Review: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Author: Holly Black
Pages: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: September 3, 2013
Read: September 24, 2013
Source: ARC from BEA

Description from Goodreads:
Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown’s gates, you can never leave.

One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them the only way she knows how: by going straight to the wicked, opulent heart of Coldtown itself.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is a wholly original story of rage and revenge, of guilt and horror, and of love and loathing from bestselling and acclaimed author Holly Black.

First Sentence: "Tana woke lying in a bathtub."

Review:

Holly Black ranks as one of the premier young adult authors, much honored for her Black Cat series. Perhaps that's where I should have started, as it sounds much more original than The Coldest Girl in Coldtown. Now, there's nothing wrong with an author taking on less unique subject matter, but I think I may personally have reached my limit for vampires. If you're still into vampires, then The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is an entertaining, dark, gory read.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown starts off with a bloody bang. Tana, the heroine, awakens in a bathtub at a party, concerned about the pictures people likely took of her in that embarrassing position. After straightening up, she heads out of the bathroom to find a scene of gruesome carnage. All of her friends are dead, eaten by vampires, the first severe attack in quite a while. Most of the vampires are locked up in Coldtowns, so attacks like this are rare. In the bedroom of the house, Tana discovers that one other person has survived: her ex-boyfriend, Aidan, bitten and cold. In the context of this book, cold means a human ready to turn, a human who will die and become a vampire as soon as they have some human blood. Also in the room with Aidan is a hungry, half-mad vampire. Tana saves the two boys from the vampire mob that perpetrated the deaths of her friends and they're off.

The group heads for a Coldtown, which is not a spoiler since it's in the title, guys. What Black does well is the gross and gory stuff. These are not cuddly vampires. Most of them are creepy and crazy, as are the humans who seek to live in Coldtowns in hopes of becoming a vampire one day. Most of the sane people end up getting eaten, in fact, so I think you have to be a bit crazy to survive in a Coldtown.

Holly Black doesn't really add anything new to vampire mythology with The Coldest Girl in Coldtown. The ways to kill or impair a vampire are the same, they've been corralled in cities, and they've even had this overly simple method of turning humans into vampires before. I do think that The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is entertaining and capably written, but it does not stand out for me in the mass of vampire fiction, and I suspect I will not remember it for very long after I read it.

The big weakness is the characterization. Though the characters do say some witty-sounding things, they never actually have personalities. Part of this is the brevity of the time frame, all of this taking place over the course of the week and with all of that being serious business time. I have no clue what any of these people or vampires are really like on a normal day, except for Tana and Aidan, and what I do know I don't like. It's all quite hackneyed and predictable, with Tana ending up trapped in the Coldtown despite her clever plan and falling in instalove with the strongest of the vampires, who of course loves her too because she's unlike anyone else he's encountered in his hundred plus years of life. The logic that sends Tana into the Coldtown, too, is weak at best, since she wasn't even sure if she'd gone cold from the tiny bite she got escaping the house at the beginning. How about you wait just outside the Coldtown and see what happens? And if you're going into the Coldtown to protect your family like your dad asked you to, how about you also not contact them, as he also asked?

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown does the creepy horror thing well, and will no doubt have quite a bit of appeal for readers who still enjoy vampire stories. This is a read for those who care more about the action and less about the logic of the world building and character motivations.

Rating: 3/5

Favorite Quote: "If she was going to die, she might as well die sarcastic."