I'm sitting on my couch, watching the local news. There's Chloe's parents, the mayor, the hangers on, all grouped round the pond for the ceremony. It's ten years since Chloe and Carl drowned, and they've finally chosen a memorial - a stupid summerhouse. The mayor has a spade decked out in pink and white ribbon, and he's started to dig.
You can tell from their faces that something has gone wrong. But I'm the one who knows straightaway that the mayor has found a body. And I know who it is.
This is the tale of two fourteen-year-old girls, best friends, and one terrible summer when lies, secrets, jealousy, and perversion ended in tragedy more tangled and evil than a tight-knit community can possibly believe.
A dark tale with a surreal edge, Jenn Ashworth's gripping novel captures the intensity of girls' friendships and the dangers of a predatory adult world they are just grown up enough to think they can handle. And it shows just how far that world will go, sacrificing truth in the name of innocence. ~~synopsis from Goodreads
My thoughts about Cold Light ~~
Wow! This book blew me away. It ended up not being at all like I thought it was going to be. The story starts out strong ~ finding a buried body on page 5. Wow! And then goes from there. The reader gets a look back to a summer over 10 years ago when things got very bad for a group of teenagers.
The story switches back and forth from that summer where a couple of 14 years old girls are hanging out and then the present, where those girls are grown up and trying to deal with what happened that summer. There is friendship, secrets, jealousy, lies, and people getting hurt, in a lot of different ways.
Chloe and Lara are best friends that summer. Add a boyfriend, add another girl who is trying to fit into the mix and add a sexual predator who is doing some not very nice things to lonely girls. It becomes a very intense summer. There is a lot of jealousy and anger that comes about when the friend's dynamics change.
The story overall is very good with some dark and disturbing aspects to it also. The end of this story was a complete shock to me ~ didn't see that coming. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough!
I received an ARC from TLC Book Tours
in exchange for an honest review.
Trailer for Cold Light
About the author
I get asked a lot at festivals and events if I’ve always written and the answer (if I feel like telling the truth that day) is yes. The first story I remember finishing was about a family of field mice who made a nest in the corner of a corn field and were massacred by a combine harvester. I think I was about six years old then, my fiction hasn’t lightened up much since and I still think happy endings are a bit of a cop out.
I studied English at Uni, thinking it would help make me into a writer. I wrote and almost finished a novel about a woman who built a hot air balloon in her garden shed – and then some bastard broke into my house and stole the laptop I was writing it on. I’ve learned to back up more carefully these days. I went to work in a library, had a baby and decided it was now or never – so signed up for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, clutching the first draft of the novel that would become
A Kind of Intimacy. I started blogging around this time too.
Since then
A Kind of Intimacy has been published in the UK, US and elsewhere and I’ve won or been
short-listed for a number of awards for my blog. In 2009
A Kind of Intimacy was included in the Waterstone’s New Voices promotion and short-listed for Sam Jordison’s Not The Booker Award at The Guardian. In 2010 it got a Betty Trask award from the Society of Authors.
Reluctantly, I decided to stop being a librarian, and I now
write,
edit and teach full time. I’ve just finished my second novel,
Cold Light which was published by Sceptre in the UK and William Morrow in the US in 2011.
If you root around enough on my website you’ll be able to find out about my books and
short stories, read about the other work I do – including
how to hire me, should you wish to – read my
interviews and
reviews, and
contact me with questions, compliments, insults and offers to buy me drinks.
Connect with Jenn
