The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

This is a sexy book, in the way vampire tales can be: bloodlust and other kinds of lust all intertwined. But it’s self-aware enough never to let that become cliche. Humans go to Coldtown all the time out of a desire to be glamorous and immortal like the celebrity vamps they see on streaming video, and the book shows all the horrible tragedies of that choice without ever exactly condemning it. Vampires are beautiful and eternal and kind of hot… but they’re also dangerous, murdering monsters. Looking honestly at that contradiction is a recurring theme. - See more at: http://www.parenthetical.net/2013/08/15/the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown-by-holly-bl...

More reviews can be seen on my shared blog, Boricuan Bookworms

I’ve got to admit that with the overabundance of vampire themes, I didn’t think that Holly Black would create an original story, and I’m glad to say I was wrong.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was one of my most anticipated reads this year, and I’m glad that my expectations were met, and exceeded.

Forget about the humane, sugarcoated, sparkly vampires that we’re used to seeing in pop culture. In this book, Holly Black isn’t afraid to get explicitly gritty and thoroughly creepy. I’m finally met with a vampire book that makes me fear vampires.

Vampires were fairy tales and magic. They were the wolf in the forest who ran ahead to grandmother’s house, the video game

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big boss who could be hunted without guilt, the monster who tempted you into his bed, the powerful eternal beast one might become.
-The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

I loved the world-building. How vampirism was explained as a disease and the Coldtowns were created was a wonderful move. There was no denying that it was wholly original and refreshing!

Setting aside the, vampire concept for a second, the characterization in this book was amazing!

We meet Tana, a girl who has already been introduced to the vampire world. She’s sarcastic, resilient, and a TOTAL BADASS. I loved Tana. Her world was falling apart, yet she always found a way to make the situation more sarcastic, or she always found a way to make the best out of her situation.

Not only was Tana great, but also Aiden, Midnight, Jameson, Lucien and Gavriel were so well developed. Here the secondary characters play a role just as important as the protagonist!

Can I have a moment to swoon over Gavriel for a bit? I’ll most probably even create a MPB post for him because I loved him so much!

Gavriel was the main love interest in this story, and I’m glad because he was just so damn amazing! Let me make something clear: Gavriel is completely insane. There is no doubt in my mind that going Cold affected his brain in some way or another. But… even in his insanity, he is completely swoon worthy. The way his insanity is portrayed is amazing. And, when Gavriel is sane… dang.



He’s such a complete gentleman that it hurts. It hurts to know that he isn’t a real person!

“Tana. In all my long life, though there were many times I prayed for it, no one has ever saved me. No one but you.”
-The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

I love characters that are multi-faceted and Gavriel is no exception! Kudos to Holly! :)

One might think that this book is just about romance in a vampire world, but it’s not. This book also touches so many different themes, and one of the main ones is family.

We see Tana trying to protect her family in one way or another, and we see small insights into her life with different flashbacks, which help us understand more why Tana is how she is.

Also, this book has beautiful prose (which doesn’t surprise me, because Holly Black has written many wonderful books) and the pacing is very good; it builds up to a wonderful plot twist that I was not expecting in a million years. This book is (sadly) a standalone, which leaves more to be desired, but nevertheless wrapped everything up beautifully.

Overall, a vampire book that I’d definitely recommend, with a wonderful romance, colorful characters, great prose, and memorable quotes.

Rating: 5 stars.

E-ARC provided by Publisher via Netgalley 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

Holly Black's entry into the crowded vampire fiction genre really stands out for me. From the shocking beginning with Tana waking up in a house full of her dead friends to the hopeful conclusion, I was swept into the world Black created.

Tana Bach is a somewhat normal seventeen-year-old in a world that has changed immensely during her lifetime. Vampires, who had always existed in secret, are now public. Anyone bitten by a vampire catches the infection and goes cold and begins craving blood. But, if they can survive 88 days without tasting human blood, the infection goes away and they are human. Vampires and those who have been infected along with a variety of humans who were already there have been sequestered in coldtowns. Springfield, show more Massachusetts, is one of the first of them and is the nearest to Tana's home.

This is also an age of social media and the vampires are quick to use it. One very famous live feed comes from Lucien Moreau's home in Coldtown. It lets people on the outside watch what the vampires want them to see. The feeds play on people's desire to live forever. There are many people who really want to become vampires and who travel to the Coldtowns in the hopes of being turned.

When Tana wakes up in the house where most of her friends died, she finds her ex-boyfriend Aidan infected and tied to a bed and near him she also finds an vampire wrapped in chains. She is determined to free both of them and flee before the vampires who created the blood bath wake and finish them off. The three of them are on their way to the nearest Coldtown. Tana is scratched by a vampire in their escape and she is afraid that she has been infected. Aidan is already going cold and craving blood. The vampire is Gavriel who is a very intriguing character. He has spent the last ten years being tortured for not killing the vampire who was responsible for bringing the vampires into the public eye and who infected countless humans. He is sort of insane and knows it. Tana is fascinated by him even though she knows he might be the most dangerous thing that she has ever known.

The story was amazing and intriguing and filled with realistically drawn characters and all sorts of moral dilemmas. While it isn't for younger young adults because of the the graphic violence, I think older young adults will be as enthralled as I was by the world Black has created. I highly recommend it. show less

Imagine going to a party, and waking up the next morning in a bathtub with no recollection of how you got there. When you stumble out to the rest of the house, you discover everyone else at the party was killed during the night. A window was left open during the party, letting in the killer. Who just happens to be vampires. That is just what happens to Tana one morning, changing her whole life.

Through a series of events, Tana, her ex-boyfriend Aidan, Winter and Midnight (two young adults they meet at a rest area), and a vampire named Gavriel flee to their local Coldtown. Not all cities have them, but they do have one close by. There are five major Coldtowns across the country - they are a section of town that was walled off to keep show more vampires and infected people sequestered, to prevent a further spread of vampirism. Coldtowns are like a glamorous wild party/reality show, with live feeds, live cams, ad streaming video, which those outside the Coldtowns can watch what is happening behind the walls. But Coldtowns are also extremely dangerous, which can't be forgotten.

Tana is the perfect heroine - she was awesome! She is flawed, makes bad choices sometimes just because she wants to, but is brave, loyal, courageous and tough. She is not weak, and does not always wait to be rescued. Gavriel is a perfect Byronic hero and love interest, and Tana does not get her head turned by a handsome face - she does not romanticize the idea of vampires, instead knows them to be the monsters that they are. Although Tana and Gavriel do get a little steamy...

The vampires in this story are not mamby pamby vampires who glitter and forgo drinking blood. They are dangerous, with red eyes, who do drink the blood of people, and will even kill them. Reading this book though, I was more freaked out by the scary wannabes, those people who saw the vampires as eternally young, who never die, no more birthdays. They have no limits to as how far they will go to get what they want, which is eternal life. Isn't this always true though - that zealots can be the craziest people in the room?

I loved this book! I read it all in one sitting, I just didn't want to stop reading it. Black created a world that was different from other vampire books, with an awesome heroine. It was complex, I just grazed the surface of this story. I feel like we didn't quite get enough closure at the end of this book, and I am really hoping that this signifies another book in the series to come! show less