The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown has interesting world-building and great characters who share some really interesting and lovely non-romantic relationships. (A book where the ex-boyfriend is a main character, and it's not all about him trying to get her back, and they don't have sexual tension anymore, and they both know they were bad for each other---wowwwwwww.) There's even a brave and beautiful trans character!!! It's well-written, and the plot is interesting and compelling---I couldn't put it down. These all make it stand out in the YA genre, or in any other.

But at the end of the day, I can't get past the fact that I don't like vampires. Nothing about immortality, ethereal beauty, or romanticized and sexualized death appeals to me at show more all. I couldn't put this book down, but I was also very frustrated by it the entire time I was reading it. And I think, in the end, I couldn't connect with some of Tana's decisions because I don't share her fascination with vampires and Coldtown. I would have run screaming the other direction after about the first fifteen pages, not bitten my tongue and had torrid makeouts with an unbalanced 300 year old hit man as dawn broke above us. Ew. I spent most of the book mentally screaming "HIV epidemic!!" on the verge of tearing my hair out. Did HIV drop out of consideration because Cold will generally kill you a lot faster? It would have been nice to have that addressed, even as an aside.

tl;dr: This is a great book, seriously. But if you aren't into vampires, this isn't going to be the one that convinces you. show less

I've shied away from teen vampire novels ever since Twilight came and ruined it all. Suffice to say, this is one hell of an exception. This book restored my faith in the "vampire genre" by proving there are strong female characters and new story lines to be had.

Tana is at a house party and wakes up passed out in a bath tub. When she walks amongst the littered beer cans and old pizza she discovers a ghastly scene. All the teenagers she had been partying with had been brutally ripped apart by vampires. When she goes to find her phone in a back room she discovers her ex-boyfriend who has been infected with "the cold") chained to a bed and a crazed looking vampire chained in a corner. She decides to save them both and take them to the show more nearest coldtown (i.e. a quarantine where vampires, infected people, and wannabees go but can never come out). Along the way they meet a pair of sibling twins Midnight and Winter who decide that they want to be bitten so they too can enjoy the fabulous vampire life that they see on tv. Together they all journey to coldtown and Tana must decide if she is going in with the beasties (in case she has accidentally contracted the cold) or if she will ditch them all and go back to her boring ho hum life. Decisions, decisions.

The characters are complex and realistic. The story line fast and unpredictable. It's a great thrill ride and you won't regret reading it. I forsee this being turned into a movie. It would be a shame not to! show less

Vampires. I have a love/hate relationship with them. Once upon a time I enjoyed Anne Rice's sexy, brooding, glamorous vampires. I loved Matt Haig's suburban vamps in The Radleys; his portrayal of an abstaining vampire family and their struggles to fit into the vanilla world of everyday life was a funny and incisive take on contemporary society. And I like the feral vampiric creatures of Justin Cronin's The Passage. I even kind of like the vampires that Sookie Stackhouse plays with in Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire series (and I really like Sookie, who's a tough little cookie). But Stephenie Meyer's glittery Twilight vampires and the vapid Bella, she of the ever-dimishing returns, pretty much ruined them for me.

I'm happy to report show more that Holly Black, in her latest novel The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, has restored the allure of the vampire for me. It opens with a bang--blood, death, white-knuckled heart-racing terror--as 17-year-old Tana Bach awakens cotton-mouthed, muzzy-headed, and hungover in a bathtub. As the previous night's sundown party--that's a party that goes into lockdown at sunset, because of the curfew...and the vampires, doncha know--comes back to her, she's somewhat relieved. At least she's still wearing her clothes, and she's pretty sure she didn't do anything, besides playing a stupid drinking game, to regret.

'Tis a pity, then, that the morning's dead silence is quickly shattered by--the silence of the dead. That's right, the dead, who were once Tana's friends and are now strewn about the floor in pools of their own blood, crumpled among their own entrails, room after room full of the dead. But as it turns out Tana isn't the last living person at the party; she stumbles into a darkened bedroom (opaque garbage bags duct-taped to the windows to keep the rising sun out) and discovers her ex-boyfriend, the very pretty, very charming, Aidan tied to the bed. Nearby, also trussed up, is a ruby-eyed vampire boy.

