Book Review: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

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.

Oh, vampires, how I still grow wary of your role in young adult fiction.  So many vampires….so many similarities.  However, I will say that Black’s novel was a bit different….in a good way, for the most part. 

The book starts out with a pretty big shocker and the description of the massacre that Tana survives was very vivid and her reaction and shock that she experiences was extremely real. As for saving her asshole ex-boyfriend? Well, I take issue with him and will get to that. 

Tana makes friends with a wonderfully insane vampire, Gavriel, who has his own agenda in a world where vampires are practically worshipped for their beauty, elegance, and have their own TV reality empire. 

I think the part that I was most impressed with during this novel was the idea of Coldtowns and how the world seemed to adapt fairly well to the knowledge that vampires were in fact real.  And as sad as it seems, I can only imagine that there would be people like Midnight who would sacrifice their futures to go and live amongst the vampires in the hope that they too would feed off of human blood for the rest of their existance.  It’s probably the thing I respect most about Black’s protagonist, Tana, she struggles to understand why some people would give up their lives for eternity and how that could affect their humanity (kind of like Elena on The Vampire Diaries). 

Things that I did not like: All of those random asides with pieces of Point of View from Tana’s little sister, Pearl.  It got to the point where I was just so bored with her that I skipped over her small parts and tried to get back to the meat of the story, which was with Tana and Gavriel.  

I did not like Aidan.  He was so ridiculously selfish and a complete douchebag. He was too concerned with himself for 95% of the novel that he served as more of a hindrance than a help.  Okay, he helped like ONCE.  Regardless, he really just could have been a better friend to Tana considering their history.  

There was a bit of a twist at the end, that I did predict, but it did not take away from my reading experience. Overall, considering this was my first time reading any of Black’s work, I think that it was entertaining, but it definitely had some pacing issues with the random flashbacks and switches to Pearl’s POV. 

3.5 Bards.