Actual rating: 4.5

Thanks to Netgalley and North Star Editions for providing me with an early copy in exchange for an honest review.

“My whole body is made up of apologies, thought. Apologies for getting in the way, for taking too long, for not responding.”

Right away I would say this is a perfect read for anyone who is a fan of We Are Okay by Nina LaCour and The Meaning of Birds by Jaye Robin Brown (although I have to say I loved this one a lot more).
Eighteen-year-old Rory is dealing with an aftermath of a car accident which killed her best friend Liv. The book is told in two timelines; one before the accident which lets us know how Rory and Liv became friends and what was happening between them and one after the accident where we see how Rory is dealing with the loss of her friend. This is a book that fully tackles the process of grief and dealing with survivor’s guilt, and it handles both very well.

Now I usually don’t read other reviews before I write mine but I’m kind of late with my review and I had to remind myself a bit on what happens, so I read a few and I see the main problems that seem be pointed out is the lack of romance. I understand why that would be disappointing, but I also feel like this book and its synopsis never promises you a sapphic romance in the focus. Like you know from the start one of them dies, you know this will be sad. This is more about having the bittersweet possibility of what could have been if there was more time, and the tragic accident didn’t happen. And personally, I eat that up because I knew what I signed myself up for. I also think this book reflects what teenagers are like today very well. Because yeah, you will say and do cringy things, you will make mistakes, you will be self-centred and angry at the whole world.
The only thing I’m not really a fan of are pop culture references. I just don’t like those and I don’t know why they are still included so much mainly because I feel like they don’t resonate much with those outside of certain country’s culture (like me who doesn’t know what is even being referenced 80% time) and I feel in a few years those will age badly anyway and no one will really know of them which is a disservice for a book that has potential to reach different audience in the long run.

For a debut novel Maxine Rae manages to capture grieving teenager’s experience perfectly and build complex relationship between these teenage girls as well as Rory and her mother. She also doesn’t fail to actually make Rory sound like an actual teenager and not the whole ‘how you're doing fellow kids’ which I feel so many YA novels struggle with. Anyways, great read for depressed girlies!

Rory doesn’t want to die. She wants an escape from reality. After being in an accident that killed her best friend, Liv, Rory doesn’t know what to do with herself. The story goes back and forth from the past, before the accident, and the months after. The reader watches how the accident unfolded, the pain of grief, and how to live after loss.

I liked the idea of this story. The idea of losing one of the most important people in your life and learning to move. Instead, this story focuses on Rory isolating herself and self-destructing. Everything from the characters to the story's bare bones just didn’t resonate with me. There are also quite a few issues within the writing that should have been fixed before this book was published (these are included in the con area).

This book is sad, and it ends that way. I am not a big fan of sad books. I like books with a happy ending, certainly when it comes to books with queer characters. The sheer sadness of this book does impact my rating, so if you like sad books, you may enjoy this book more than I did.

Pros
- A realistic look at loss. Healing is hard, and progress isn’t linear.

Cons
- Liv, the dead best friend, has a Stranger Things tattoo. The tattoo is numbers on her wrist. This tattoo is completely insensitive as it resembles tattoos given to those in Nazi concentration camps. This could have easily been taken out of the book or rewritten.
- Liv is depicted as a manic pixie dream girl. She is so different and cool. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks, is teaching herself multiple languages, and has no issue breaking the rules. The character just feels like everything “cool,” even when it makes no sense.
- Liv is the epitome of white feminism. Liv has these “woke” takes throughout the story, but they are incredibly surface-level, and no one ever questions her.
- The teenagers in the book aren’t written well. They are the idea of what a teenager is without any of the nuances.
- The writing can be clunky at times, and the pacing is all over the place.

I don't know if a book has ever spoken to 18 year old me quite like this one does. I loved it. So, so much. I cried. I laughed. All of it. Read it. You have to.

Rae has written a truly wonderful yet heartbreaking treatise on survivor's guilt.

I won't lie. It was a difficult read. But only in the sense that the story hits so many emotional levels that it was a cathartic experience. That may not be for everyone.

Thank you to North Star Editions, Flux, and NetGalley for providing an eARC for an honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

This book really transported me back to the days of quiet YA and I absolutely loved it. The format reminds me a lot of John Green's Looking for Alaska and is something we don't see very much these days in contemporary YA.

I found the writing to be easy to follow along with and the voice to be subdued but incredibly poignant at the same time. The themes in this book are hard to grapple with but this is such a nice book to read when you need a cry!

I didn't expect to love this book, but I did. I really did.

Rory and Liv have the best relationship, honest, raw, gritty. They are unapologetically themselves and encourage the other to embrace themselves for who they are. We all need someone in our lives like that.

Rory's pain is palpable throughout every single page of this book. The flashbacks give the reader so much context and love that it hurts.

Maxine Rae has done a stellar job of writing about love and loss in a tasteful and relatable way.

