Book of Night

I do not leave the light on after reading a horror novel or avoid canines or cars after reading Cujo or Christine, but I was truly creeped out by Book of Night. Holly Black creates a dangerous world full of grimy, nefarious beings, all anchored into the magic of shadows. Black's main character, Charlie Hall, fits almost perfectly into this sullied place, being a con and a thief.

As the reader's understanding of the power and evil which can be derived by shadows grows (shadows that can be altered, lost, “sewn” back on, quickened, shadows that can infiltrate, murder), so too do the menacing forces determined to stop Charlie's discoveries. I literally felt menaced myself for the last half of the book.

Charlie is a compelling character show more since she is an intelligent, wily risk-taker burdened with heavy guilt. She does have a moral compass, one that is more moral, meaning ruthless when necessary, than most in the world of Book of Night. It's not, perhaps, our traditional morality, yet we feel we want her to succeed, protect her sister Posey and her mysterious boyfriend Vince and outwit the nightmarish hold that gloamists and other evils have on her world.

One hundred percent enthralling. Also a well-written, short novel. show less

Holly Black's first adult fantasy involves a world of shadow magic. There are four types of gloamists, or people who can manipulate their own or others' shadows: Alterationists, Carapaces, Puppeteers, and Masks. Although they've existed forever, people only became aware of them generally in very recent times.
Our protagonist, Charlie Hall, works with gloamists in her capacity as a thief and pickpocket, stealing tomes and other gloamist tools for profit, though she's given it up recently to work as a bartender. She lives with her boyfriend Vince and her sister Posey who wants to become a gloamist. It's a complicated world where people steal others' shadows. Shadows can feed on their owners and eventually become Blights.
Ms. Black has built show more a unique setting for her urban fantasy. I've always enjoyed her YA books, but honestly, I expected the Maas approach to YA-to-adult writing which seems to just include more sex and swearing. THIS IS NOT THAT - AT ALL. This is a fully-realized fantasy with extremely interesting characters in a complex world and magic setting.
Charlie is, at heart, a loser. Oh, she tries hard to do the right thing but doesn't usually succeed. The con in her just finds that side of life more interesting. I love Charlie with all her flaws and street smarts. Vince is her boyfriend, mostly because he pays half the rent and is easy to get along with. The other characters are interesting and well-written. They're all pretty much morally gray if not just evil, but that's the world Charlie lives in.
The story starts out slow which is fine because I needed to acclimate to the magic system. It also alternates chapters to the pasts of young Charlie and Vince as the picture builds to what's at stake here. The real-world setting is western Massachusetts and the college/mill towns along the Connecticut River which helps supplement the urban feel of the story.
I can honestly say that I had no idea where the story was going most of the time and right up to the last page. There are so many twists of the kind that once revealed made me shake my head that I didn't see it coming. This is a stand-alone book though I believe there will be others coming in the series - and I am down for them. They will be automatic pre-orders because this is one of the best books I've read in a while. show less

Enter a world where some shadows are magical and can move independently of their owners, feeding off their blood. A world where shadows can be altered, stolen and used as currency. Charlie is dating a man with no shadow, with a sister who wants to find a way to force hers to be magical. This book will have you wanting to keep an eye on your own shadow!

Charlie is a fierce, crafty con artist trying to stay out of trouble after a stint stealing magical artifacts for rich customers. That's why she's working as a bartender and dating solid Vince, hiding her past from him. But trouble keeps trying to find her, and even those close to Charlie are not what they seem.

A friend hires Charlie to find her missing husband, but he's involved in the show more black-market world Charlie's trying to leave behind. When Charlie's attacked at her bar by a gloamist, someone with a magically alive shadow, who sends his shadow down her throat, she's forced to reckon with her choices. Someone seems to think she knows where a very valuable book is stored and is willing to kill to find it. But Charlie's also a force to be reckoned with herself, as she fights to save herself and those she loves.

