White Cat by Holly Black

Title:  White Cat
Author:  Holly Black

Cassel comes from a family of curse workers—people who have the power to change your emotions, your memories, your luck, all by the slightest touch of their hands. Since curse work is illegal, they’re all criminals. But not Cassel. He hasn’t got the magic touch, so he’s an outsider—the straight kid in a crooked family—as long as you ignore one small detail: He killed his best friend, Lila. Now he is sleepwalking, propelled into the night by terrifying dreams about a white cat. He also notices that his brothers are keeping secrets from him. As Cassel begins to suspect he’s part of one huge con game, he must unravel his past and his memories. To find out the truth, Cassel will have to outcon the conmen.

I finished this book a couple of days ago.  And it was awesome.  Admittedly, I'm not really on top of the bandwagon in reading it, as it came out a while ago, but I'm just glad I got around to it.

Because it's told in first person point of view by our protagonist Cassel (who has an awesome name btw), the whole world of the curse workers is a little hard to figure out, but the story basically takes place in our world except it's sort of alternate-universey because some people are born curse workers which means that they can do cool magic with their hands.  So everyone wears gloves.  Which for some reason has sort of a romantic notion to it - that you hardly ever touch someones bare hands.

Anyway, the story starts with dear Cassel trying to throw himself off of a roof - so suffice to say that there's plenty of action, and things only get more interesting from there.  While I did guess a major plot twist, there were still plenty of surprises and even if there hadn't been, the characters would more than make up for it.

Speaking of which, Cassel is a pretty cool narrator.  I love a male narrator (probably because I feel like I'm a spy hoarding information on that gender which I often fail to understand), and he didn't disappoint. To describe the other characters would probably lend to spoilers, but suffice to say that they're different, they're flawed, they change (character development anyone?), and they are just swell.

Due to the fact that the basis for the plot is crime and there are lots of powerful mob bosses and such, the book gets pretty dark in places.  The whole conmen atmosphere made me wonder how every character wasn't completely paranoid, but hey, it was a suspenseful read.

To sum up the above in one line:  Holly Black is a fantastic writer.  Besides her cool characters and plots, I can't really put my finger on why this book was so enticing and delicious to read, but it just was.  Previously all I had read from her was the Spiderwick Chronicles (can someone say fourth grade obsession?), but I will definitely be checking out her other books including the sequel Red Glove which I have yet to get my hands on.