The Curse Workers Series | Holly Black
White Cat► Red Glove►Black Heart
Blurb from the first book:
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.
Do you like noir fiction or hardboiled crime fantasy? Have a penchant for alternate worlds with three-dimensional feel like ours, populated with well-rounded characters? If yes, then this series is for you! (Okay, I know I sound like a retarded commercial, but I can’t help it).
Try it, and don’t forget to check out Lila Zacharov in 13 Pieces at the series’ official website. It’s a short story generator containing vignettes told from Lila’s POV. The stories explore Lila’s character and her relationship with the others, particularly Cassel. These are said to bridge the gap between White Cat and Red Glove.
Black Heart will be out this May 2012. :)
Red Glove
by Holly Black
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Bringing the readers back into the deliciously dark realm of mobsters, magic, curses, and cons, Holly Black once again proves that she is an inimitable wizard of words in the second installment of her Curse Worker’s trilogy, Red Glove. With a plot that never quits, wonderfully complex characters, and a setting that is strikingly familiar yet eerily different from our own, this book presents a kind of urban fantasy that noir fiction lovers will devour.
In Black’s world there are hyperbathygammic people, or “workers” who can do magic with just the mere brush of their fingers. One in a thousand can be a worker and their specialties can be one of the seven: memory, dream, luck, physical, emotion, death, and transformation. Because of these, hands are treated like weapons, and anyone who doesn’t wear gloves is deemed dangerous.
Cassel Sharpe, the main character, learns in White Cat that he is a worker of the rarest kind. But discoveries like this—coupled with being surrounded by meddlesome and deceitful relatives—do not produce neat results. He cannot trust his family anymore, and because of that he becomes a walking dichotomy of equal parts vengeance and remorse. One of his brothers was killed and the dominant feeling he has is relief. One minute he’s ecstatic for finding out that the girl she’s smitten with miraculously returns his affections; the next he’s devastated because he discovers that someone else aside from Cupid tampered with her emotions. As if matters are not chaotic enough, a couple of FBI agents appear, believing that Cassel can help them solve his brother’s murder case by looking into the only clue left at the crime scene: images of a woman in red gloves. That’s about the same time a leader of a big-time crime family is courting for his service, knowing what Cassel can do with his magic.
Cassel has to be careful in every step he takes in the minefield of choices presented to him by the mob and the government. One misstep and everything will blow up.
Smart and suspenseful, I love this book as much as I did White Cat. The thrill is undiminished, and I think the murder mystery at its core is responsible for this. The twists and turns of the plot are as shocking as ever; with the first class cons that Cassel pulled off in the first book, I didn’t expect him to be able to do something of that caliber again. Apparently I was wrong. XD Also we see how Cassel grows up into a more mature character. He is surrounded by people egging him to be a bad criminal that he should be, but he keeps on clinging on to the “good side”, willing to do the right thing even if it costs him everything. The best example of this is when didn’t opt to take advantage of Lilia’s love-cursed state even if he does love her so much. Instead he evades her, waiting for the magic to subside. Cassel is also working on his antisocial attitude—slowly but surely, he is becoming more open to his friends.
What I find the most interesting in this novel is the role of politics in it. The topic has been raised in White Cat and I’m glad Black decides to further explore it. Workers are often considered the society’s misfits/freaks, but the government knows how to pull the strings in order to use the workers to their own ends. There are worker rights fighters of course, and the clash of opinions is profoundly exciting. :p
Needless to say, I’m excited for the final installment, Black Heart.
