White Cat, by Holly Black
Jan. 2nd, 2011 12:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaStarting my book-every-couple-days resolution off right...
White Cat (Curse Workers, Book 1)
, by Holly Black
Cassel Sharpe grew up in a family of workers—people with the inborn (and, in the USA, illegal) ability to perform magic on others by touching their hands to their target's bare skin—but he himself is no worker. His mother is in jail for using her emotion working ability to scam a rich man; his grandfather is a retired death-worker, with half his fingers missing due to blowback from the killings he's done; his brothers work for one of the crime families that both use and protect curse workers. But Cassel's attempt to live a normal life is destroyed when a white cat invades his dreams, literally, leading him to sleepwalk up onto the roof of his boarding school. And worse. It doesn't help that Cassel himself, though not an illegal curse worker, nonetheless has a history that includes a really horrific crime.
It's a noir con artist story, based on a comparatively obscure fairy tale, with alt history and magic and great worldbuilding! What's not to like?
I really enjoyed this book, and a big part of that is because of the setting. There's a lot of urban fantasy that uses the trope 'our world, but magic,' but Black's take (entirely lacking in weres and faeries and vampires) is fresh and interesting—even 'magic is illegal,' not itself a new idea, goes in some directions I hadn't seen before. In this alternate US, not just alcohol but also magic-working was made illegal in the 1920s; unlike alcohol, the criminalization of working was never lifted. Accordingly, by the 'present' of the story, magic is almost entirely in the hands of organized crime families. Everyone wears gloves all the time (except with trusted intimates), because bare hands are as plausible a threat as an unsheathed knife.
The characters were as well-realized as the setting, even though most of them were pretty unlikeable. (I did like Cassel and his friends, and a couple of others, but mostly the cast is a bunch of nasty folk—which I actually appreciated: it undercut the all-too-common fantasy trope of your thieves and assassins who all conveniently have hearts of gold.) They were all solid and believable, and even when they occasionally did stupid things they had plausible motivations.
But mostly I thought the plot was very good, half caper (Cassel's family were all curse workers, but even more fundamentally, they were all con men and women) and half mystery, with a strong dose of magic. If I hadn't known from Holly Black's talk at Sirens, I wouldn't have realized this was a fairy tale retelling, because the feeling of it is more noir, or possibly heist film, or both. It's one of those books where the twists and turns made me think both, "Wow, I didn't see that coming!" and "Oh, but of course!" at the same time, which is quite a trick and also very satisfying to read.
In retrospect, this is a pretty dark book, but it didn't feel dark in the reading, if that makes sense. Nasty things happened, and things happened that made me cringe for Cassel, but in a way that was exciting and compelling, not that made me feel flattened by the Cement Truck of Grim.
This is one of those books that I am glad I wasn't spoiled for, so I'll put my further thoughts under a spoiler cut.
I guessed that Cassel was a transformation worker no more than a page before the reveal, which is part of why I appreciate the plot on this one so much: all the clues, deftly dropped here and there, came together at exactly the right moment that I went, "OHHHH, I bet Cassel—" and then, a page later, sure enough. I also appreciated the way Black gave Cassel exactly the thing that he'd always resented not having (magic), and a power that is both extremely powerful and exceptionally rare (transformation working), and yet did it in a way that made me think not "Gary Stu" but "Oh shit, poor Cassel, that sucks."
I liked the various intersecting plots and cons, and especially the details of the cons. One of my favorite things was the way that the final con that Cassel runs with the help of Daneca and Sam hinges not on magic but on cleverness, and on Sam's entirely nonmagical skillset.
In retrospect, I'm kind of surprised that I didn't pick up faster on the fact that Barron was the memory worker (the evidence was staring me right in the face, but I believed along with Cassel that Barron was the victim of a memory worker, not that he was suffering from blowback). I really liked the subversion of the usual Meaningful Dreams: Cassel has meaningful, and indeed suspiciously usefully meaningful, dreams, but it's not because of destiny or anything like that: it's because, even when she's trapped as the cat, Lila's a dream-worker and she's working his dreams. I loved the way that piece snapped so neatly into place.
The ending, though, hell of a sucker punch. And it made total sense: of course Cassel's mom would do that, it's entirely in character for her, but ouch.
Anyway, highly recommended. Especially if you like stories about con men, or noir, or just urban fantasy with an original and interesting setting. The second book's coming out next year, and I can't wait (but this story ends at a place where I didn't feel like I'd gotten cliffhangered, which I also like).
White Cat (Curse Workers, Book 1)
, by Holly BlackCassel Sharpe grew up in a family of workers—people with the inborn (and, in the USA, illegal) ability to perform magic on others by touching their hands to their target's bare skin—but he himself is no worker. His mother is in jail for using her emotion working ability to scam a rich man; his grandfather is a retired death-worker, with half his fingers missing due to blowback from the killings he's done; his brothers work for one of the crime families that both use and protect curse workers. But Cassel's attempt to live a normal life is destroyed when a white cat invades his dreams, literally, leading him to sleepwalk up onto the roof of his boarding school. And worse. It doesn't help that Cassel himself, though not an illegal curse worker, nonetheless has a history that includes a really horrific crime.
