This week I'm covering all of The Curse Worker Series (White Cat, Red Glove, and Black Heart) by Holly Black. I really liked these, y'all. It was a good thing they were all available for immediate download form the library, because I devoured them in a couple of days.
Cassel Sharpe is the only non-worker (a person with magical abilities who with just a touch of their bare hand can affect emotion, luck, memory, or dreams) in his family of con-artists and gangsters, and he's kept out of the business due to his lack of magic or due to the fact that three years ago he killed his best friend, the mob boss' daughter. When he sleep walks onto the roof of his dorm, starts being stalked by a white cat, and realizes that chunks of his memory are missing, he gets dragged into a mess of family secrets and layers of betrayal, and has to survive with a series of cons.
The world building in this is so cool. The magic is scary in that all the curses are intrinsically manipulative and most affect personality. But there are consequences for cursing people in the form of pushback: when an emotion worker alters someone's emotions, their emotions also get messed up, eventually making them big, manic messes. Memory workers become amnesiacs. Death workers rot away fingers. This makes not only the curses cast on people creepy in their manipulation and lack of consent, but it's also creepy to see interactions with the workers as they become more and more derailed.
The world building here is pervasive, influencing every aspect of the story. It's intricately tied to the plot in that the way the magic functions lends to stacks upon stacks of lies, driving the story along. It's also tied to everyone's characterization, in that each worker's brand of magic affects their personality. It influences the dynamics between characters either as workers/non-workers or as worker/person whose been worked. It affects every aspect of the environment and social structure from the fact that everyone constantly wears gloves (and takes them off in burlesque shows), to the history of the worker camps where the crime families got their start, to the background political climate of New Jersey pushing for mandatory testing.
Cassel is an entertaining character. He's clever in the way of clever con-men and heist movies. He's sympathetic and struggling to "be good," but he's also done awful things that aren't easily forgiven. The books are told from his first person perspective and what I was struck with most about that was that he way he described himself and the way he explained that he presented himself matched with his actions. He didn't describe himself as clever and then do groan-worthy, boneheaded things. He described himself as untrustworthy and then proceed to lie to even the people he was trying to be honest with. You can see his struggle to be a good friend to his normal school friends in both his actions and his internal monologue.
It was also masterfully told in that this was from the first person and we watched Cassel to preparations for his cons, and yet as the cons went down they were still surprising. I never felt that information was being withheld from me to make the story more suspenseful, and this fact only occurred to me after I'd finished the series.
That said, I did guess the twists in the first book before Cassel did, but he wasn't all that far behind me and it became clear that most of his slowness was denial, so I can cut him some slack.
Really fun reads. Highly recommend.
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Aside: There's an edition of White Cat with a cover that has Cassel as a white dude. This is absurd.
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Next week: September Girls, paranormal coming of age at the beach, by Bennett Madison
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