Dreamspinner Press, $3.99, ISBN 978-1-935192-41-1
Fantasy Romance, 2009
Finding a Heart of Snow catches my attention because of its intriguing title. The plot is interesting too. A race of magical humanoids have long guarded their emotions by encasing them in ice – literally. Long ago, their Snow Queen died of heartbreak and the resulting fallout was disastrous, to say the least, so now these snow spirits protect their hearts by encasing them in an ice crystal – one that is now stolen. If it falls into the wrong hands…
Our hero Shirai is on a mission to retrieve the ice crystal and for some reason, he thinks that our befuddled hero Marmion Roy knows some important information pertaining to the location of the lost ice crystal. From that point on, Marmion is going to find himself in an adventure and love of a lifetime.
Okay, scratch that love bit – if these two are in love, I think the author must have forgotten to show me how those two came to be that way. These two guys are busy running all over the place, with love understandably rarely coming up in conversations, so when they end up talking about moving in together, I can only scratch my head in bewilderment.
The romance may be lacking, but the story is interesting, I have to say. It gets off on a slow and bewildering start, but once the author settles on a rhythm he is comfortable with, things kick up a notch. Early on, I was sure that reading this story would be a waste of time as I was far from impressed with the clumsy way the author introduced the characters to each other, but by the last page, I am eagerly turning the pages.
Marmion is the typical moony little girl character that plagues the gay romance genre, though, so be careful if you don’t like guys who sheds tears like a broken water pipe. If the plot doesn’t intrigue me so, I’d probably be driven screaming and running in the opposite direction by now.
An interesting story, an uneven execution – this sums up Finding a Heart of Snow in a nutshell.
