Rating: WARTY!
This was such a pathetically dull story, and read by such an awful reader that I made it through only two disks on the audio book and could stand to listen not a phoneme further. There was one part where it got really interesting, which kept me going briefly, but that was soon blown to shreds by the deadening text which followed quickly afterwards. And where in hell the author dragged that title from has to be one of the great mysteries of the 21st century. A novel about ice and snow, and cold and an Ice Queen is titled Breadcrumbs? Definitely a Whisky Tango Foxtrot call-sign on this one.
The basic story is about Hazel - an adoptee from India who prefers to hang out with her best friend Jack (yuk - yet another unimaginatively mundane male character named Jack. Barf, etc.) than to do "girly stuff". Hazel is evidently overweight, and the subject of bullying - from the very boys with whom Jack hangs out at school. There's an entire story there which was lost because this author evidently couldn't see it. As for Jack(-ass), he couldn't see anything wrong with his friends hazing Hazel, and basically tells her to get over it. What a jerk. The true tragedy here is that Hazel evidently has no life without Jack in it. As for the story, it had no life at all. It was pedantic and tedious, and the narrator Kirby Heythorne's reading voice was god-awfully dull.
The problem with Hazel is that she is one of the most boring characters ever, with no motivation and an obsession with Jack which is pathetic if not scary. She's not likable and she doesn't change - not in the part to which I listened anyway. She has nothing to offer to win our hearts or minds.
The interesting part for me was where Hazel met an old childhood friend whom she had not seen in four years - a lifetime for an eleven-year-old child. When Hazel arrived at her home, her friend was in the kitchen doing homework whilst her slacker uncle (supposedly a screenwriter LOL) was baking cookies. The girl's uncle told Hazel that he was encouraging his niece to invent a story which he could steal and turn into a screenplay which would make him rich.
They began to elaborate on the original idea, and the story became quite engrossing, brief and sketchy as it was. Unfortunately it was over all-too-quickly, and we went right back to the brain-deadening tedium of our regular programming, which is where I said, "Check please, I'm outta here!". I wanted to switch to the other story and pursue that instead, but of course that option wasn't available so I couldn't avail myself of it!
This is based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, and things turn towards the fantastical as this novel progresses (according to the blurb), but that was nowhere near enough of an attraction to lure me any further notwithstanding that I had liked the "screenplay" they'd discussed on earlier. I cannot recommend this story based on what I suffered through, and especially not in the mind-numbing audio version.
