Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth
My rating: 3/5 cats
the more i think about this book, the less i like it. and now i have put off writing the review for four days, and i don’t even care…
it started off really strong for me, with a great premise, but i was a bit let down by the ending. and by ending, i mean the last 100 pages, pretty much.
see, here’s the thing—i got up to page 62, and i forgot this thing at home. it was devastating. i had nothing to read on the subway going in to work, and had to actually look at people. it was the worst. so i borrowed a book at work, and read it and then returned to this book the next day. so maybe my momentum was broken, maybe i was just angry that it had let itself be forgotten so easily, maybe maybe maybe. but maybe i just didn’t like it very much.
i think a lot of it boils down to character. i am fine with unlikeable characters. i am fine with unreliable characters. i am not fine with implausible characters—characters who have something happen to them in their youth and then spend the rest of their lives stuck in amber because of it. come on—you must have done something in that time! no? nothing?
this is about a twenty-four year old woman who lost her best friend to an apparent suicide-pact with her much older boyfriend when they are both fourteen. their relationship had been one based on an uneven power struggle from the outset—lola is shy and poor, with parents older than most; a long-suffering mother who has to take care of her husband, with his spells of mental confusion and obsessive behavior, and her increasingly-wayward daughter. chloe has more money, but she also has a mean streak, a sense of entitlement, and the invincibility of being a pretty teenage girl. she shoplifts and bullies lola constantly, and then she meets a much older man and begins a relationship with him, leaving lola further behind. around this time, emma appears on the scene, she becomes fast friends with chloe, and they begin excluding lola from their friendship.
the reasons will be given, but they will be unsatisfying, leaving more questions than resolutions.
as a backdrop, a flasher begins terrorizing young girls in the city, and a boy goes missing.
for me, it is too many things: a young girl resenting her parents’ shortcomings while still retaining tenderness for her lost father, the story of a media intent on providing entertainment and misleading the viewers with tawdry crimes and instilling fear, the story of teenage friendships and the toxic elements of peer pressure, and secrets secrets secrets.
and it comes back around to character. i do not understand why (and this is a huge spoiler, for reals) View Spoiler »
i don’t know. i am still curious about ashworth’s other book, but this one just didn’t work for me. maybe it will work for you?
i am only half-engaged in writing this review, so i’m sorry if it makes no sense. my brain feels spongy.
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