Holly Black is a bestselling author who writes books for children and young adults. She is the author of many well known books, including The Spiderwick Chronicles which I’ve read as a kid. She is mostly writing fantasy stories and her works have received a lot of award nominations. 

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is about a girl named Tana. She lives in a world where vampires are not a myth, but a terrifying reality. Her past encounters and present experiences entwine together, when she wakes up after a party and finds out that everyone who was in the party, is dead. Well… almost everyone.

To start, I was very surprised when it turned out that the book is about vampires. For some reason I was sure that it is going to be about zombies, for some reason that seemed to make sense in my mind – towns, blocked with zombies – a bit of the Walking Dead vibe, right?

Unfortunately there seem to be less good things to say about this book than bad. But to be honest, I didn’t really enjoy The Spiderwick Chronicles when I was a kid and neither did I  The Darkest Part of the Forest (review). I feel like the author’s style might just not fit my taste.

It was a quick read, but as with all the books I’ve read by this author, it seemed to be a very slow process. I don’t know what it is about her writing, but I just feel like it takes forever to get things done, because there’s quite a lot of action in her books.

I think I said it about the previous Black’s book as well, but I felt like, if I put this book down, I will never pick it up again. It will probably not stay in my bookshelf for long.

The book itself was weird, I felt like it could be divided in couple of parts and… well, the last couple parts of it were not really necessary.
So Tana finds other survivors and they decide on a plan, which they follow. And once that initial plan is executed (not perfectly, obviously), I would expect the book to end. But here we have 300 more pages, with some more action. After finishing the book, I was confident that the last 100 pages were unnecessary in this book. It just seemed a waste – it wasn’t fun or interesting and the plot twist wasn’t worth the time.

Another thing that I did not particularly enjoy was the ending. It was partially left open, but I just hated everything about it. I felt like Tana is over dramatised to be some kind of superhero by how she acted until the end. By the way – the names of the characters seriously disturbed my reading, I just didn’t feel like Tana was the right name for the girl. Also Midnight’s name was used a lot together with ‘dawn’ or ‘evening’, which I absolutely hated, because I had to make sure that they are talking about a human, not time of the day. Not cool.

Overall the book was not at all what I expected, but I also don’t feel like it was a waste of time. This is a very rare occasion, where I was ready to have more romance and even anticipating it, but got a cold bucket of water in my face for even wishing that, because every trace of romance disappeared from the view as soon as I got the tingling feeling that I will like this one.

I gave this book two stars, mostly for the slow dragging, unnecessary length and the ending I didn’t like. I guess one can say, that I simply did not bond with this book too well, which possibly would not be the case with young adults, who don’t mind a fair share of blood, killing and some attractive vampires.

Let me know, what you thought of this book in the comments bellow. Also, give me your thoughts, if I should try some more books from Holly Black, after I have not liked two of her books (not counting Spiderwick, because that was so long ago…), I would really appreciate your thoughts and comments! Thank you and cheerio!