Review: Frigid by J. Lynn

Title: Frigid
Author: J. Lynn
Series: Frigid, #1
Format: eBook, owned
My rating: 2 / 5

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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.

-- As seen on Goodreads

My Thoughts

Everything started out good. It was light, entertaining and funny, until it just wasn’t. The more I got to know the characters, the more irritated I became. I’m really tired of the supermodel good looking guy that sleeps with anything available, and the picture-perfect almost-pure-as-snow girl characters. It came across as over the top and boring. I feel like I’ve read a version of this story too many times and I’m over it.

Sydney:

I was in love with my best friend. And it could be worse, I guessed. I could have been in love with a male stripper or a drug addict. Kyler Quinn was neither of those things. Although he could easily be passed off as a male stripper with those jaw-dropping good looks and messy brown hair, and he was as addictive as any drug out there.

I think I would have like to read about Sydney falling in love with a stripper and/or drug addict. I mean, there are so many ways you could run with that storyline!

Kyler:

Sydney was perfect— the actual embodiment of the perfect woman. She was practically pristine and fresh. She was untouchable. She was everything to me.

Sometimes, I seriously wonder if my priorities are correct. Putting myself in Sydney’s shoes: if I knew there was a “snow storm of the century” coming, the first think I would be thinking about are things like… food. And water. Also firewood (if you had a fireplace) candles, matches, blankets, torches and spare batteries in case the electricity goes, stuff like that. Once that was taken care of, THEN I might start noticing said “best-friend Kyler” who I’m trapped with and crushing on. Granted, yes, they had all of these things, but the way it was portrayed took from the significance of the situation. I don’t want to be told every few pages about the storm: I want to see the characters actually preparing to keep themselves alive, you know, show a little responsibility and build up an atmosphere that isn’t exclusively lust. Everything needs balance, including relationships portrayed in books!

I want to feel the connection between characters, not be told about a connection, whether it is friendship, love, trust, hate, it doesn’t matter. If I’m not convinced of it, it just doesn’t work and I can’t connect with or believe what happens.

The amount of miscommunications going on is just mind-boggling. A regular person talking to their best friend would hold up their hand and say “Wow, hold on a minute, you’ve got that wrong” and then put them right on the issue. It’s just too much and overly dramatic. One or two instances within a book could be believable. But constantly? No, I don’t buy it. They don’t come across as friends who are secretly in love with each other: they seem completely obtuse and lack real trust in each other.

When Sydney’s best girlfriend tells her “Okay. Stop the bullshit.” I actually nodded and said, yep, I’ve been trying to tell you that from the beginning… That’s not the reaction I want to have in any book I read. I really like Jennifer Armentrout’s Lux series, and I don’t want to write a less that glowing review for any of her books. But, I have to be honest, and from my perspective this is her weakest work I’ve read: so disappointing.