High schooler Jordan Frost has, as far as he knows, very few problems. He’s the most popular kid in school, good at sports, and currently coping with a crush on classmate Sonya. Despite never knowing his parents, he’s making the best of his life. Then one day, as he’s working at the local grocery store, he’s recognized by a stranger for his physical similarities to his parents. Upon being identified, he’s inducted into a centuries-old world of magic and underground secret agents—just as his parents were.
As it happens, Jordan Frost’s mother and father were major players in a massive secret war some years back, which led to their deaths. The agents of The Shadows, an organization as old as humanity itself and gifted with the powers of their ancestors, inducts him in hopes that he will be as powerful as his parents. With the help of best friend Steve and (eventually) Sonya, Jordan hones his powers. As he prepares for duty, though, he discovers the name of the man behind his parents’ death: Krieg, a traitorous figure who’s just as intent on killing Jordan as Jordan is on killing him.
JORDAN FROST AND THE AWAKENING (Book 1 of the Shadows) has some promise, building up a cast of powerful young characters and the bones of an interesting world. However, much of the story’s forward motion is dependent on The Shadows being far more lax than an organization of their type should be. After insisting that they are secret and exclusive, they simply accept Steve’s presence because Jordan says so. Sonya’s involvement comes about because Jordan is encouraged and permitted to make an unencrypted holographic call to her, allowing Krieg’s minions to pinpoint her easily. And Jordan thinks nothing of telling pretty much anyone he meets his whole life story, up to and including his induction into the allegedly secret Shadows. The ease with which dangerous and detrimental things are simply allowed to happen means there is no real feeling of stakes, which regrettably makes it difficult to get invested in the characters. Between this and the presence of typos and punctuation errors throughout—including a few examples of “its”/”it’s” confusion, quotation marks incorrectly placed in a way that blurs the line between dialogue and narration, and commas that are frequently misplaced and used instead of periods on nearly every page—it feels like this book could do with one more pass to bring everything together.
The core trio of this first JORDAN FROST novel could be compelling: strong but troubled Jordan, clever class clown Steve, and flirty sharpshooter Sonya—although hopefully there will be a bit more character development for Sonya in later books. Overall, there are things that need to be shored up in order for this world to reach its full potential.
While J.A. Simmons’s JORDAN FROST AND THE AWAKENING (Book 1 of the Shadows) has the bones of a compelling YA read, a combination of lax grammar and plot holes leave it feeling somewhat weak.
~Kara Dennison for IndieReader