This immersive fantasy draws you fully into its world, where blights - untethered shadows - roam, and gloamists fight to have the most knowledge of shadow magic. With a romance to die for, a savage but enticing main character and a mind-blowing final twist, this page-turner will keep you hooked until the very end.

Thank you to the publisher for the advance review copy of this book. show less

Book of Night, the newest novel from the consistently excellent Holly Black, is as mysterious as shadow itself. Or, at least, that is what I thought after first reading it. Now, I believe I did not appreciate what Ms. Black accomplished with her novel. Most of this is my fault, as I can look back and admit I was not in the right headspace for the book. I spent too much time trying to understand Charlie and her world that I got lost among the weeds.

Book of Night is a novel that needs and deserves your undivided attention. It is not a complicated story, but there is a complexity that requires a little more from a reader than usual. When the characters in a novel can make themselves look like someone else and when something as subtle as a show more shadow moves, you need to pay attention.

Even though I did not give Book of Night my undivided attention, I still enjoyed the story. Ms. Black does what she does best, presenting Charlie in all her morally ambiguous glory in a world where there is no such thing as a hero. It is a novel that I want to read again to appreciate better the nuances of the story and Ms. Black’s very gray world. show less

The feel of this book reminded me a bit of Curse Workers with the main POV character having a history of running cons. Charlie is trying to go straight and currently working as a bartender it never seems to work out in the long term. Everyone knows what she can do for them, and they all want her to do it. People manipulate and steal shadows in order to do magic. Things start rolling back into that life when she sees the dead body of a bar patron and gets curious about his death. The next thing she knows she is attacked and then saved by her boyfriend doing things she didn’t know he could do. Charlie has kept secrets about the cons she ran in her past and her boyfriend has never spoken about why he no longer has a shadow but all of show more that will be revealed during the book. The story universe was interesting but overall I never really cared about Charlie. She has done what she has in order to get by and help her sister but then she can also be cut corners when she didn’t have to. She admits in the book that she has self-sabotaged herself her whole life and maybe at some point things might change but then the ending of the book isn’t what she wanted to happen.


Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss show less

Even in fiction, the Internet makes things worse. Shadow magic has been around forever, but masters of it rarely stumbled across each other. Then came the 1990s, online bulletin boards, private forums, and voilà: shadow magic everywhere. Thanks, Al Gore.

I found Holly Black’s first foray into adult fiction as competent a tale as you’d expect from a successful author of children’s and YA fiction, but that’s about the best I can say of it. She’s done her research on con artistry, her use of an arms race for magical arcana is a reliably fun convention, and her action sequences are good. Especially chilling is the fight scene at the bar, mostly because calling it a fight is generous. Those who’ve mastered their shadows hold an show more advantage over mere mortals the way a cat does over a mouse.

Even I would think, upon rereading that paragraph, that this is my kind of book. Everyday magic? Check. Criminal underworld? Check. Action sequences that feel like the stakes are real? Check. An old and powerful grimoire that very bad people want to get their hands on? Check, check, and check. Add it all up, and what do you get? Meh.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like several aspects of the book. The protagonist, Charlie Hall, is damaged in a way that makes sense as you learn more about her origins. You can really mess up a kid by strong-arming her into a life of crime, and Charlie’s self-destructive adulthood flows naturally from a childhood spent with self-absorbed or manipulative adults. The twists at the end are great, and so cleverly foreshadowed that I could have figured them out but didn’t. That alone earned an extra point from me.

I also appreciate Black’s realism about the rough edges of working-class life. Characters in fiction often have a surprising amount of time and energy to spend on plot, even when they’re supposed to be so poor that keeping body and shadow together is a challenge. The fact that Charlie has to negotiate the plot around her bartending schedule feels real. If you’ve ever done shift work, you know the frustration of trying to wrap your life around a job that doesn’t pay all that well anyway.

