Ice Like Fire

Not sure if 1★ is too harsh or not, but the only thing I'm 100% sure of is that I did not enjoy this book. At all. [b:Snow Like Ashes 17399160 Snow Like Ashes (Snow Like Ashes, #1) Sara Raasch https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1392224823s/17399160.jpg 24221752] was disappointing for me, and Ice Like Fire is even worse. I feel like everything just fell apart. At first I had a bit of excitement because Meira is finally exploring the rest of Primoria, but the world-building is so poor that all the kingdoms she visited mostly blended into a blur. I feel like if all the descriptions are taken out of the book, it wouldn't make that much difference—that's just how flat they are.Also, Mather gets his own perspective in this book... and I didn't like it. His chapters are awfully dull. They don't add anything new to Meira's chapters. The sudden switch from Meira's first-person narrative to Mather's third-person is so jarring it's disturbing. And most of his chapters are filled with... angst. Actually, there's a whole lot of angst in this book—both from Mather and Meira. The plot feels like it's getting nowhere, and it really didn't go anywhere. This entire book with its 479 pages accomplishes nothing. It feels like wading through a bunch of unnecessary stuff just to end up like one step ahead of the start line.I find Meira slightly more tolerable than how she was in Snow Like Ashes, but she's still just as rude and judgmental—as Giselle pointed out. She's still whiny. She still makes a lot of stupid decisions, and she repeatedly blames herself for it. By which I mean repeatedly drowning in so much self-loathing that gets tiring real fast. The issue of Meira finding things so fast just so the plot can progress has been here since the first book, but all these convenient situations are just ridiculous.Oh, and Theron in this book is awful—naive and stupid. Man, what happened to the characters in this series? They have become unbearably dull, and whatever charm they had in Snow Like Ashes are gone. Or maybe the massive whinefest drowned them out, I don't know. I just don't feel anything for these people. There's also an attempt at political drama between the kingdoms, but it's so pathetic it feels shallow. Like it's only there for the sake of having turmoil in Primoria.Overall, Ice Like Fire was terribly bland. I'm still going to read the third book though, just to see how it all ends.