Sixteen-year-old Frost understands why she’s spent her entire life in an abandoned apartment building. The ruined streets below are hunting grounds for rogue robots and Eaters.
She understands why she’s never met a human besides her father. She even understands why he forbids her to look for medicine for her dying pet. But the thing is, it’s not her real father giving the orders…
It’s his memories.
Before he died, Frost’s father uploaded his consciousness into their robot servant. But the technology malfunctioned, and now her father fades in and out. So when Frost learns that there might be medicine on the other side of the ravaged city, she embarks on a dangerous journey to save the one living creature she loves.
With only a robot as a companion, Frost must face terrors of all sorts, from outrunning the vicious Eaters…to talking to the first boy she’s ever set eyes on. But can a girl who’s only seen the world through books and dusty windows survive on her own? Or will her first journey from home be her last?
"I want to see things the way you do."
The big reveal towards the end of the book blew my mind. Honestly, I should have seen it coming with the way that things were going, and yet it still came as a shock to me. Let me just put that out there since it's the biggest thought in my mind right now.
Okay, back to the review.
So this is a story about a girl named Frost (yes, another book named after the main protagonist) who lives in a world that is pretty much destroyed. We first meet her in a pretty much empty apartment with her dying pet brute. A brute is almost like a vicious pink dog, only not a dog but something worse. The fact that she was able to even have one of these creatures as a pet was astonishing to even her robot companion and anyone else she met. Everything was pretty much status quo for her until her robot Bunt told her that her beloved pet Romes was dying. It was that knowledge that made her want to leave the apartment for good and make to the promised land of The Battery, where the destruction of the world would be left behind and the healing could begin.
So they left the apartment, and that's when everything changed.
Frost is a sixteen-year-old girl, and yet I felt like she had the hope of a child, one that despite all of the death and destruction around her still believed that there was something better out there. That hope was what made her leave her life of solitude behind in that dreary apartment, one that made her risk everything in order to save Romes. It was that hope that ended up touching the humans she ended up meeting, Barrow and his son Flynn, even though there didn't seem to be anything left to hope for. She almost felt weak in my eyes, needing everyone else to save her in moments that were life or death. What good was this main character for, and what was it that made the author want to tell her story?
This combination of robots and zombie-like creatures was an interesting take that I hadn't come across before. Then again, I haven't read as many books as I would like, and this is one of the first zombie type books that I have decided to read. It was interesting though, to see that the people still left in this world were either enslaved by a vicious dictator, "Eaters" that couldn't help but feast on flesh, or other. The "other" group, which I would include Frost, Barrow, and Flynn in, were those that weren't yet enslaved, but not free either. They were just surviving from what was out there, trying to make sure that they weren't either killed or tortured by the ones that served the "Good John Lord". What happened to the world that it was so utterly destroyed?
There are rarely any good things that happened to Frost in this book. Not everyone we meet in this book makes it to the ending, both good guys and bad. The ending is almost a cliffhanger, and the revelation that both Frost and the reader finds out is one that completely changes the game. Did it make the hours spent on this book worth it? I would say so. Were there parts of the book that made it difficult to get through? Unfortunately, yes. There is supposed to be a sequel coming out in the near future, and I'm curious to know what Frost is going to do since she is pretty much on her own now. Were her efforts to save Romes really worth it? Is he going to die anyway? I'm still waiting to find out.
I don't regret reading this book, but I do regret reading it before the sequel came out. It was almost nice to see someone that didn't give up hope, even though I don't know how I would have reacted in her shoes. There were times when it seemed like everything was about to end, but then I saw I still had more of the book read and figured that something good had to happen eventually. All in all, it was an interesting read and I would recommend it to anyone that wants to see what happens when robots and zombies decide to take over the world.
Rated: 4/5 ★
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