Title: First Frost Series: Waverley Family #2
Author: Sarah Addison Allen
Published: January 20, 2015
Genre(s): Magical Realism
Page Count: 296
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:It's October in Bascom, North Carolina, and autumn will not go quietly. As temperatures drop and leaves begin to turn, the Waverley women are made restless by the whims of their mischievous apple tree... and all the magic that swirls around it. But this year, first frost has much more in store.
Claire Waverley has started a successful new venture, Waverley’s Candies. Though her handcrafted confections — rose to recall lost love, lavender to promote happiness and lemon verbena to soothe throats and minds — are singularly effective, the business of selling them is costing her the everyday joys of her family, and her belief in her own precious gifts.
Sydney Waverley, too, is losing her balance. With each passing day she longs more for a baby — a namesake for her wonderful Henry. Yet the longer she tries, the more her desire becomes an unquenchable thirst, stealing the pleasure out of the life she already has.
Sydney’s daughter, Bay, has lost her heart to the boy she knows it belongs to.. if only he could see it, too. But how can he, when he is so far outside her grasp that he appears to her as little more than a puff of smoke?
When a mysterious stranger shows up and challenges the very heart of their family, each of them must make choices they have never confronted before. And through it all, the Waverley sisters must search for a way to hold their family together through their troublesome season of change, waiting for that extraordinary event that is First Frost.
Some sequels are just unnecessary. First Frost is one of those. Taking place 10 years after Sarah Addison Allen’s extremely well-received debut, Garden Spells (a novel that remains her most popular), this book catches readers up with the lives of the Waverley family. It’s not a bad idea, and there’s certainly the fanbase to support this novel, but I unfortunately found that this book hinged far too much upon the success of the author’s previous novel, rather than venturing out to break new ground.
For instance, roughly one-fourth of this book consists of recapping, informing the reader what happened in Garden Spells. I’m not adverse to a little bit of recapping in a series; it’s often helpful. But when I reached the halfway point in First Frost and realized that the only plot developments that had been made were rehashes of things the reader should already have known, I was frustrated. I think the intent was to make this book a standalone/companion novel, but because so much of its story depends on what came before, it’s not entirely a successful venture. People who have read Garden Spells will be frustrated by the amount of time spent going over things they already knew; people who haven’t read it will probably be annoyed by the amount of summarizing/info-dumping that’s happening. It’s not a well-done situation.
In general though, I found that First Frost doesn’t really stand well on its own, regardless. More than anything, it expands upon things that were already established. Instead of launching familiar characters onto new adventures, it’s just more of the same. History repeats itself, the characters still face the same fears and dramas, etc. If you’re going to write an unnecessary sequel, you should at least bring something new to the table. Allen really does not do that here. First Frost feels more like a very lengthy epilogue to Garden Spells than anything else.
I’m really disappointed by this book, overall. I didn’t think it was a sequel that needed to happen, but I read it out of my appreciation for the author’s body of work. But First Frost does not live up to the talent Sarah Addison Allen has demonstrated before, and I finished reading this book with a feeling of boredom and pointlessness. Garden Spells was perfectly fine on its own, in my opinion.
