Waiting on Wednesday: Black Glove by Holly Black

Waiting on Wednesday’s a feature hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine to highlight the books we just can’t wait to get our hands on.

This week the book I’m most looking forward to is:

Black Heart
by Holly Black
April 3, 2012

NOTE! If you haven’t read White Cat and Red Glove, DON’T READ THE SYNOPSIS. SPOILERS BE HERE. (Man, sometimes I miss LJ cuts)

Synopsis: Cassel Sharpe knows he’s been used as an assassin, but he’s trying to put all that behind him. He’s trying to be good, even though he grew up in a family of con artists and cheating comes as easily as breathing to him. He’s trying to do the right thing, even though the girl he loves is inextricably connected with crime. And he’s trying to convince himself that working for the Feds is smart, even though he’s been raised to believe the government is the enemy.

But with a mother on the lam, the girl he loves about to take her place in the Mob, and new secrets coming to light, the line between what’s right and what’s wrong becomes increasingly blurred. When the Feds ask Cassel to do the one thing he said he would never do again, he needs to sort out what’s a con and what’s truth. In a dangerous game and with his life on the line, Cassel may have to make his biggest gamble yet—this time on love.

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Now, you guys totally believe me when I say this week’s ‘Waiting on Wednesday’ has NOTHING AT ALL to do with the fact that I read White Cat/Red Glove last week...right?

Okay, yeah, it totally does, and I’m not fooling anyone. I seriously love Holly Black’s first two books, and I’m sure the third will live up to its predecessors. Usually I’m more of a fan of a female main character - nothing against the boys, I just bond more with a female protagonist. That, and often when women/girls are written as love interests for the boys, they don’t come off as a fully fleshed character. We could call it the ‘Ginny Weasley’ syndrome if we wanted to be snarky, but I won’t.

Cassel, however, is an exception to my general preference. I seriously love this character. He’s smart and thoughtful and completely messed up. He tries to do what’s best for his family and ends up screwing them over anyway. He desperately tries to keep up the con man front and makes friends in spite of it. He’s stuck in an impossible position, watched the girl he loves walk away from him, and...where to go now?

We knew that the deal with the Feds couldn’t possibly end up as perfect a solution as Cassel hoped, and I’m thrilled to see via synopsis that Black’s continuing her many shades of grey approach to her world. No one’s all good or all bad. The mobsters have an admirable aim at times, and the Feds are hardly the guys in white hats. It’s a level of complexity that’s not always achieved in novels (YA books are so not alone here), and it’s one I appreciate greatly.

So yes, Black Heart. Out next April. A mere 14 days before my birthday when I’ll be...let’s not think about that. I just want the book!

Review: White Cat by Holly Black

White Cat
by Holly Black
January 1, 2010 
Borrowed from Library
Goodreads Page
Amazon Page
Grade: A

Synopsis (from publisher): 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.

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Review: I know, I know, I’m late to the party for this book. I don't have any good excuse - I read Tithe years ago and enjoyed Black's work on The Spiderwick Chronicles, but for some reason I never picked up White Cat. Beyond my lateness, I don’t usually review books right after reading them, but last night, I stayed up way, way too late to finish White Cat because I couldn’t put it down.

White Cat hit so many of my story kinks: complicated sibling relationships, boarding schools, an alternate reality with a well-thought out magic system and interesting political atmosphere, and a boy-girl relationship that went beyond love at first sight (I know, it’s sad that becomes something to look for).

I really enjoyed Cassel as the narrator, and I say that as someone who generally does prefer female narrators in my reading. He was an interesting and well-fleshed out character who grew dramatically during the course of the book. The reader gets to watch as Cassel struggles with conflating the mantra that family is everything which had been literally cursed into him with the possibility that his brothers had treated him as just another mark. There are times when it feels like Cassel descends into too much self-pity, but as both a teenager and someone dealing with the betrayal of everything he thought true, it also feels excusable.

The politics of Black’s world are a lot of fun to read about (if probably not so much fun to live). While the debate about registration and testing of the ‘curse workers’ feels a little X-Men, the history revealed in the rise of the magic using crime families and the constitutional amendment against magic gave the paranormal aspect a thorough grounding in society. I especially liked the societal mandate to always wear gloves - and the fact that Black takes that to its obvious conclusion with the touch of bare flesh on skin becoming both slightly titillating and scary.

Finally, Lila struck me as a fantastic character. The daughter of a crime lord, she was both a lot more violent and less caring than most female YA characters - as the daughter of a crime lord should be. I’m not one for wanting to read versions of a book with another viewpoint character, but I think that a Lila-POV story would be a lot of fun to see.

I’m reading Red Glove now, and I’m pretty sure that the wait until April for the trilogy’s conclusion is going to be agonizing.