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.
words in scarlet ink 