really enjoyed the Hush, Hush series.
Great review!
La Coccinelle @ The Ladybug Reads...
I have this in my TBR pile. But I’ve read Stolen, so I’d probably be comparing the two… and this sounds like a much worse version. Oh, well.
Brigid
EW. Another author stupidly decides to make her MC have stockholm syndrome. I am so SICK of this. It’s a serious disease and I am tired of author’s using it without realizing they made their MC into a victim.
Brigid
fuck that apostrophe. Excuse that please….and my foul language.
Nova @ Out of Time
Haha, I expected this. I laughed straight out loud when I saw the rating and knew that it was a good thing I accidently destroyed my ARC of this book. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT, I SWEAR.
Frannie Pan @ Frannie in the Pages
Ahahah I’m sorry for the book but YAY, I’m not the only one who thought this book was crap! I mean, stockholm syndrome? Please. That’s so not the stockholm syndrome, it’s a picnic compared to it u.u And don’t even get me started on the characters…
Anyway. I really want to read Stolen, I’ve headr amazing things about that book!