Read the book.

thank you so much to for giving me early access to this wonderful book!
i loved this book so much, i rated it 5 stars because i felt a deep connection with the story and legitimately enjoyed my time reading it, even when i was crying throughout a lot of it. to me, the vibes of the book as a whole reminded me of a mix of perks of being a wallflower and looking for alaska but the story was still very unique and didn’t feel like anything i read before. it was also so beautifully written, the word choices of the author, the emphasis on certain words or even the capitalization worked so well for me and added to the experience of being immersed in the book. one thing i really noticed was that the flipping between timelines worked really well and was well done, i often find this hard to follow but in this case it flowed very naturally between “before” and “after”. additionally, the characters were well developed, i felt a connection with all of them, even the ones who only come up a few times. overall i would 100% recommend reading this book, i loved it so much and probably have to buy myself a physical copy so i can have it in my physical collection too haha!

"'Here's what it means,' she says softly. 'It means Liv was loved by Rory Quinn-Morelli. It means she was the luckiest girl in the world.'"

COLD GIRLS tore apart every life-changing moment of one young girl's life, placed them in a hat, and plucked them out for the audience to view almost at random—the perfect encapsulation of PTSD.

As someone with PTSD who also acquired it as a result of childhood events, I was surprised to find such relatability and accuracy in our main character, Rory, despite the starkly different traumas we share. At its core, PTSD is always the same (though it is also always different). I have never experienced what Rory did, which was being the sole survivor of a car crash, and she has never experienced what I did, which I will not dump here in a book review. But I saw so much of myself in her. In every move she made and word she said, I found myself, young and bruised, a messy whirlwind that cannot be contained.

Which is why I loved the protagonist! People love to beg for messy protagonists, especially teenagers/girls/LGBTQ+ people, yet are so picky about it. To me, Rory was one of the messiest contemporary teens yet, and she doesn't even always apologise for her actions, but I do not care. She was amazing. I loved every moment of her story.

"It was a Tuesday night, and we were seventeen, and we were listening to every single song at once."

Including her relationship with her best friend Liv. The development of their connection consistently paralleled with the aftermath of the car crash was emotionally exhausting in the best way possible. It was like whiplash, with the way I found my heart beating for Rory's yearning and grief at once.

Especially that ending. Oh my god. Talk about a perfectly timed climax and resolution! The world was frozen around me, I was on the edge of my seat, and then I burst into tears. Sniffly-nosed and red-cheeked, the whole shebang. It was sensitive and raw, a miracle of reality, like the two-headed cow under the doubly starry night.

It is a heartbreaking read, but the kind I will recommend, for there is so much wonder to be found between the cracks.

"My sweet Roo. I'd give you the sky."

An honest and hard-hitting tale of friendship, family, and grief that is as beautiful as it is raw. Looking forward to seeing what this author publishes next. A brilliant read.

I would have easily rated this book lower because it absolutely did not touch me despite its topic (grief). Most of the story takes place during the fourth state, depression, and for a very, very long time it was no different than a gloomy winter rain sadness. By the end, the book got its act together, I think the last 20% were quite great in terms of emotional involvement and creative usage of fragmented text, but I wish it was that good the whole time.

I was primarily drawn to the potential relationship between the two girls, which was slower burn than a snail. It would have been perfectly fine to have two queer girls finding their friendship and nothing more, I know a lot of queer girls who don't fall in love with each other by default, and wouldn't have changed the story that much.

I like to finish on positives, so what should be highlighted is Jem, because only fictional men can be this perfect.

Woah, this book was really something else. To be frank my feelings about this book constantly changed while I was reading it but overall, I relatively enjoyed it.

Pros
The subject of grief was tackled extremely well throughout this whole book (especially the ending). The author did a very good job in highlighting how grief can affect a person and how everyone handles grief differently.

Cons
Liv as a character wasn't my favorite to say the least. She was portrayed as this "woke activist" who is so different from everyone in Clarksdale, and it just irked me. This is more of a personal opinion than anything else. I wished that the romance between Liv and Rory was explored more because throughout the book there was an obvious "romantic tension?" between the two girls and I feel like it would have made the ending more meaningful instead of how the ending actually occurred.

Overall, I do have mixed feelings about this book, but it was wrapped up very nicely.

I liked how the chapters alternated between before and after the accident, but I wish a little bit more time was given to the actual accident itself. Was I reading too fast and missed it?

This is a hard book to read and hard to review. Rory is so depressed and flat that it is hard to get engaged, while Liv is so bubbly and nearly (but not quite) a manic pixie dream girl, that she's also hard to really see. But that is the point, that both of those cold, hard shells are supposed to keep you at a distance.

So the writing is good and true, but it doesn't always make for an easy reading experience. Honestly the first 1/3 of the book was a real slog and it only got a bit better at the halfway point. The first real joy is at about 2/3, so hang in there, readers.

The before/after structure worked pretty well, though maybe not as well as [book:Looking for Alaska|99561], but I couldn't put my finger on why. Of course, being almost as good as Looking for Alaska is pretty danged good.

Heavy stuff, I wouldn't have wanted to read this in 2021 when we were locked down.

