Freeze Warning A Tor.Com Original

Oy, that could have been better... Freeze Warning is about a Valkyrie in the modern world who tries to save a woman from committing suicide and meets a super hot guy who looks like Thor. I love urban fantasy, but it's a tough genre to do well. You have to introduce a lot of very dramatic changes into a space and time that people already know very well. It's hard to take shortcuts, and even tiny actions can have a lot of meaning. Let's take this tiny sample of writing from the middle of the story to illustrate what I mean. "It didn’t take much Rune-magic to convince the charge nurse to let her see Bella. Just a little misdirection and a few Runes scribbled on a piece of paper Mist quickly burned with her lighter the moment the man looked away. After that, no one paid any attention to a woman in her late twenties wearing very average boots, jeans, and a leather jacket. She’d hidden her knives, just to be on the safe side." So... she can use rune magic to do things. Cool. Did she write out the runes in front of the dude? Or before? Why did she burn them? How the hell did she hide the whole burning of them anyway? Paper causes smoke! The dude is right there, even if he's not facing you, his nose still works. Also, if this the modern world, why even burn them? Who would recognise them? Do you have enemies, protagonist? You haven't mentioned any... Would they go through your pockets? Why even use runes if the hot dude was able to get in to visit the lady without any trouble? Was this just a "look, I has magic!" moment? Also, unclear writing alert! You hid your knives as in you put them on even though you usually don't or you hid them as in you decided not to wear them hanging off your belt? Why are you so wary centuries later? (Okay, that might be from your weird encounter earlier that wasn't weird, but totally a set up for INSTANT BOYFRIEND). What made you bring knives to a hospital?? As I said, urban fantasy can be hard to pull off! These two paragraphs were meant to introduce readers to more magic, but ended up confusing things and making the narrative feel illogical. It was less "show us your world organically" and more "LOOK! MAGIC THINGS! BAD ASS PROTAGONIST! I DID NOT TELL! I TOTALLY SHOWED, RIGHT?!?!" The rest of the short story doesn't fare much better. Mist, our protagonist, is angsting when she sees a woman try to commit suicide. She tries to save her, but ends up mysteriously needing help from a random modern viking warrior dude. He's instantly smitten with her. She angsts, they have sex, and that's about it. There's no actual plot here other than setting up Mist as a crabby Valkyrie who hated being treated as lesser when she was in Asgard and now hates... everything? This feels very much like a chapter of a book rather than a short story. It does not stand alone, has no real plot, and leaves readers in the middle of a scene. I am totally down for reading excerpts of books to get a sense of whether I want to commit, but warn readers in advance! (Though I am pretty sure this was just meant to be a standalone story despite not actually standing on its own). Also, spoiler from the synopsis of the first book that follows this: Hot dude is Loki. How... completely unsurprising.

DNF at 46%. More or less. I think. Can't remember now. Oh well. This should have been really cool. I mean, Valkyries + Odin + Norse mythology = really cool, right? Haha, you're so funny. That's what I initially thought, too. And then I started reading. Sigh. Double sigh. Triple sigh. Want to know why I'm sighing so much? Because despite this being a VERY short story (32 pages), the author manages to squeeze in ✘✘ Freaking Insta Lurrrrrve ✘✘ before the 40% mark. Now that must be the achievement of the century. Before this story there was Insta Lurrrrrve, now there is Step On It No Time To Lose Insta Lurrrrrve. Read 10 pages and BOOM, it's there! Yay! What else? Apart the from the fact that there is no such thing as a plot you mean? And that this must be one of the most lackluster stories I was ever given to read? Let me think for a second there… Oh yes, there is something else! The flashbacks killed the plotless story. There are too many of them. They are poorly written. They add little to the narrative. Yay. In the end you're left with an uninteresting, incoherent, jumbled mess. Double yay. And there you are, probably thinking I'm overexagerating again. You don't trust my judgement much, do you? You're thinking not ALL must be bad about this story. And you know what? You're right. It's not ALL bad. The cover is beautiful. Ha.