Things start happening very fast and Tana makes the decision that any honorable, brave, foolhardy person would: she races to save these two dangerous men--oh yes, Aidan's been bitten and all he needs is a good drink of human blood to complete the transformation to vampire. See, that's how it works. You get bit, you get the hunger, and you either feed and turn or sweat it out for eighty-eight days and get cured. During that time between infection and cure (or curse) one is said to be cold.

Which leads us to Coldtown. Coldtowns--for there are a number of them across the United States--are places where vampires and the infected and wannabes live in gloriously, glamorously, unabashed debauchery. If you're infected, death or Coldtown are your options. Either way, it's a life sentence.

Tana's journey involves getting from death scene to death scene--and what a glorious scene Coldtown is!-- with her passengers intact and her humanity unscathed. And, maybe, to kill a couple of vampires. And keep her little sister Pearl safe. Falling in love would be nice, too, although it's not even a blip on her radar for most of the story.

Holly Black has written an original, well-written, and only very occasionally angsty novel, which has all of the great vampire tropes--immense beauty and power, behavior that's at best amoral, at worst evil, and one of my favorites, aversion to sunlight--without being cliched. Tana is a great heroine: strong, loyal, persistent, honest, funny, and not at all enthralled by the idea of being subsumed by a man, be he human or vampire...which may be the most important quality of all in the heroine of a young adult novel.

A quick note on the audience for The Coldest Girl in Coldtown: the publisher classifies it for ages fifteen and up, and I concur. The overt violence is minimal (but present), but the descriptions of its aftermath--delicious though they may be--are often over-the-top and quite graphic. There's an awful lot of talk about kissing, but no actual sex, and the language is fairly tame. If your young reader is under fifteen, make sure she or he will be okay with the gross-out factor. show less

You have to get over some chunky writing (lots of “seems to” and “tried to”). The dialogue is often interrupted with thoughts and actions, breaking the flow of conversation, like a not-well-edited movie. But if you can get past that (or you’re not as judgmental as I) then you could have a fun time with this. It’s one of the few vampire stories I’ve been able to finish.

Like others, it treats vampirism as a disease. A plague, more accurately, and those who’ve been struck with it have been sequestered to “coldtowns”–barricaded cities where vampires, humans, and ghouls eke out a quasi-symbiotic existence. As symbiotic as you can be when a lion’s trapped with the lamb.

But there are other interesting ideas too. Like show more how some vampires become online celebrities, cribbing from Lestat on how to live forever in an eternal party. But I’ve bounced off a Holly Black story before, and I think her writing style is just not to my taste. There is lots of thinking and repeated information. Feels like its aimed at a younger audience than me (which is 99% true for anything I read). Lots of “syntactic sugar” to make word count and impedes story efficiency. Just kinda confirmed my theory that this author is not for me. show less

'The Coldest Girl In Coldtown' was excellent. It had a good plot, strong world-building, a cast of relatable characters and a teenage heroine, Tana, who I could believe in and care about and who wasn't another version of Buffy Summers.

The Coldtowns at the heart of the story give an original answer to the "What if vampires came out into the open?" question. In the US, Coldtowns were created to contain the vampire plague that was sweeping the world. They are prison towns used to quarantine the vampires and the infected but not yet turned. You can go in but you can't come back out and once you're in, the rule of law no longer applies. The vampires ensure their food supply by controlling who gets turned and by using social media feeds of show more glamorous parties with beautiful vampires to attract people to enter a Coldtown so that they can join the party and , if they can get turned, party on forever.

The worldbuilding in the book is skullfully folded into the backstory and character exposition. This is a very personal account. Most of what we learn about the world comes from learnging about Tana, her family and the people that she meets. Most of it is told as part of the stream of events that carry Tana into Coldtown with the exception of a few flashbacks that give some insight into Tana's history or the history of one of the vampires.

