‘The Coldest Girl In Coldtown‘ was excellent. It had a good plot, strong world-building, a cast of relatable characters and a teenage heroine, Tana, who I could believe in and care about and who wasn’t another version of Buffy Summers.

The Coldtowns at the heart of the story give an original answer to the “What if vampires came out into the open?” question. In the US, Coldtowns were created to contain the vampire plague that was sweeping the world. They are prison towns used to quarantine the vampires and the infected but not yet turned. You can go in but you can’t come back out and once you’re in, the rule of law no longer applies. The vampires ensure their food supply by controlling who gets turned and by using social media feeds of glamorous parties with beautiful vampires to attract people to enter a Coldtown so that they can join the party and , if they can get turned, party on forever.

The worldbuilding in the book is skullfully folded into the backstory and character exposition. This is a very personal account. Most of what we learn about the world comes from learnging about Tana, her family and the people that she meets. Most of it is told as part of the stream of events that carry Tana into Coldtown with the exception of a few flashbacks that give some insight into Tana’s history or the history of one of the vampires.

For me, the main strength of the book was that it focused not on the vampires or their world but on the personal journey for Tana, the seventeen-year-old main character. Her reactions set the emotional tone of the book, which is mostly of shock and fear and uncetrainty that somehow feels matter of fact rather than melodramatic. We first meet Tana, as she wakes in a bathtub after getting drunk at a party and finds that her friends have been that her friends slaughtered by vampires during the night. I liked that she was freaked out by all the gore but kept going anyway. I also liked that, even when she was flooded with fear, had a strong urge to flee and could hear the killer vampires stirring, she couldn’t bring herself to leave the behind two survivors she found bound and chained in a bedroom

Tana has s strong need to do the right thing but real life keeps getting in the way and her own conflicting desires make it harder to figure out what the right thing is. She sees the world quite clearly. Unlike her little sister, who has posters of vampires up on her wall and is besotted with the fairytale glamour pumper out be the live feeds from Coldtown, Tana doesn’t see vampires as glamorous. She doesn’t see tham as demonic either. For the most part she sees them as people who discover who they really are when they possess the power to do anything to anyone without suffering any consequences. She recognises that it’s a lust for this power that pulls so many people to Coldtown.

When Tana finally enters Coldtown, she sees it for the grubby, dark, dangerous, desperate place that it is. She understands that whole situation is wrong and that there’s nothing she can do about it except make the best choices that she can.

The plot kept Tana at the centre without turning her into a super hero. The choices she takes define her. They make her more herself but she is still essentially the same girl that we met at the start of the book.

The plot is clever and kept the tension high right up to the end, partly by revealing more about the relationship between the main characters but mostly by keeping me engaged with Tana and by knowing that, whatever she decided to do, it would be unexpected.

I had a great time with ‘The Coldest Girl In Coldtown’ and I’ll be looking for more books by Holly Black, I’m tempted by her Curse Workers series and by her latest novel, ‘Book Of Night‘.