Cold Light
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
An unsettling, darkly humorous tale of teenage girls in a predatory adult world, and a cocktail of lies, jealousy and unworldliness that leads to tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in a small English town, Ashworth s second novel (after A Kind of Intimacy) offers an object lesson in the perils of concealing the past. For ten years, twenty-something Laura has kept mum about at least one dreadful secret: What really happened when her best friend Chloe drowned at age 14. The knowledge has crippled Laura s hopes for a meaningful life. She holds a menial job as a shopping center cleaner and lives alone, fearful that mutual friend Emma might expose her. In her first-person recollections of the fateful months preceding Chloe s death, Laura dwells perhaps overmuch on the minute details of her angst-ridden adolescence. Ashworth pulls no punches. Though some of the dark, British humor may be lost on an American audience, the author s narrative is revealing, timely, and damning of tabloid-media sensationalism.
Customer Reviews
Stark and moving
Cold Light is Jenn Ashworth's second book and she continues to write about people on the fringes of society. Her writing style is stark but there is comedy, pathos and truth in her young teenage characters. She captures the feelings of being a teenager brilliantly through her characters' behaviour and the possessions with which they surround themselves.
It's a novel in which the main characters endure - and cause - terrible pain, both to themselves and strangers but you never have anything but sympathy for them. These are lives not so much tinged with, but informed by sadness, but the novel is never grim - you care for these girls, especially Lola. Her seeming emotional detachment from the events in her life towards which she should be anything but detached are brilliantly countered by episodes of moving sentimentality.
This is a novel that tells about wasted potential in almost all of its characters but the novel never lacks hope. Jenn Ashworth is very talented and I look forward to her next book immensely.