Book Review | The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

Format: Kindle Edition

Source: Purchased

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Publication Date: September 3, 2013

Pages: 432

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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.

 

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was one of my most anticipated fall releases. The premise for this book sounded amazing and since I’m such a huge vampire fan, I knew that this was one book that I absolutely had to buy.

This book starts off with a bang. Tana wakes up in a bathtub after a night of hard drinking and partying. She is extremely embarrassed that she passed out in a bath tub with the door unlocked, anyone could have come in and done who knows what to her and she would have never known.

However, when Tana comes out of the bathroom, her embarrassment rapidly fades with everything that she sees in front of her. Sometime after she had passed out, all of her classmates were murdered by vampires.

To me, the beginning was the best part of the book. I got so caught up in the horror of the first few chapters that they flew by. But, after those first few chapters, the story seemed to slow down and by the 50% mark, I found myself skimming some of the flashback sections. I feel like this story would have been immensely better if it had more ‘NOW’ moments instead of so many flashbacks.

I thought the Tana was just ok. At times I felt like she was a little too trusting and naive. But, at other times she seemed strong and very caring. I think her best moment was what she done for her sister, Pearl, at the end of the book. As far as the other characters, I wasn’t really too invested in them. I just felt like I didn’t really know them.

Overall, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was a good read that I probably would have enjoyed more if it had been more focused on what was going on with Tana in the present instead of having multiple flashbacks from not only Tana’s POV, but also from other characters in the story.

"You are more dangerous than daybreak."