Iced by Karen Marie Moning

I really wanted to like this book. I thought the premise sounded interesting but when I started to read, my enthusiasm started to fall apart, for several reasons. First, I absolutely can not stand the protagonist of the story, Dani "Mega" O'Malley. She's 14 years old, acts like a self-absorbed, self-important, oppositional for no reason,  and a Mary Sue. She's got super-speed! Super-hearing! Super-everything! OMG! Reading her first-person narrative made me want to claw my eyes out. And something else, aside from her constant narcissism and use of the word "dude"?-- instead of using the word "fuck" she instead uses "feck," which irks me on so many nitpicky levels. I have a pet peeve about people that self-censor.

While we talk about language use in this book, let's discuss how this novel is set in Dublin, Ireland, yet the language and syntax would never give that away. Reading the narrative and dialogue, one could assume that this was taking place in, say, California. In fact, the only person that  uses any little bit of dialect is the Highlander, Christian, who utters the occasional "och" and "lass" here and there.

Speaking of Christian... He is in love with/sexually attracted to Dani. Who is 14. In fact, there are several adult males fighting over Dani's future-loss-of-virginity which is creepy and gross. Moning has sexualized her underaged female protagonist to uncomfortable proportions.

Overall, the plot was "eh," the characters are thrown at the reader (this is book 6 of one series but book 1 of another series, an annoying trend I'm seeing in series these days)  without a lot of back story or character development. Most of the characters are fairly shallow, especially Dani, and the only one that I was remotely curious about (and the reason I'm even rating this at 2 stars) was Ryodan, because he was one I honestly couldn't figure out (and I appreciated that, while the world was ending he was still doing paperwork, because hey, it's business as usual).

Rated 2 stars on Goodreads