The Frozen Realm (12 Miles Below #1)

I added this book to my reading stack because a friend whose taste overlaps with mine rated it 5 stars, but it got stuck there for a while as there’s just so much to read!

When I finally started reading 12 Miles Below (since that’s what is most prominently written on the cover, that’s what I’m calling it), it turned out to be a real page turner. And this line from the book’s own blurb on GoodReads really summarizes it well:

The surface is frozen. The depths filled with monsters. Can anything survive?

It’s a fantasy epic in a somewhat medieval-seeming society on a post-apocalyptic Earth. Machines are still very smart, but the main characters in the story don’t have any idea how all of that works. The book focuses on a boy named Keith, his older sister, and their dad - as they travel deep underneath the earth and battle machine monsters there.

While it is a real page-turner, the middle half of the book is way too battle-heavy for my taste. I love battle as a mechanism to move a plot forward, but here it just seemed like an endless stream of battles against the same machines - without much plot development.

All in all a good enough read that I landed between 3 and 4 stars and rounded up (again - am I getting too kind here?). I won’t be adding other books in the series to my list for now though, as there are plenty of candidate books that I look more eagerly forward to on there already.