Cursing Cats

Apologies for the late blog post. I assumed incorrectly that I would have time to keep up with this because we weren't having many people over. Man, some people are a pain, you know who you are. Just kidding, Thanksgiving was lots of fun and I am now very sleep deprived.

The Curse Workers:

White Cat

By Holly Black

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 criminals. Many become mobsters and con artists. But not Cassel. He hasn't got magic, 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.

Cassel has carefully built up a facade of normalcy, blending into the crowd. But his facade starts to crumble when he finds himself 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. As Cassel begins to suspect he's part of a huge con game, he must unravel his past and his memories. To find out the truth, Cassel will have to out-con the conmen

I have to admit that I predicted several things that happened later in the book, but that didn't keep it from being an interesting read and there were a couple of key points that took me by surprise.

At first glance the world of White Cat doesn't seem very different from ours, but as the book went on there were all these little details that gave it a different twist. It's our world if there just happened to be magic.

One detail that I really liked was that everyone wears gloves. Because Curse Workers can do so much with their bare hands and there's no way to tell who is one just by looking, it's considered as essential to being dressed appropriately as wearing pants.

The idea of Curse Workers reminded me in some ways of the Contractors in the anime Darker Than Black. They have these incredibly powerful abilities, but they pay for it every time they work a curse in ways that they can't control. This provides a very reasonable way to keep Curse Workers in check as the more powerful the Curse the more painful the payment.

I doubt I will read the second book in the series because I had a hard time liking one of the main characters and was completely neutral about the other. I think the two things I liked the most was the mystery about what had really happened in the past (I was only half-right) and the world itself. The world fascinated me more than the characters which is not very conducive to reading more in the series.

One of the things I didn't like about this book was that all the characters in this book had a rather skewed moral compass. There were spots were I had difficulty seeing how the actions of the protagonist were any more morally correct than the villians. It was more like they were all just rivals in the mob.

Overall, I liked the book enough to finish reading it, but that's about all. I've found that I tend to only like about a third of Holly Black's books, but they always sound interesting and make me want to try them.