This was not my favorite Holly Black novel but I enjoyed the story. I liked how obsessed everyone was with becoming a vampire. I also like that the vampires were smart enough to realize that changing everyone would remove their food source. ( )

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 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. ( )

Guilty pleasure. Nice to see some teen vampires that don't sparkle. Compelling, easy read. ( )

This was my first Holly Black book that I've finished (can't count The Cruel Prince cause I've DNF it for the moment). I love her writing style, I really liked how this was written, however the characters in here are a huge no for me. Tana is one of the dumbest protagonists I've read about in a long time; girl has no sense of self preservation at all. Her survival instincts do not exist, she's missing that fundamental part of her humanity. She's smart enough to recognize the dangerous situations she's in and to know how dangerous/deadly vampires are, yet she consistently runs headfirst into these dangerous situations time and time again. Like really? How about we not rescue and then go on a road trip with a full fledged vampire and your ex who is in transition to become a vampire? I think that would be the safer option, I'm just saying. Her stupidity over and over again had me saying, "if her dumbass dies, she deserved it." I really didn't like any of the other characters in here either, except for Tana's sister Pearl. She's the only one I liked, and unlike her sister she's got better survival instincts (still not the best, but better).

As I was thinking about this, I thought the story would have been better if it was about her sister Pearl going into a coldtown and Tana trying to find a way to get there and get her sister out. I could buy that she'd jumped headfirst into dangerous situations if it was to try to save her sister, but to go into these situations without any real reason is dumb.

Ok, so enough about how dumb Tana is, I'll finish this off with one last positive note. I liked that this book makes you question/wonder: is it really the vampire disease that makes people do horrible things or is there an innate darkness within us that's released when someone turns? There are times when it talks about how the vampires are like normal people or they seem like the person they use to be before they turned. There are even times when a vampire in transition can hold off the hunger and choose not to feed. And then there are the humans that want to turn and they go looking for vampires to bite/turn them. So is it the disease that makes them feed/kill or are they simply giving in to the darkness that's already within them? It's the old nature vs nurture debate, and I like that this book goes there.

Edit: I forgot that I read Dollbones, so this is my second Holly Black book that I've finished, not the first. ( )

'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 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'. ( )