For me, the main strength of the book was that it focused not on the vampires or their world but on the personal journey for Tana, the seventeen-year-old main character. Her reactions set the emotional tone of the book, which is mostly of shock and fear and uncetrainty that somehow feels matter of fact rather than melodramatic. We first meet Tana, as she wakes in a bathtub after getting drunk at a party and finds that her friends have been that her friends slaughtered by vampires during the night. I liked that she was freaked out by all the gore but kept going anyway. I also liked that, even when she was flooded with fear, had a strong urge to flee and could hear the killer vampires stirring, she couldn't bring herself to leave the behind two survivors she found bound and chained in a bedroom

Tana has s strong need to do the right thing but real life keeps getting in the way and her own conflicting desires make it harder to figure out what the right thing is. She sees the world quite clearly. Unlike her little sister, who has posters of vampires up on her wall and is besotted with the fairytale glamour pumper out be the live feeds from Coldtown, Tana doesn't see vampires as glamorous. She doesn't see tham as demonic either. For the most part she sees them as people who discover who they really are when they possess the power to do anything to anyone without suffering any consequences. She recognises that it's a lust for this power that pulls so many people to Coldtown.

When Tana finally enters Coldtown, she sees it for the grubby, dark, dangerous, desperate place that it is. She understands that whole situation is wrong and that there's nothing she can do about it except make the best choices that she can.

The plot kept Tana at the centre without turning her into a super hero. The choices she takes define her. They make her more herself but she is still essentially the same girl that we met at the start of the book.

The plot is clever and kept the tension high right up to the end, partly by revealing more about the relationship between the main characters but mostly by keeping me engaged with Tana and by knowing that, whatever she decided to do, it would be unexpected.

I had a great time with 'The Coldest Girl In Coldtown' and I'll be looking for more books by Holly Black, I'm tempted by her Curse Workers series and by her latest novel, 'Book Of Night'. show less

Most modern vampire novels of the teenaged persuasion are all about the teen angst and romance (I blame Twilight for that entirely, though the Vampire Diaries were only slightly less co-dependent in retrospect), but Black does a careful job of ensuring that the romantic themes between our protagonists Tana and Gavriel don't overwhelm the entire story. She focuses instead on the general nature of a world where vampires have come out of the darkess (as almost all vampire novels do), but where humanity's reaction to them has been to create walled off cities (dubbed Coldtowns, after the cold nature of the vampiric infection) to keep the spread of vampires. Harkening back to historical vampire tales, Black's interpretation of vampirism as an show more infection that can occasionally be beaten reitterates themes from Stoker's Dracula and Streiber's The Hunger. Unlike previous authors, though, Black's vampiric infection has a very specific and acheivable cure - namely sweating out the toxic blood- which brings the genre a new level of realism as she basically treats the supernatural curse the same way as modern sicknesses at their early stages. The cure isn't perfected yet, and there are no drugs or vaccinations available yet, so her moment in time is still at the early stages of the discovery of a new sickness, but there is a certain amount of hope available to humans - and in Tana's case specifically, a choice between "going cold" and attempting to fight for her humanity. show less

Have read the short story, of the same name, this is based on and dying to see if it's as good as the other.

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I have always said if Gothic Horror and Young Adult had a child it's name was Holly Black. She's done dark fairies and goblins and the mob with dark magic, and I fell in love with her first vampire short snippet of this story years ago. I love how the original main girl was having none of this crap, was so realistic and brass nails and wants to show how this world was not glamorous. And I was very hopeful (of this world) and very wary (of the novel ruining what I loved about the short story) when I first heard about it.

I'm glad to say it was entirely unfounded. Holly Black's first take at a true vampire book, coming out of show more that story was amazing. I like that this book isn't neatened up. I like that it talks about media and how its presented, both on tv and through the lens of the internet. I love that Tana is pretty active as a character with her own (damn!) opinions and both beautiful and truly terrible choices. I like that she is both the prisoner and hero of her own history, and that she admits to being both.

And I really love Gavriel. I love Gavriel so much. Especially because there are no excuses made for his insanity and his brokenness. For the fact he is a monster, and even he knows he doesn't know how to do things not in a monstrous way. I love demons for demons sake. And I love the ending. I felt the ending -- the way Holly ends books as ends that are a brand new open door, leaving you leaving the scene, knowing they are still going on to where they belong or whatever might happen down the dark long walk ahead -- was perfect. show less