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3.75 AVERAGE
3.75 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I've never read one of Black's novels before, but I've read her graphic novel series, The Good Neighbors, and a lot of her short stories, and one thing that's always impressed me about her is that she's not afraid to take risks. To do the unexpected and uncomfortable. To create a sympathetic character, one you can identify with, and have him or her do something terrible. To take readers to a truly dark place.
The other thing I love about Holly Black is her follow-through on taking an idea to the extreme and creating a wholly believable world around it, a world based on our own but with a fundamental difference. Cassel's world is a recognizable one, it's our world, really, but the addition of curse workers -- and the alternate history Black has created to encompass them -- changes everything just a little bit. Everyone wears gloves as a precaution -- if everyone is wearing gloves, than no one can be secretly worked by someone. Bare hands are shocking and inappropriate. People also wear charms that protect against being worked, and while selling the charms isn't illegal, there's no regulation to assure that the charms you're getting are real. Then there's a new genetic test that can identify people who are workers, and some in the government want to make it mandatory, to create a database of workers that is supposed to remain secret (but no one really thinks it will). Others, including one of Cassel's friends at school, whose mother created the advocacy group HEX, want curse work to be made legal, so that workers won't be forced to turn to crime -- and the mob families -- to make their living.
Cassel is a tough character -- I enjoyed reading from his perspective, but I could see how others might not. He's an unabashed liar and con artist -- everyone is a mark to him, someone to be used and manipulated, even the few people he counts as his friends. Yet at the same time, it's clear that his moral compass is higher than his family's, and that he's begun to realize the limitations to always thinking of the angles. He keeps saying he's not a good guy (a lot of his narrative is written as if he's addressing the readers), but it's unclear to what extent this is true, and it stays that way for quite a while. Even when it becomes clear that Cassel is not the bad guy he thinks he is, you're left with the certainty that he could be that guy one day, and not just because his loyalty to his family outstrips everything else. He loves the con, and he has bad role models. His brothers may love him, and the signs are there (though understated), but they are also beasts who use him horribly for their own ends. His mercurial mother doesn't understand why changing someone's emotions to suit her is wrong. His grandfather seems like a decent guy, the only truly stand-up one in the bunch, but he used to kill people for the mob.
I figured out early on that Cassel was a transformation worker. It's unfortunate, but true, that in most fantasy novels, whenever someone comments that a particular kind of magic is rare and powerful and special, the main character will invariably turn out to be the wielder of such magic. Especially if the main character thinks he or she has no powers at all.
But, this was the only thing I could predict about the novel. The slow reveal of Cassel's transformation powers and how his brothers have been using him all these years is shocking, because Black uses my own ability to predict plot twists against me by creating an unreliable narrator who doesn't know he's unreliable. Cassel is not the kind of narrator you implicitly trust, because he starts by talking about being the best grifter in the family, but you believe him on the little things. The clues to what's really going on are so subtly interwoven into his narrative that you miss them -- just like Cassel does. I'm talking little clues, clues that don't even seem like clues but like facts, like when Cassel tells you what kind of workers the various members of his family are (Granddad a death worker; Philip a physical worker; Barron a luck worker; Mom an emotion worker), or a throwaway comment Granddad makes to Cassel -- "My memory's fine" -- when you think he's talking about Uncle Armen's Alzheimer's. Barron's notebooks; the feral cats in the garage; Cassel's dreams; Philip's problems with his wife; Mom's calls from jail telling Cassel to trust his brothers: these little moments come back with new meaning when Cassel begins to discover that his memory has been tampered with.
Normally, when I read a book, I know more than the characters know, because I see more story than they do. It's harder with a first person narrator, but because I also have the benefit of thirty-some years of internalizing story structure, I can still see things coming that the characters can't. In this book, my expectations were continually unsettled; Cassel can't tell which memories are true and which are false, and neither could I, and his search to find out who messed with his memories, what really happened to Lila, and what his brothers are up to, is full of misdirection. It is some brilliant plotting, particularly how it all plays out, when Cassel manages to turn it all around on his brothers.