When I try to figure out why this book was such a drag, I come up with three reasons. First, the magic system is confusing. I don’t expect everyone to be Brandon Sanderson, but the rules are hard to follow. Some people (not all) can quicken their shadows by feeding them blood, giving them a form of life. But you can also infuse it with your emotions, I guess? Does that come with the blood, or is that sold separately? I don’t think altered shadows are quickened, but then again, could you control them if they weren’t? So maybe they actually are quickened? I had a hard time tracking the rules of shadow magic, which made it hard to stay interested.

Second, the bad guy is cartoonish. Imagine an old rich white man with a goatee and a monocle and a silver topped cane, twirling his mustache and rubbing his hands as he expounds his plans in clipped New England accents. I’m not describing Lionel Salt exactly, but I might as well be. He even terminates his sentences with “My Dear” since every evil villain turns good breeding to evil so that his evilness will be all the more evil-er. I can’t take him seriously, which makes the story hard to take seriously.

Third and finally, the protagonist is not my kind of people. Charlie Hall seems to be written for a very specific class of readers: young and insecure women who don’t think they deserve anything but paradoxically think they deserve everything because they’re good people who just make bad decisions and anyway it’s not their fault and also they’re trying so hard but no one would love them because they don’t deserve love but also wouldn’t it be great to have a hot boyfriend who listens and helps around the house and is super good at sex but he probably won’t last either because no one is that perfect and something must be wrong with him but really something is wrong with me omg I am so complicated.

Look: I don’t hate Charlie half so much as she hates herself, but please give me some personal growth. I think she has potential to be an interesting character, and perhaps in the second and final book of the duology she’ll make some strides toward inner peace. I, however, am not Charlie’s therapist. I am but a humble reader who is not paid well enough (or at all) to sit and bear witness to the bad decisions of someone who doesn’t seem interested in making better ones. show less

I was very excited to read this book as I have been a Holly Black fan for years. My favorite books of hers are her Curseworkers trilogy and The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, and this book sounded like it had more in common with those than her faerie books, so that also sparked my interest. While I did not love Book of Night the way I love those, it was not a bad read either. I would say it was a solid first attempt at writing a book geared towards adults.

The premise of the book and the magic system is what I loved the most. Twenty years before our story begins, the existence of magic is dramatically revealed to the world. The specific type of magic is the "quickening" of one's shadow, which will, if properly cultivated and fed a regular show more diet of blood, be able to preform amazing feats for the bearer and can even be specialized to do things such as fly. But there is danger in feeding your shadow too much of yourself, that the shadow will become its own creature, even potentially living on after the death of its human as a Blight.

Our protagonist Charlie Hall has a regular non-magic shadow, but she used to be a thief of magical books and references for the gloamist (people with magic shadows) community. She's keeping on the straight and narrow now with a steady job as a bartender and a solid boyfriend named Vince, who is shadowless. Because in this world, people who want quickened shadows can buy them from dealers, who illegally steal them right off of people. Charlie is drawn back into the game when rumor of a book that can make shadows into Blights that can live just like people comes about. There are twists and turns and we get to see a lot of Charlie's childhood and training as a thief and conartist, and the trauma that shaped her and her family.

As I said, I loved the shadow magic, and we get to see flashbacks of a side character quickening their shadow and developing its powers which are really intriguing. Unfortunately I did not love Charlie herself, and the book spends a lot of time in her head. It takes a long time for the plot to get moving, and that time is mostly spent with Charlie thinking about her difficult life and how she was just born to be bad and so on. It felt like it was trying a bit too hard to be a gritty urban fantasy. But despite that, I still enjoyed the book, and once the plot picked up I was much more invested. There are well developed side characters (Vince the enigmatic boyfriend is my favorite) and hints to the ultimate twist which were satisfying to watch build.

All in all, a solid first foray into adult fiction for Holly Black, and I'm definitely looking forward to the sequel (there better be one!)

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. show less