White Cat

Cassel is the only member of his family who isn’t a curse worker (able to manipulate luck, memory, emotion, or other things). Curse workers are feared and discriminated against—massacred, in other countries—and Cassel’s going to private school to get away from his family and their involvement in a major crime syndicate. But when he wakes up from sleepwalking on the roof of his school, chasing a white cat, he finds that he can’t run away from his family or from working. Really interesting worldbuilding, with various political and scientific machinations in the background (if there’s a test for working, can we make everyone take it?) but family drama foregrounded. Cassel came off as an overdramatic teen in a dramatic show more situation; he was realistically attracted to two very different girls his age; and the book presented working as legitimately horrifying in its implications. I’m looking forward to the next book, where Cassel seems likely to have gotten out of the frying pan by jumping straight into the blue-white heart of the fire. show less

Plot: Cassel is from a family of curse workers, magicians who manipulate luck, emotions, life and memory. But in a world where such magic is illegal, most curse workers are part of organized crime. Cassel’s family is no exception. He has always been an outsider in this world. He’s a bookie and a con artist but he is the only one in his family who can’t do curse work. As if that wasn’t enough, when he was 14, Cassel killed the girl he loved and he doesn’t even know why. He’s tried to get as far away from that life and those memories as he could. But he’s been having strange dreams about a white cat, dreams that have almost gotten him killed. To save himself and those he loves he may have to face the mob head on and pull off show more the biggest con of his life.

I’ve been going on a bit of a Holly Black binge this week. The Curse Worker’s series is her newest work and it’s every bit as good as her previous writing. Though I don’t like the characters as much as those in the Modern Tale of Faerie series (I get the feeling that they aren’t meant to be likable, though most are at least interesting), it’s a very impressive bit of world building. Her magical system and the world in which it exists is entirely believable.

She also seems to have put a lot of thought into organized crime and especially the idea of the con. Because conning people is ultimately what this book is about. Magic, when it is used at all, is just a tool. Cassel is good at conning people, it comes naturally to him, and more than that he enjoys it. He ultimately saves the day through cunning and lies. There’s a kind of vicarious thrill that comes from watching it all unfold. And the ending, the last few lines just blew me away. It was very different from the standard happy ending, I didn’t see it coming and yet it was the perfect ending for the story.

My one question is, this story being fairly well contained, where will Black go with the next book? I’m not worried though; she has yet to disappoint me. show less

Enjoyable and engaging, just as I expected from Holly Black. Her approach to the real and active presence of magic throughout the world's history is unexpected and unusual and convincing, and her hero is cleverly rendered and sometimes frustratingly believable. I love the glimpse into confidence games and organized crime, but I'm not altogether pleased with the love interest. So far, I find her annoying, but I'm hopeful the next book or two will serve to make her more interesting.

This is a series with marvelous potential. It's pretty much a hard-boiled story of grifters and the mob, but with magic and boarding school, too. And cat, of course. And it works, so well. Cassel at school is a classic outsider, always watching, always trying to make like he fits in. He's a guy from [a:Tobias Wolff|7371|Tobias Wolff|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1212762477p2/7371.jpg]. But also, there's his family, the mom in jail (I see her as Angelica Huston from both The Grifters and Prizzi's Honor, with a bit from The Witches, too), the oldest brother who is in the mob. There is so much going on in Cassel's life, it's no wonder he's up on the roof of the dorm with his classmates yelling for him to jump. And that's the show more beginning.

Black has done a beautiful job. She's created a guy of many dimensions and conflicts, a guy who thinks of a con before any other possible solution to a given problem, and she's made him sympathetic and believable. He lives in a society that is prejudiced against him, not for his dark skin and ambiguous family history, but for the magic. And there's a girl with a hemp bag leading the magic/straight alliance.

And if teen girls are going to be all swoony over someone, better Cassel than a sparkly vampire I could mention. show less

Note: this is YA and first-person, and I'm giving it five stars. Because nothing about this book is standard, or chosen for ease rather than purpose, or unthinking. I am terribly, terribly pleased with this book.

It's about memory and lies and trust. Oh sure, it's also about magic and consequences, and privilege and fear, and how being a teenager is about feeling different. But mostly, it's about memory and lies and trust, and as such, the first-person POV and style adopted is absolutely bloody perfect - not so much unreliable as careless (...or is he?) and the perfect way to really live with the narrator such that when the terrible things reveal themselves, they are truly terrible, even if they were what I had always suspected to be the show more case. (And even then, there were beautiful one-step-further twists on them, so that even what I'd deduced was not nearly the full extent.)

Basically, I think this is masterful. It twisted and turned, but not in a "Hah! I am outsmarting you!" way, but more in an inclusive, luring-down-the-garden-path way. It is full of mystery and wonder, but laden with grit and serrated edges. (And oh! but I love serrated edges. The ending. It's like a punch in the chest, and left me grinning like a loon out the train window.) The characters are real and the relationships are tricky and there are absolutely no easy answers and it's just plain fucking beautiful.

(Sidenote: I've read some Holly Black before - Tithe, I think - and I found it good fun, and quite canny, but ultimately sort of facile and forgettable. That was one element of me not reading this for so long. The other was that, from the cover tagline and the original blurb I have a vague memory of reading, I thought this book was some sort of magical-world-[or at least portal]-hidden-amidst-attic-junk sort of twee thing. Holy shit is it totally not. It is the best sort of magical organised crime jaded teenage bitterness and read it, read it now. Ahem.) show less

This is one of those books that's nearly impossible to put down. Cassel's voice is such an engaging and driving force within the book that it's difficult to walk away from the story here, and the twists Black has played out in the book are put together masterfully, so that the book has its own sort of inertia from start to finish. I'm not sure what to call it--fantasy, urban fantasy, suspense, con story--but I loved it. And in the moments when my heart dropped with what the character was experiencing, and I was left staring at my book and feeling stupefied by the turn things had taken... well, all of that made it that much clearer that if this book draws you in and holds onto you, it's going to affect you. I feel shell-shocked enough by show more the twists in this one that I think I need a few weeks of recovery before leaping into the second one, but there's no doubt that I'll be seeking it out sooner than later.

Absolutely recommended for fans of strange suspense/mystery or urban fantasy, or well-written stories in general. show less

In this magnificently crafted world unlike any other, magic is portrayed as a well-known weapon among the characters of the book and is used to instill a sense of mob and crime, making White Cat one of the most unique novels I’ve ever read.

Admittedly, this was my first Holly Black novel, but it certainly won’t be my last. White Cat was a fast-paced mystery that very much reminds me of the crime investigation shows that I grew up watching as a kid. Clues are unraveled and things are foreshadowed and everything weaves together to make an extremely enthralling book that never bored me.

Cassel was such an entertaining protagonist. He’s witty and sarcastic and definitely a smartass, but as the story deepens and we learn more about his show more history with Lila, a girl that he believes he had murdered, his layers kind of strip away and he comes more serious. More determined. Not only does Holly Black write amazing worlds, she also does a pretty nifty job with the characters she puts in them.

The only thing I can really complain about was that after awhile, it did start to become confusing. A lot of different names and memories are thrown at you, so if you’re not really focused on the book, you’re going to be scrambling to flip pages back to figure out what you missed.

Overall, I really enjoyed White Cat. The Curse Workers world is one that I can’t wait to dive back into, especially with the sudden, and somewhat bizarre, ending that the first book left us with. This is a new kind of paranormal and a new twist on magic, so I definitely recommend it! show less