And just when you relax, Black surprises you yet again, with another terrible, terrible truth, and the ending leaves you feeling sick and horrified. Black is a master of those uncomfortable endings, which I love love love.
This is not a book for everyone, because it's not a happy story or a fast-paced one. It's dark and subtle and you get the wool pulled over your eyes several times. You're kept distant from most of the characters because Cassel is distant, and most of them are not likable. (I think that Cassel is likable, but I don't think everyone would agree with me.) There's not a ton of action until the end; in fact, the plot develops slowly and you have to have patience that it's all going to come together. The meticulous pacing allows the faint, nagging sense that something is wrong to develop, until the foreboding gets so thick that it makes up for the lack of action. In this kind of book, just when you have an emotional payoff and you're letting out your breath in relief, something happens to stop it entirely. It's a horror story and a heist story rolled up into one, and one of the more impressive books I've read this year. I have no idea where the next one in the series will go but I can't wait.
For those of you who have read this book, did you get the impression that the piles of junk in Cassel's childhood home and his ability as a transformation worker were connected? Lila tells Cassel that his brothers have been using him as a assassin/garbage disposal, having him turn people into objects and then dumping them, but she never says where they dump them. I know Cassel says his mother filled the house with stuff, but do you think it's possible that the brothers used the house to dump the transformed people, knowing that these objects will blend in with all their mother's accumulated garage sale purchases and stuff? Doesn't that make all the scenes where he's cleaning up the house super, super creepy?
ETA: Edited to fix the repeated misspellings of Cassel's name. D'oh!
The other thing I love about Holly Black is her follow-through on taking an idea to the extreme and creating a wholly believable world around it, a world based on our own but with a fundamental difference. Cassel's world is a recognizable one, it's our world, really, but the addition of curse workers -- and the alternate history Black has created to encompass them -- changes everything just a little bit. Everyone wears gloves as a precaution -- if everyone is wearing gloves, than no one can be secretly worked by someone. Bare hands are shocking and inappropriate. People also wear charms that protect against being worked, and while selling the charms isn't illegal, there's no regulation to assure that the charms you're getting are real. Then there's a new genetic test that can identify people who are workers, and some in the government want to make it mandatory, to create a database of workers that is supposed to remain secret (but no one really thinks it will). Others, including one of Cassel's friends at school, whose mother created the advocacy group HEX, want curse work to be made legal, so that workers won't be forced to turn to crime -- and the mob families -- to make their living.
Cassel is a tough character -- I enjoyed reading from his perspective, but I could see how others might not. He's an unabashed liar and con artist -- everyone is a mark to him, someone to be used and manipulated, even the few people he counts as his friends. Yet at the same time, it's clear that his moral compass is higher than his family's, and that he's begun to realize the limitations to always thinking of the angles. He keeps saying he's not a good guy (a lot of his narrative is written as if he's addressing the readers), but it's unclear to what extent this is true, and it stays that way for quite a while. Even when it becomes clear that Cassel is not the bad guy he thinks he is, you're left with the certainty that he could be that guy one day, and not just because his loyalty to his family outstrips everything else. He loves the con, and he has bad role models. His brothers may love him, and the signs are there (though understated), but they are also beasts who use him horribly for their own ends. His mercurial mother doesn't understand why changing someone's emotions to suit her is wrong. His grandfather seems like a decent guy, the only truly stand-up one in the bunch, but he used to kill people for the mob.
I figured out early on that Cassel was a transformation worker. It's unfortunate, but true, that in most fantasy novels, whenever someone comments that a particular kind of magic is rare and powerful and special, the main character will invariably turn out to be the wielder of such magic. Especially if the main character thinks he or she has no powers at all.
But, this was the only thing I could predict about the novel. The slow reveal of Cassel's transformation powers and how his brothers have been using him all these years is shocking, because Black uses my own ability to predict plot twists against me by creating an unreliable narrator who doesn't know he's unreliable. Cassel is not the kind of narrator you implicitly trust, because he starts by talking about being the best grifter in the family, but you believe him on the little things. The clues to what's really going on are so subtly interwoven into his narrative that you miss them -- just like Cassel does. I'm talking little clues, clues that don't even seem like clues but like facts, like when Cassel tells you what kind of workers the various members of his family are (Granddad a death worker; Philip a physical worker; Barron a luck worker; Mom an emotion worker), or a throwaway comment Granddad makes to Cassel -- "My memory's fine" -- when you think he's talking about Uncle Armen's Alzheimer's. Barron's notebooks; the feral cats in the garage; Cassel's dreams; Philip's problems with his wife; Mom's calls from jail telling Cassel to trust his brothers: these little moments come back with new meaning when Cassel begins to discover that his memory has been tampered with.
