Cold Light: A Novel

When Lola was 14 her best friend, Chloe, died. The authorities determined Chloe and her older boyfriend killed themselves after Chloe’s parents found out about the relationship, but Lola always knew the truth. In the decade that passed, Lola and Chloe’s other friend Emma went their separate ways while the community romanticized Chloe’s story. With the community having raised funds for a memorial, a local TV station broadcasts the groundbreaking which leads to the shocking discovery of a body. But Lola isn’t shocked as she watches on TV; she knows all the details and begins to reflect on what happened all those years ago.
Cold Light is told in both present time and Lola’s reflections of what happened when she was 14; thus, the show more story is partly a mystery, but primarily a story of the dynamic between three teenage girls. The mystery is by far the weaker plot. The ending, which revealed all, struck me as far-fetched and reframed my entire opinion of Lola who turned out to be quite the unreliable (or at least not very forthcoming) narrator. However, I entirely enjoyed the story of the teenagers who fought with each other and their parents, who broke the rules and sometimes suffered the consequences, and who sought love and approval in the wrong places. show less

The Short of It:

As the title suggests, the light that falls upon these characters is a harsh, unrelenting light. It seeps in where it’s not welcome and leaves its chilling aftermath behind.

The Rest of It:

It has taken me WEEKS to write this review. Not to actually write it, but to ponder WHAT I’d actually write about once I finally sat down to do it. It’s not that it was a difficult book to read. It wasn’t. It’s not that I couldn’t get into the characters, because I did. I think it had to do with the fact that when I finished it, I was like…”Hmmm. Interesting.” Then a week later, I was like…”Hmmm. It was so dark!” Then each day after that, I continued to think about it and it dawned on me, that what I thought show more was a book that fell into the YA category, really wasn’t that at all.

That made me ponder it some more.

There are no likable characters to speak of. No one in the book would ever be my friend. Lola is like any other fourteen-year-old in that she wants to fit in and when she hooks up with Chloe, she finds that niche, that “in” if you will. Chloe is pretty and popular and really, very into herself. She is the classic bad girl. She drinks and smokes and steals things and she gets Lola to do the same. But it’s obvious from the beginning that Lola has a lot going on in her head. Her family is dysfunctional and her dad, although too smart for his britches has some issues, as well as her mother.

After Chloe hooks up with a real loser of a guy, things begin to go downhill for Lola. She’s not Chloe’s center anymore and often takes a backseat to Chloe’s boyfriend but when something happens to Chloe and her boyfriend, the town paints a very different picture of the girl Lola knew.

Ten years later, when the town decides to build a monument in Chloe’s honor, Lola finds herself revisiting her past and what really happened that fateful night.

Cold Light is a quiet mystery that hits you over the head long after you've closed the book. It took awhile for me to digest the ending but after much thought, the ending was perfect and quite fitting given what I knew about the characters. I know that getting hit over the head does not sound like a good thing but for me, it was. It was a departure from what I expected it to be and I am always impressed when a book surprises me in some way.

Ashworth does a beautiful job of capturing just how obsessive teenage friendships can be without preaching about the dangers of mixing with the wrong crowd. It’s suspenseful and well-paced and not necessarily for the YA crowd although I can see them reading it as well.

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There is a grubby, desperate, joyless feel to “Cold Light” that caused me to put it aside a few times. While it is well written, with authentic feeling characters…as a group I don’t think one of them experiences true happiness even once during the entire novel.

“Cold Light” is about dark things. Death, despair, cruelty, mean spiritedness and desperation fill even the smallest cracks of these characters lives. And I was never really sure why. Though none of them have dream lives, few of them are living nightmare lives.

Laura, or Lola, is the main character…and through her eyes we view this tangled group of unhappy and unfulfilled people. Though nothing other worldly happens…there is a feel of unreality throughout. Perhaps show more that emanates from the perspective of a very troubled teenage girl.

“Tonight I remember the things that happened during that winter and it is like watching myself in a reconstruction. Some girl who isn’t quite real enough to be me stumbles through the corridors in a school that cannot have been so large and sits near a pair of girls that would never have been allowed to be so cruel.”

Laura and her friend Chloe, and Chloe’s newest friend Emma, are jaded and cynical, despite their young age. Their lives are about smoking, drinking, ignoring their parents whenever possible, and only tangentially about school. Their voices come across like those of much older women who have lived hard lives. This winter of their lives is filled with rumor, a forbidden boyfriend and a growing cloud of suspicion and danger.

“I knew already that it wouldn’t matter. That this was the start of a time when things like shoes would stop mattering altogether. That the idea they had ever mattered was going to become funny.”

This time would change them all. Furtive secrets, actions that could never be taken back…would lead to the destruction of the lives they know. Destruction that would echo into the future.

“I look at her, think about how she lives – alone, touching no one but her dogs – and get a glimpse of something massive and black, something I can’t catch hold of.”

“It is cold, where Emma is. I realize I do not understand it.”

