Book Review: Cold Kiss

Cold Kiss

Amy Garvey

Harper Teen

304 pages

Wren is a high school student who seems to be more reclusive since the death of her boyfriend Danny over the summer.  Her two best friends, Jess and Darcia have tried to get her to come out and socialize, to no avail.  However, it’s not grief that is keeping Wren away, but the fact that she is spending time with her boyfriend.  The dead one.

Wren has special powers.  She has not learned how to control them and her mother and other female relatives have the same powers, but no one is willing to talk about it.  Wren decides to go ahead and see if she can raise Danny from the dead.  He was her first love and her grief at losing him is overwhelming.  Unfortunately, she really doesn’t think it through, and Danny coming back to life is not at all what she expected.

Danny is not the same.  He is mopey and despondent.  Wren is forced to hide him in the rafters of an elderly neighbor’s garage and the stress of constantly checking on him and keeping such a huge secret is taking its toll on her. All this insanity culminates with the arrival at school of a new boy named Gabriel, who quickly learns Wren’s secret and embarks on a way to help her.

The overall story of Cold Kiss is a sad and desperate one. Wren realizes that she has to figure out a solution to Danny’s presence but that opens up the grief of losing him the first time.  She is guilt stricken with the situation she has put Danny in and laments that she didn’t love him enough to let him rest in peace.  Instead, she made a selfish decision to bring him back without thinking about what she would be putting him through.

Personally, I didn’t see it that way.  Obviously Wren made a huge mistake in bringing Danny back to life, but I never saw her as selfish.  That’s not to say I liked her.  It became obvious early on that something needed to be done about the Danny situation, but Wren preferred to just stick her head in the sand and ignore the problem.  I understood the tension she had with her mother but I wanted to scream at her for not going to her mother with the problem knowing that her mother could help her figure something out.

Paranormal YA is not generally my genre of choice, but bringing a dead boyfriend back to life was not something I could pass up.  It was a fun read that raised some interesting questions but it didn’t blow me away.

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I received an egalley of this book via Netgalley.

This book counts towards RIP VI.