Cold Kiss

Cold Kiss by Amy Garvey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


4.5 stars


We were completely different. Danny was tall, sweet, graceful despite legs that went on forever. I was little, moody, uncoordinated. We didn't like the same music or the same movies. He put onions and mushrooms on his pizza and never wore socks and could sleep through a pipe bomb. I survived on bananas and yogurt and always wore hats and got carsick unless I chewed gum with my headphones on. It didn't matter. I loved him.

As soon as she entered puberty, strange things started happening around Wren: flying objects and exploding light bulbs became a regular occurrence. This wasn't completely unexpected: all the women in Wren's family can do the same, but for some reason, Wren's mother refuses to talk about it or teach her how to control it. So when Wren’s boyfriend Danny dies in a car accident, Wren decides to use her power and bring him back to her. Unfortunately, Danny that rises from the grave isn’t the same easygoing Danny they buried two weeks earlier. The new Danny, angry and confused, is not nearly as harmless as Wren thought he would be. Just keeping him hidden and compliant might prove to be too big a challenge for one seventeen-year-old girl.

I enjoyed the new take on zombies. Garvey wrote: My zombie, such as he is, isn’t George Romero’s, as you probably figured out. He’s closer to the kind of zombie you might create with Haitian vodou magic, a corpse reanimated and then controlled by a sorcerer. While zombies we’re used to reading about are usually scary in a grotesque way, Danny was creepy and deeply disturbing. Every time Wren kissed him or placed her head on his silent chest, I felt the coldness of his body on my own skin and I shuddered involuntarily. He really made my skin crawl. It was easy enough to forget that he was once a warm and loving boy and that none of it was his fault.

I never even realized how thoroughly I’d connected with Wren until I caught myself siding with her even when she was obviously wrong. I don’t think I even noticed the other (living) characters, not in their own merit at least. They meant to me what they meant to Wren, and if she suddenly changed her mind about one of them, I changed my mind together with her.

The funny thing is that Wren isn’t a character I’d normally like, but that’s where Garvey’s strength lies. Create a selfless, heroic character and everyone will be crazy about him/her under any circumstances, but write a girl who is self-indulgent and careless and make me care about her - and you'll have accomplished something not many authors can.

I think that’s what every emotional reader seeks – a character he/she can connect with entirely. But Cold Kiss is also thought-provoking and original, and Amy Garvey’s marvelous writing skills add more magic to this powerful, compelling and haunting story. I will not only read whatever she decides to write next, I’ll probably preorder it as well.

Favorite quote:

Love like that is what they make movies about. It's the thing you're supposed to want, the answer to every question, the song that you're supposed to sing. But love like that can be too big, too. It can be something you shouldn't be trusted to hold when you're the kind of person who drops the eggs and breaks the remote control.
Love doesn’t break easily, I found. But people do.