Tag Archives: authors: holly black

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

fiction, supernatural August 3, 2020 Leave a comment

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was the last Holly Black novel I read in 2018, and honestly, I think it was my least favorite.

I think I missed the boat with vampires, guys, I really did. They can be scary monsters, and I enjoy them to some extent but…I don’t find them sexy, I don’t find their angst particularly interesting, I don’t enjoy their love stories.

This was all of those things, except I did enjoy the world building in this novel.

Tara is a teenager who goes to a Coldtown because she’s afraid she’s going to become a vampire after her leg gets nicked by a vampire fang. She wakes up after a party and everyone is dead except her ex-boyfriend (who is definitely going to become a vampire) and another vampire. She sets them both free, and her leg gets nicked by the emerging vampires.

Coldtowns are places set up by governments to police vampires – think vampire ghettos but fancier, because are vampires ever not glamorous? Anyway, Tana gets involved with this vampire who wants to kill this other vampire, and her sister shows up, and then Tana gets bit for real or something and is trying not to become a vampire…

The whole thing just wasn’t that interesting to me. I enjoyed the world building, but other than that the book didn’t have a lot of highlights. I enjoy what I’ve read of Holly Black for the most part but some of the stuff she writes makes me wonder about some of her heroines. In the last book I read by her, The Darkest Part of the Forest, I thought Hazel was a bit of a sociopath and I remember thinking that it wasn’t normal that Tana woke up in a bloodbath of vampire violence that had wiped out entire teenage house party and basically felt no ill-effects from this, or even seemed really bothered by it while it was happening to her.

On the way to Coldtown, Tana also ends up having to deal with two teenagers who are dying to get to Coldtown to become vampires. Their names are ‘Midnight’ and ‘Winter’ and they have a blog. I don’t know if Black was stereotyping the shit out of stupid goth kids on purpose, but she nailed it here. I was embarrassed by their cringeyness and they weren’t even real people.

Anyway, I preferred The Darkest Part of the Forest. Coldtown isn’t bad, exactly, but it wasn’t my type of book and I wouldn’t revisit it.

The Darkest Part of the Forest

fantasy, horror, supernatural April 18, 2020 1 Comment

Holly Black was an author I hit hard in 2018. Not as hard as Stephen King or Bill Bryson, but still pretty hard for me (3 books).

This was the second Holly Black book I listened to, again, mostly at the gym.

I will say that it was under the Stephen King umbrella of supernatural/fantasy/horror, although this book was definitely less horror and more fantasy.

This was my favorite of Black’s books. Hazel and Ben, her brother, live in a town where the humans and fae live in close proximity. In the woods is a glass coffin where a boy with horns has been asleep for as long as anyone can remember. Then he wakes up.

Black has a knack for capturing the tumultuous inner lives of teenagers, and anyone who does a decent job of making teenagers anything other than just angsty whiners is a hero in my opinion. I’ve just read so much teenage angsty garbage that when I find characters that do more than this, I really appreciate it.

The story is a complex mix of fairy magic and a damsel-in-distress-with-a-twist story. Hazel’s relationships with her brother Ben, and another teenager named Jack, and with herself are basically the defining narratives here, that all combine to solve the mystery of what’s terrifying the people in town and how to stop it.

I liked Hazel, although she was a bit of a sociopath. Kids killing creatures – even non-human creatures – with delight always freaks me out a little. That said, children’s sense of justice is frequently much more black and white than an adult’s.

To illustrate: when I was a very small child in playgroup, a girl bit me. I was wearing a thick sweater, and still had teeth marks and a huge bruise on my arm. Also there were apparently no just consequences for this in my little mind. The girl wasn’t really “punished” (and again we were about two years old). My parents did as parents do – parenting. They tried to explain that sometimes kids do things wrong and it’s not nice to bite and the girl didn’t mean to hurt me, and I should forgive her etc… apparently I spent the time until the next playgroup saying “Not nice to bite?” and my parents would say “Yes, not not nice to bite.” Then, at the next playgroup, I apparently waited on a chair for that girl to run by, pulled her up by her hair, shook her around and yelled “NOT NICE TO BITE!” at her.

I don’t remember any of this, but I know myself well enough now to know that sounds like something Toddler!Kristine would do. VENGEANCE.

I didn’t love Black’s technique of going between the past and the present to reveal Hazel’s character. It felt a bit contrived, something to draw out the plot and prevent the reader from getting these pieces of the puzzle too soon, but without a real reason for doing it.

The story, though, was fun and well paced and there were some twists to keep me guessing, even if there was a bit of teenage angst that slowed things down here and there.

Overall, I liked The Darkest Part of the Forest. Would recommend.

Doll Bones

fiction, horror, supernatural June 25, 2019 Leave a comment

Doll Bones was the first of three stories I read by Holly Black in 2018. I didn’t realize it was a YA book when I started it, but I liked it enough to continue listening once I realized it was.

The story is about three kids named Zach, Poppy, and Alice who all play together and, now, at about 12 years old are caught between being kids and being teenagers. One of the characters in their game, the Great Queen, is based on a doll Poppy’s mother keeps in a case. Poppy, not wishing to grow up and wishing to keep her friends close to her (she’s figured out Alice has a crush on Zach and that Zach is now, for a reason unknown to her but revealed to the reader, embarrassed by the fact he plays with them) tells her friends that she had a dream about the Great Queen, and she’s actually a haunted doll made of human remains that wants to be put back in the cemetery where she belongs.

Poppy, Alice, and Zach end up on a quest to return the doll to its rightful resting place.

This was a good story that captured the heartache of adolescence so well. Everything’s hard, everything’s awkward, everything feels like the end of the world, even though it isn’t. I related too well to Poppy’s sense of losing her friends, to Alice’s crush on Zach, to Zach’s embarrassment about doing “baby” things but still loving them.

That said, the “horror” aspect to this story was a little weak. It wasn’t clear if the doll was haunted or if the kids were imagining it. A little more background on the girl who was supposed to be haunting them would have been nice too.

I also was sad because it was over too soon. I think the whole audiobook was done in about 5 hours and I wished there was more of it. Or a sequel. Sadly, there’s not.

Doll Bones was a fun one. It also convinced me I wanted to read more of Holly Black’s book, which I did later in 2018.