The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

We’ve all got our vices, and for some of us it’s YA novels. No judging. But even if you aren’t looking for your next hit of teenage-vampire love, Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown will still hook you. Sure, there’s a vampire love interest and the pacing is weird (every other chapter is either a flashback, an info dump, or both) but Black creates an interesting world and (for the first two-thirds at least) an unpredictable story. In the near future it’s revealed that vampires do exist. The US government treats it like an outbreak, walling up infected cities and leaving both vampires and humans to fend for themselves. When Tana’s ex-boyfriend gets bitten, she ends up going with him to the nearest coldtown. The journey getting there is fun and the coldtown itself is fascinating, but the third act unfortunately sheds most of what made the book unique for standard vampire melodrama.

This article appears in Dec 26, 2013 – Jan 1, 2014.