Normally, when I read a book, I know more than the characters know, because I see more story than they do. It's harder with a first person narrator, but because I also have the benefit of thirty-some years of internalizing story structure, I can still see things coming that the characters can't. In this book, my expectations were continually unsettled; Cassel can't tell which memories are true and which are false, and neither could I, and his search to find out who messed with his memories, what really happened to Lila, and what his brothers are up to, is full of misdirection. It is some brilliant plotting, particularly how it all plays out, when Cassel manages to turn it all around on his brothers.
And just when you relax, Black surprises you yet again, with another terrible, terrible truth, and the ending leaves you feeling sick and horrified. Black is a master of those uncomfortable endings, which I love love love.
This is not a book for everyone, because it's not a happy story or a fast-paced one. It's dark and subtle and you get the wool pulled over your eyes several times. You're kept distant from most of the characters because Cassel is distant, and most of them are not likable. (I think that Cassel is likable, but I don't think everyone would agree with me.) There's not a ton of action until the end; in fact, the plot develops slowly and you have to have patience that it's all going to come together. The meticulous pacing allows the faint, nagging sense that something is wrong to develop, until the foreboding gets so thick that it makes up for the lack of action. In this kind of book, just when you have an emotional payoff and you're letting out your breath in relief, something happens to stop it entirely. It's a horror story and a heist story rolled up into one, and one of the more impressive books I've read this year. I have no idea where the next one in the series will go but I can't wait.
For those of you who have read this book, did you get the impression that the piles of junk in Cassel's childhood home and his ability as a transformation worker were connected? Lila tells Cassel that his brothers have been using him as a assassin/garbage disposal, having him turn people into objects and then dumping them, but she never says where they dump them. I know Cassel says his mother filled the house with stuff, but do you think it's possible that the brothers used the house to dump the transformed people, knowing that these objects will blend in with all their mother's accumulated garage sale purchases and stuff? Doesn't that make all the scenes where he's cleaning up the house super, super creepy?
ETA: Edited to fix the repeated misspellings of Cassel's name. D'oh!
Cassel's always believed he was the only unmagical person in a family of curse workers. But when he wakes up from a nightmare and finds himself on the roof of his expensive boarding school, he realizes there are things about his own life that he doesn't know. This incredible paranormal/crime-noir novel will grab hold of you in the first chapter and leave you desperate for answers to Cassel's questions. When you finish this one, be sure to get your hands on the sequel, Red Glove.
-- Beth M. --
-- Beth M. --
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I mostly listened to the audiobook, I enjoyed the Jesse Eisenberg narration- though it may have painted Cassel as more vulnerable than the words on the page, Eisenberg sounds young, emotional. I found it a fast and consuming read/listen. Some of the characters are frustrating in the way that I have found other Holly Black characters to be (especially in the Ironside trilogy)- emotionally unaware, toxic, manipulative, heedlessly destructive, but the main characters had enough nuance (and common sense) to keep my interest. This was a YA urban fantasy novel that felt fairly original for the genre. Definitely one of Holly Black's better works.
Holly Black creates a vivid world with a swiftly moving plot and interesting twists and turns. The familiar noir mystery devise of lost memories and black outs work in a surprising new way.
Though this is a series this book works well as a stand-alone. I admire the grace with which she tells a single story but leaves some space for the characters to continue.
Though this is a series this book works well as a stand-alone. I admire the grace with which she tells a single story but leaves some space for the characters to continue.
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Minor: Bullying
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
Holly Black has an amazing ability to make magic seem real. Gloved hands, Family loyalty and secrets so dark you gasp in fright! Loved it. You better read it NOW!