Bluest Hair in Coldtown: Book Launch and Review

Sorry for the delay in posting, but you know, sometimes Real Life interferes with Book Life. One week ago tonight, my coworkers and I hosted the launch party for Holly Black's latest novel, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, which is one of my favorite YA books for the season. When I'm really struck by a particular book and my store hosts an event for the author, I sometimes do wacky things like color my hair. For Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus from a couple of years ago, I went for a bright, fire engine red in honor of that book's reveurs. In honor of Tana, the heroine of Coldtown who has blue hair, and of Holly Black who also has blue hair, I decided to give myself blue hair for the day, too. I can't speak for Tana, but Holly's professionally-lightened-then-tinted hair looked considerably better than my spent-twenty-bucks-at-Sally's-for-temporary-blue, but it's the spirit that counts, right?

Holly with booksellers

I loved The Coldest Girl in Coldtown from page one, when I read it on the plane on my way to Anguilla for summer vacation a few months ago.  It's immediately engaging and well-written, and clearly this is not your daughter's vampire novel.  True, it's a young adult book, but Holly wrote this book in homage to the great vampire works she read growing up.  If you think vampire books begin and end with Twilight and thus haven't given them a fair shake, give this one a go.


Tana lives in a slightly futuristic world where a rogue vampire decided to break all of the ritualist rules of Vampire Secrecy by infecting hundreds and hundreds of people with the Cold, and they, in turn, infected thousands and thousands and so on. This created worldwide havoc, but at least in the US there are a handful of Coldtowns, where vampires and humans live side by side in an uneasy alliance: humans allow vamps to feed on them just a little via IV tubes rather than by biting (which spreads the Coldness), and therefore the vamps' food source doesn't dry up (literally) and the humans can keep on being human and not Cold.

One day, Tana wakes up from an all night party to discover she is the only partygoer left alive from a mass vampire attack. When she discovers Aidan, an exboyfriend infected with the Cold, and Gavriel, a mysterious but insane vampire, chained up in a bedroom, her split decision to try to rescue them both by driving to the nearest Coldtown (in Springfield, MA) changes all of their lives. You'll find no romanticized notion of vampires, no helpless heroine, and no love triangles here.  Instead, you'll get a moral-but-complicated-heroine who often doesn't know what the right thing to do is, plus a vampire who is unhinged, secretive, and seductive. It's hard to predict whether the denouement will bring revenge, romance, or revolution. In other words, this book is thoroughly fun and refreshing.

Holly, answering questions from the audience

We had a packed audience for Holly's reading, followed by a vigorous Q&A, where I was both disappointed and relieved to learn that Holly wrote Coldtown as a one-off.  I've been saying for the last three years that what I'd really like were fewer series and more substantive single novels being published with complicated and interesting heroines, hold the love triangles, please.  Holly delivered *precisely* that, but next time I'll include the caveat "unless I really like the heroine, in which case please write more."

Anna obligingly demonstrates the proper placement for candy fangs

Holly also brought candy fangs for the entire audience and passed them around in a basket. My bookstore gave away fang glitter tattoos to everybody who came, and the publisher provided us with Coldtown glowsticks to give away to the first 50 people who bought the book.  So all in all, it was a pretty kick-ass night.

In parting, here's a photo of me before the event--you cannot really tell, but there are actually three shades of blue happening in my hair.  And my eyebrows are slightly tinted, too.  That's bookseller dedication, peoples.  It took three showers to wash all of the residual blue out of my hair and nearly an entire bottle of conditioner to get my regular hair texture back to normal, but it's so worth it. And for any of you publishers out there who would like to subsidize a professional color coordination of my hair for your next big event, you know where to find me!

Book (P)Review: Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley

Have I mentioned recently how much I love my job?  No? Let me be clear: I do. Not least because occasionally I am able to make the long trek from where I live to Boston to have dinner with authors, publishers, and other booksellers. Last week the unpredictable New England winter weather cooperated and so I made my way to The Met Bar & Grill in Boston's Back Bay, courtesy of Little, Brown, to meet Peggy Riley, author of Amity and Sorrow.

When I read this book last month preparatory to meeting the author, I wasn't sure what to make of it at first.  It's the story of a mother named Amaranth who makes a desperate and reckless escape from a polygamous cult, fleeing with her two daughters across state lines, believing that the madman of her husband will pursue them at any cost. She may have been willing for him to take on all of his other wives after marrying her, but she'll be damned if he'll let him take one of their daughters as his next one, and so amidst the confusion of a police raid and the conflagration of their homemade temple, they escape in the night. Thus the book gets off to a start that is rife with sensationalism and it's as difficult for the reader to turn away from it as from a traffic accident.

Her daughters, named Amity and Sorrow, have never known anything outside their narrowly circumscribed life, but while Amity's youth and inherent sweetness might preserve her sanity and enable her to start a new life, Sorrow has no such refuge. She is very much her father's daughter, believing that she is the bringer of signs and the bearer of the new messiah, and she is so deeply imbalanced that in her quest to be reunited with her father her actions become as brutal as they are unpredictable.

In the meantime, Amaranth is pretty close to being useless as a parent, immobilized as much from the guilt she feels about raising her children in such a way as from being completely unaware of how to live in the modern world, one where women are allowed to talk with men who aren't their husbands, and where literacy in girls is required, not forbidden. She doesn't know whom to trust, she constantly fears that her husband is just one step behind her, and her uneasy alliance with the local farmer who allows them to live on his property in exchange for work only serves to confuse her.

The book is pretty easy to race through (after all, it ticks SO MANY of the boxes: cults, rape, incest, wild pursuits, madness, torture, brainwashing) but it was only when I got to the end of the book and could see Sorrow's insanity laid bare that led me to a better understanding of the novel and the women in it.  Well, that and being able to hear the author talk about the psychology of cults and how otherwise bright, "normal" women can be lured into situations like Amaranth was, with the promise of family and always having someone to belong to.

I suspect that this book will be making a big splash when it's published in April.

photo of me with Peggy Riley. Sorry for the bad lighting!

A new novel, utterly convincing and haunting

Room by Emma Donoghue.  Jack, our 5-year-old narrator, and his mother are being held captive in an 11' by 11' room.  His mother struggles to give him as close to normal a childhood as possible under these desperate circumstances, with "Outside" being a made-up world he sees only on TV. But when Ma's daily struggle against insanity becomes too much to bear, Jack must bear the burden of a drastic escape plan.  Donoghue's ability to portray Jack's understanding of his world and Ma's determination to keep him safe is both poignant and heart-wrenching.  It's been a long time since I've read a book that has affected me as much as this one has--it's absolutely haunting.  This title was the #1 choice among independent booksellers for the month of Septemer (you can see the entire list here). It's out this week in hardcover from Little, Brown.  

(Edited to add: This book has since made the  "short list" for the Man Booker Prize.)