These characters are unable to understand themselves, let alone others around them. This book is glittering ice – slippery sharp with no warmth or soft spots. “Cold”, yes. “Light”, no. show less

A ground-breaking ceremony is taking place for a memorial to a young girl and her boyfriend, now ten years dead. Watching the television broadcast is the now grown girl's best friend, Suddenly, it all goes awry as the spade hits something it shouldn't. "You can tell from their faces that something has gone wrong. But I'm the one who knows straightaway that the mayor has found a body. And I know who it is." Thus starts Jenn Ashworth's atmospheric novel about the friendship of two fourteen year old girls, jealousy and reminiscence. Ashworth is at her best in capturing the anxiety of adolescence, the competitive nature of young girls, and striving to be more grown up than they should. If this is a time of your life which you've done your show more best to forget, you may wish to skip this book. If you enjoy psychological dark dramas, this might be for you. show less

Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth is a psychological study of three teenage girls who have a history of jealousy, lies and perversion between them. These emotions eventually build into a tragedy. As events are slowly unveiled we learn the history of the friendship and how the secrets they held and the intensity of their relationship goes way beyond normal.

Told in a bleak, almost surreal manner, I had trouble getting into this book but eventually the hints the writer drops and the many questions that arose enticed me into the story. These are not likeable girls, they are mean, seem to have a sense of entitlement and no empathy to speak of. I can’t say I liked the story, but it certainly became one that was difficult to put down.

Cold Light show more seems to have left me with more questions than answers as I ponder the motivations of the characters. The story is told in flashbacks from 10 years in the future and in the end the strongest emotion I felt was one of sadness for the waste that their lives became by being shaped by guilt and shame. Not an easy or comfortable read but a memorable one. show less

What can I say about this story? I guess the best description is that it's the sad story of teenage friendship gone wrong in the most devastating way. How well can we really know a person? Annie convinces herself that her neighbor is in love with her. Annie...like the majority of the characters... live largely within their own heads. Following the death of a teenager, a reconstruction process is under way to work out exactly what happened. The search for the truth peels back so many layers that the reader finds themselves asking "is there a real person inside?" I believe the biggest problem I had with the book is that I just didn’t like Annie or feel much compassion for what she and the others were going through as a consequence of show more their own making. show less

Jenn Ashworth’s second book, Cold Light follows Lola as she reflects back on her childhood friendship with the long-dead Chloe, her tragic demise, and the illicit summer and fall that contributed to her downfall. Told in flashbacks, Lola not only shares the truth behind the terrible events, she inadvertently seeks redemption, or at least a sense of peace, ten years after the events occurred. Two parts murder mystery and one part coming-of-age story, Cold Light shows how dangerous the line between childhood and adulthood can be, especially for those not ready to cross that line.

Unfortunately, the synopsis makes Cold Light sound much better than it actually is. The story itself slow, and Lola is not the best of narrators. In fact, she show more is fairly pathetic. Due to either a guilty conscience or an inability to move on from that infamous summer, she hides behind her anonymity and becomes a depressing adult. What is worse is the fact that she realizes her life is in a holding pattern but is not willing to do anything about it. The flashes back in time are jarring, made worse by the mocking tone in which adult Lola tells the story of her last summer of childhood. The ensuing dark tension and angst only antagonizes a reader rather than drawing one more firmly into the story’s grasp.

Perhaps it is adult naiveté at the actions of young teens or perhaps it is a cultural difference between Americans and Britons but Emma’s, Chloe’s and Lola’s actions and freedoms appear as extremely improbable and make it so difficult for readers to remember that the story is supposed to be about fourteen-year-old girls. Everything about them, from their appearances to their actions to their thoughts and discussions, has the appearance and experience of girls much older than they truly are. While this is easily explained as girls trying desperately to act older than they are, in a hurry to grow up as kids this age always are, it does little to endear them to the adult reader. Perhaps a younger audience would better appreciate the dangers they willingly embrace, but more experienced readers can only roll their eyes and groan at the truly awful decisions made. It creates a dichotomy between the reader and the characters that is difficult to overcome.

Another difficult point to overcome is the presence of the adults. In Cold Light adults are not shown in the best of lights. They are easily lumped into three categories and none of them flattering. There are the creepy, stalker types with illicit designs towards young women. There are those that are power-hungry and too eager to manipulate details to capture the spotlight and fame. Then there are the rest – the sheep that fall prey to the machinations of the latter and blindly ignore the former while easily duped by sassy teens. Of course, all three categories of adults cannot possibly understand what it means to be a teenager and are only trying to make their lives more difficult. It is a stereotypical attitude about adults and teens that does nothing to endear the narrator to a reader.

That being said, the strong emotions Cold Light inspires is a direct testament to Ms. Ashworth’s writing talent. Her word selection and turns of phrases are pivotal to establishing the bleakness of Lola’s world. One gets the impression that the uneven pacing and disagreeable characters are a studied decision and one made to evoke strong emotions within a reader. It is a conscious choice that prevents readers from remaining ambivalent about the story.

Cold Light is a tale of two novels. On the one hand, she captures the essence of the misanthropic nature of teenagers and does so with chilling accuracy and honesty. On the other hand, the pacing of the entire novel is blocky, and the unreliability of the narrator is overdone. The story takes too many twists and turns, and the reader is fooled one too many times into thinking the truth is finally being revealed. By the end, a reader will no longer care what the truth behind Chloe’s and Carl’s deaths really is. Lola quickly loses her sympathetic appeal as she tries to defend or explain her poor choices that culminated in the tragic chain of events, while Chloe, Emma, and Carl never really earn a reader’s sympathy. The lack of likable characters should never be a deterrent to enjoying a novel, but taken in combination with a jerky plot structure and too much teen angst, it proves too much for one’s complete enjoyment of the novel.

Acknowledgments: Thank you to Mary Sasso from William Morrow for my review copy! show less