This book is haunting and heart-breaking. It's a story of grief and the raw emotions that exist when you are the one who survives a tragedy that took someone you loved. Much like in this book a similar accident occurred in my high school just a couple of weeks before graduation. To reach out and admit that you are not okay is a hard step to take but Rory shows that healing is possible. I love that the stigma of needing a therapist and learning strategies to face a traumatic experience is removed and shown as a much-needed resource that provides hope. The before and after telling about the worst night (the car wreck) was a creative and enjoyable way of progressing the story. By the end you were rooting for Rory to overcome her depression and fears to move on with her life. I feel that teens will connect with the characters in this book and feel empathy for those in similar situations. Thank you NetGalley for providing a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this one, overall a really great read. The thing that most immediately stood out was the characters’ speech, it sounded very much like how me or my friends would talk and not like an adult misusing gen-z slang which I’ve found in some YA books and always turns me off from a book. I was also impressed with the time integration–the book switches between different points in time in a sort of before/after way and the way it was done was very easy to follow and really enhanced the book. I also loved the characters, they were developed really well and even the side characters had personality, though I will say the main character’s development at the very end felt a bit rushed and a little too “happily ever after.”
The plot was enjoyable, it was a very easy read, and the main characters’ relationship with her best friend was beautiful (if heartbreaking). My only other comment would be that it felt like there was at least one unnecessary adverb in every sentence which got more annoying than it should’ve, though that may be more personal preference. If you’re a fan of Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia or want a less-sad Adam Silvera-type novel I’d recommend this one.
Thank you Netgalley for the ARC!

Pro
Good time integration
Speaks like a teenager without awkward misuse of gen-z slang
Strong character development
Con
Overuse of adverbs
Ending felt too “happily ever after”

Well written with well-developed characters. But I think that this story is a little too young for me. I think that it is great for the intended audience, and hopefully the gen Zers will like all of the references that I missed!

DNF at 33%. This is completely my fault for requesting a book about death and grief. I thought I could handle it but it was incredibly emotional. The writing is fantastic and the plot is something that I usually gravitate toward and love. I think I would have loved this book too. In fact, I did love what I read. I got really emotionally attached to the characters immediately and I needed to quit for my own mental health. I really want to revisit it someday though!

Cold Girls wrenched my heart into a million of little pieces. Even with the fact that I cry very easily, this book had be absolutely sobbing. The author, Maxine Rae, has some kind of magical talent to write passages that come out of know where and just sucker punches you in the heart.

Rory and Liv. Best friends until one night when tragedy happens and Liv is killed in a car accident while Rory survives. Dealing with guilt, the loss of her friend, and really almost a loss of herself, Rory struggles to make life work. Told in a back and forth timeline Rory recounts her time with Liv and how she must now navigate 5e world without her.

There is so much to this book to even know where to begin without giving away spoilers. I will definitely be adding this to our collection.

I'd like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. <3

I'm going to be entirely honest here... but I went into this book completely blind. I hadn't even read the summary and I just randomly began the book. I was hooked from the moment I started the first chapter and I couldn't put it down. It's THAT GOOD.

I think that I'll be thinking about this book even years into the future. It's one of those stories that stays with you for a long time, maybe even forever. It's beautiful but so goddamn heartbreaking. It's a book that I didn't know I needed until now and it honestly came at the perfect time for me. I feel like I was meant to read this story and for it to help me deal with everything going on in my life as it is in a way very similar to Rory's.

Rory is such a relatable character. I don't believe I've related to a fictional character more until now. Her and Liv's relationship was beautiful and it's something that I've experienced myself. The dialogue and just the whole book in general is beautifully written. The flow is perfect. Nothing feels forced or rushed or anything. I have absolutely no critical remarks, nothing negative to say. I am 110% pleased with absolutely everything that happened in the book. The story progressed just the way it should and I wouldn't change a thing about it even if I could. I feel like this is my new favorite book at this point.

This book definitely deserves the 5 stars and I will most probably read it again someday just so I can experience everything that it has to offer again.

The author did a great job to make everything about the story authentic and believable... and it made me fall in love with the characters more and more with each chapter. I am very pleased with everything.

I just reviewed Cold Girls by Maxine Rae. #ColdGirls #NetGalley
[NetGalley URL].

Where should I start with this review? Because this book left me speechless and heart broken.
I should probably start of with how Rory Quinn-Morelli is a 18 girl who has social anxiety and is attending this new school with lots of posh people, here she meets Liv, a gorgeous and perfect girl who loves music and stranger things. They friendship blooms after meeting at music class and see how their life progresses until that fatal night when Liv and Rory get into a car crash.

I love how Maxine Rae wrote grief in this book . Liv's pain was raw and real and it made me feel every pain she went through. I also love the time jumps from before to after the worst night where we can see how Liv and Rory's relationship grow.The ending didn't left me tears instead it made me feel so much sorrow that I couldn't even cry.

honestly this is one of the best books I've read in 2023 and i would definitely buy the physical copy of this.