White Cat by Holly Black
Ack, BEA is fast approaching and I still have two more books to review. Right, no excuses, JJ, just jump on it.
Review of WHITE CAT by Holly Black
WHITE CAT by Holly Black
Because I suck at writing cover copy, I’m just going to swipe the one on Holly Black‘s website.
Cassel comes from a family of curse workers — people who have the power to change your emotions, your memories, your luck, by the slightest touch of their hands. And since curse work is illegal, they’re all mobsters, or con artists. Except for Cassel. He hasn’t got the magic touch, so he’s an outsider, the straight kid in a crooked family. You just have to ignore one small detail — he killed his best friend, Lila, three years ago.
Ever since, Cassel has carefully built up a façade of normalcy, blending into the crowd. But his façade starts crumbling when he starts sleepwalking, propelled into the night by terrifying dreams about a white cat that wants to tell him something. He’s noticing other disturbing things, too, including the strange behavior of his two brothers. They are keeping secrets from him, caught up in a mysterious plot. As Cassel begins to suspect he’s part of a huge con game, he also wonders what really happened to Lila. Could she still be alive? To find that out, Cassel will have to out-con the conmen.
Spoilers after the cut.
LOVE. Love, love, love. Hi, Cassel, hi. You’re a cute-patootie. Also, your mom is fucked up. AND I LOVE HER OMG. You probably agree with me. Well, about the crazy fucked up, at least.
I’ve read many of Black’s previous works but WHITE CAT is indubitably the best. Perhaps that’s personal bias, as I’m not much for fairies. I wasn’t a huge fan of TITHE or IRONSIDE, although I loved VALIANT to pieces. (That’s because in my aesthetic algebra Beauty and the Beast > Tam Lin.)
Like many of Black’s works, WHITE CAT is loosely based on a fairytale of the same name. What I like about Black’s fairytale reworkings is that the source inspiration isn’t very obvious. She keeps elements from the original stories, but they’re only elements; her stories take center stage and shine.
Her latest book is no exception. WHITE CAT has everything a girl could want: a story about hot brothers, con men, prep school boys, prickly and bitchy girls, mothers who screw up their children, and magic.
What? You say that those things aren’t what a girl wants from fiction? What is it then? Sparkly vampires and angsty love triangles? Pffft. Surely you delude yourselves.
My favourite part of WHITE CAT is the magical world Black has created. In this universe, a certain portion of the population are “workers”; that is, people who are magically gifted in some way or another, and who work their magic through touch. Curse work has been forbidden since the Prohibition, but it’s been poorly regulated, giving rise to crime syndicates of working families. (OMG AWESOME.)
Black very elegantly gives us just enough information to understand her world without any awkward info-dumping. For example, curse work doesn’t come without consequences; the worker suffers a “blowback” every time s/he uses his/her gift. Black never point-blank tells us what a “blowback” is, but we infer that the consequences of using magic vary according to gift and ability.
WHITE CAT is at its heart a story about family, a subject and theme Black has explored in her previous novels. Like Sarah Rees Brennan, she writes about the way love can harm as much as it heals and it can be devastating. (Hence why Cassel’s mother is my favourite character in this novel–she’s a perfect example.)
Wholeheartedly recommended! Especially if you’re like me and are sick and tired of paranormal romance saturating the market. Will this trend ever die? Someone please stake it through the heart already.
