Review: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

Rating: 3.5/5

This story breathes new life into a very tired genre: Vampires. In this world, walled cities contain vampires to quarantine, and prevent outbreaks from happening. Humans and vampires mingle in these towns which have been shown in a glamorous light on TV, where there are live streams of the 24 hours parties. There is only once catch: once you enter Coldtown, you can never leave.

At the beginning of this novel Tana, wakes up after a perfectly normal party to find herself surrounded by the corpses of her friends (an extreme case of a party gone wrong). The only survivors of this massacre are her ex-boyfriend, who has been infected and is on the edge of turning and a vampire in chains. Tana does the only thing she thinks they can do: go directly to Coldtown.

Tana isn't the typical kick-ass protagonist. Her actions were filled with self-doubt and fear but she never stopped doing what she felt was right, which was important.

This is an example of a stand-alone novel done right. So often I find stand-alones aren't as satisfying because they don't have as much space to build the world and tell the story. However this story had a very clever use of flashbacks. Normally I'm not the biggest flashback fan, and more often than not find them tedious and unnecessary but these ones added knowledge about the characters and understanding of their nature.

I really loved Holly Black's writing style. The atmosphere she created was fantastic and the characters where vivid and realistic. However I think my main problem with this book was the 3rd person perspective, I think it would have been more engaging if it was 1st person.

This rating might have been higher, because I really did love this book, but for some completely unexplained reason it took me a reeeeaally long time to get through this (we're talking like 6 months) and I just couldn't rate a book any higher than this if it took me this long to get through