Cold Kiss by Amy Garvey

Title/Author: Cold Kiss by Amy Garvey
Publisher/Date published: HarperTeen, September 20th 2011
How I got this book: received it from the publisher through NetGalley

Goodreads summary: "It was a beautiful, warm summer day, the day Danny died.
Suddenly Wren was alone and shattered. In a heartbroken fury, armed with dark incantations and a secret power, Wren decides that what she wants — what she must do — is to bring Danny back.
But the Danny who returns is just a shell of the boy Wren fell in love with. His touch is icy; his skin, smooth and stiff as marble; his chest, cruelly silent when Wren rests her head against it.
Wren must keep Danny a secret, hiding him away, visiting him at night, while her life slowly unravels around her. Then Gabriel DeMarnes transfers to her school, and Wren realizes that somehow, inexplicably, he can sense the powers that lie within her — and that he knows what she has done. And now Gabriel wants to help make things right.
But Wren alone has to undo what she has wrought — even if it means breaking her heart all over again."

Ok, so I had some doubts about this book, but I'd heard really good things about it, so I requested it, because you know, I have skipped on books many times, only to hear EVERYONE raving about it and then loving it myself and regretting not getting to it sooner. But this time, I should have trusted my instincts.

I'm not big on zombies. I'm totally fine with undead beings: vampires, revenants, ghosts. But zombies... They don't do it for me (mostly because they're creepy and want to eat my brains). And Danny was pretty much like a zombie to me. So we were not off to a good start.

But in the beginning I thought, well, seems like Wren (which is an AWESOME name) has gotten herself into a sticky situation (always wanted to say that), let's see how she'll manage to get out of it. Wren seemed cool at first, she had been dealing with the consequences on her own and because of this she had pretty much lost her friends and you know, her LIFE.

Enter Gabriel, who for some reason I can't figure out, is attracted to Wren. And seriously, there was too much insta-love for me here. I do not understand WHY he would like her.

This is probably the main issue: I did not like Wren. She treats a lot of people badly. REALLY badly! Her mom, her friends, her sister, Gabriel and yes, her dead boyfriend too. She's shutting them out and I can get she has to keep the undeadness of Danny a secret, but still. You can still be a decent person. But she's not. She doesn't appreciate help when it's offered, especially by Gabriel. And she has issues with her mom that I did not get at all and she's generally not a good person. There, I said it.

Also, she's constantly crying about the situation with Danny WITHOUT actually DOING something about it! I mean, really, it's been like that for 3 MONTHS. Not days, months. And she knew it wasn't right pretty much from the start. What is wrong with her that she didn't do something about it sooner! This annoyed me.

So yeah, this book wasn't for me. I finished it because it was a pretty quick read and I was thinking it would get better. I think this is a stand-alone, but there's a lot of issues left unresolved. There's a whole lot going on between Wren and her mother I couldn't really make sense of, also stuff about her father, but this never gets explained further. To me, this was the most interesting part of the novel, so I'm sad that it wasn't explored further.

My rating: 1,5 stars