Book Review: White Cat (Curse Workers, Book 1) by Holly Black

Release Date: May 4, 2010

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

Age Group: Young Adult

Pages: 310

Source: My local library.

Summary:

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.

Holly Black has created a gripping tale of mobsters and dark magic where a single touch can bring love — or death — and your dreams might be more real than your memories. (From TheCurseWorkers.com)
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Why I picked it up: I was intrigued by the premise of  Curse Workers, and even though I've never read any other books by Holly Black, I've heard wonderful things about them.

The Good:

White Cat had me from the first paragraph:

I wake up barefoot, standing on cold slate tiles. Looking dizzily down. I suck in a breath of icy air.

The many mysteries of the story make an immediate entrance here, and I appreciated the vividness of Black's prose. The sentence fragment in the middle gives the reader a taste of the likely unsettling feeling of waking up on a roof, and the imagery of the cold tiles and chill air put me right in the story. I devoured the book in just a few sittings; but for a lull around the climax, the pacing of White Cat is masterful. I always read longer than I planned because I had to know what happened next. Some of the plot twists are predictable, but that's mostly because Black foreshadows them with a megaphone from the get-go. This made me feel all smart and detective-y, and I enjoyed having the opportunity to think, "Oh ho, I see what you did there!" more than once. I was, however, completely surprised a couple times.

Beyond the pacing and prose, much of the fun of White Cat comes from the well-assembled world of the novel. The magic of the curse workers fits neatly into the history and framework of the real world, which is mostly recognizable except for the gloves worn by nearly all the characters. In the novel, curse workers can influence--even kill--others with a mere touch of their bare hands. Curse work was banned in the world of the novel in 1929. Like Prohibition in the real world, it led to organized crime families important to White Cat's storyline, and curse workers became even more dangerous, hence the gloves. One can never be too careful.

The reality of cursework is integrated into TV shows and songs on the radio in the book, and Cassel notes the fear attached to bare hands:

In health class our teacher used to say that if someone came toward you on the street with bare hands, consider those hands to be as potentially deadly as unsheathed blades.

My favorite part of the novel's rewriting of history, however is this quote that made me laugh so hard I almost snorted:

Wearing gloves goes back as far as the Byzantine Empire  . . . .  They believed that demons walked among people and their touch brought chaos and terror . . . .  If you had a worker baby, it was because a demon had gotten inside of it. Justinian the first--the emperor--took all those babies and raised them in an enormous tower to be an unstoppable demon army.

Still funny.

Additionally, Cassel is a well-drawn character. He's a con artist from a family of criminals, and even though he's the protagonist, he isn't always perfect. He lies to his friends and causes other people pain. On the other hand, he's also smart, and watching him scheme, maneuver, and fumble through dangerous plots and awkward high school relationships is fun.

The Bad:

While the cover is sharp and the colors are eye-catching, I have issues with the model, who appears Caucasian. In the book, Cassel discusses the origins of his family with another character, and one of the tall tales he's been told is that his great grandfather was a maharaja of India. He also notes,

People are always coming up to me on trains and talking to me in different languages, like it's obvious I'll understand them. It bothers me that I never will.

This suggests that his skin is dark. The discrepancy between the cover image and the text is confusing, among other things.

Also, as much as I liked ripping through Cassel's story, I never established an emotional connection with him or any of the characters. Stuff was happening to them, and it was interesting, but beyond that I didn't really care. As far as PG-13 moments, there's plenty of violence, but it's nothing that most people haven't seen on TV, and the action scenes are only as terrifying as one's imagination makes them.

All in all, there's really not much to complain about.

The Recommendation:

If you're at all attracted by the summary, try it. If you like thrillers with a dash of the supernatural and quick, edge-of-your seat reads, definitely try it. There's a lot about the book's world that's left unexplained, and a couple juicy, incomplete plotlines that left me wanting the sequel ASAP. I highly recommend White Cat as a quick, intense, and fun read.