It's a noir con artist story, based on a comparatively obscure fairy tale, with alt history and magic and great worldbuilding! What's not to like?
I really enjoyed this book, and a big part of that is because of the setting. There's a lot of urban fantasy that uses the trope 'our world, but magic,' but Black's take (entirely lacking in weres and faeries and vampires) is fresh and interesting—even 'magic is illegal,' not itself a new idea, goes in some directions I hadn't seen before. In this alternate US, not just alcohol but also magic-working was made illegal in the 1920s; unlike alcohol, the criminalization of working was never lifted. Accordingly, by the 'present' of the story, magic is almost entirely in the hands of organized crime families. Everyone wears gloves all the time (except with trusted intimates), because bare hands are as plausible a threat as an unsheathed knife.
The characters were as well-realized as the setting, even though most of them were pretty unlikeable. (I did like Cassel and his friends, and a couple of others, but mostly the cast is a bunch of nasty folk—which I actually appreciated: it undercut the all-too-common fantasy trope of your thieves and assassins who all conveniently have hearts of gold.) They were all solid and believable, and even when they occasionally did stupid things they had plausible motivations.
But mostly I thought the plot was very good, half caper (Cassel's family were all curse workers, but even more fundamentally, they were all con men and women) and half mystery, with a strong dose of magic. If I hadn't known from Holly Black's talk at Sirens, I wouldn't have realized this was a fairy tale retelling, because the feeling of it is more noir, or possibly heist film, or both. It's one of those books where the twists and turns made me think both, "Wow, I didn't see that coming!" and "Oh, but of course!" at the same time, which is quite a trick and also very satisfying to read.
In retrospect, this is a pretty dark book, but it didn't feel dark in the reading, if that makes sense. Nasty things happened, and things happened that made me cringe for Cassel, but in a way that was exciting and compelling, not that made me feel flattened by the Cement Truck of Grim.
This is one of those books that I am glad I wasn't spoiled for, so I'll put my further thoughts under a spoiler cut.
I guessed that Cassel was a transformation worker no more than a page before the reveal, which is part of why I appreciate the plot on this one so much: all the clues, deftly dropped here and there, came together at exactly the right moment that I went, "OHHHH, I bet Cassel—" and then, a page later, sure enough. I also appreciated the way Black gave Cassel exactly the thing that he'd always resented not having (magic), and a power that is both extremely powerful and exceptionally rare (transformation working), and yet did it in a way that made me think not "Gary Stu" but "Oh shit, poor Cassel, that sucks."
I liked the various intersecting plots and cons, and especially the details of the cons. One of my favorite things was the way that the final con that Cassel runs with the help of Daneca and Sam hinges not on magic but on cleverness, and on Sam's entirely nonmagical skillset.
In retrospect, I'm kind of surprised that I didn't pick up faster on the fact that Barron was the memory worker (the evidence was staring me right in the face, but I believed along with Cassel that Barron was the victim of a memory worker, not that he was suffering from blowback). I really liked the subversion of the usual Meaningful Dreams: Cassel has meaningful, and indeed suspiciously usefully meaningful, dreams, but it's not because of destiny or anything like that: it's because, even when she's trapped as the cat, Lila's a dream-worker and she's working his dreams. I loved the way that piece snapped so neatly into place.
The ending, though, hell of a sucker punch. And it made total sense: of course Cassel's mom would do that, it's entirely in character for her, but ouch.
Anyway, highly recommended. Especially if you like stories about con men, or noir, or just urban fantasy with an original and interesting setting. The second book's coming out next year, and I can't wait (but this story ends at a place where I didn't feel like I'd gotten cliffhangered, which I also like).
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Date: 2011-01-02 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-02 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-02 11:37 am (UTC)Did Black say what fairy tale she was working from? I didn't catch that angle at all!
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Date: 2011-01-02 08:42 pm (UTC)The fairy tale is called "The White Cat," and it's not one of the more common ones. I think it's one of the French salon fairy tales, vs. being a Grimm one. It's also pretty freaking bizarre, in that way where I'm fairly sure it's metaphors all the way down but I don't know metaphors for what. There's a copy of the Andrew Lang version of the fairy tale here: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/aulnoy/whitecat.html
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Date: 2011-01-02 06:52 pm (UTC)I especially loved how integrated plot and character were: no one goes out of character or is an idiot to facilitate a plot twist, but rather the plot twists all make sense and seem logical because they come straight out of who the characters are.
Someone suggested that the disgusting cluttered house Cassel cleans is cluttered with... the transformed corpses of his victims. Aieeee!
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Date: 2011-01-02 08:45 pm (UTC)Someone suggested that the disgusting cluttered house Cassel cleans is cluttered with... the transformed corpses of his victims. Aieeee!
Ack! Ack! Ack! And yet, TOTALLY PLAUSIBLE.
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Date: 2011-01-02 10:42 pm (UTC)