But then people start getting murdered, he boyfriend’s secret is even worse than she thought, and best of all: there may be an opportunity to get revenge on her nemesis.Īlthough it’s been quite a while since I’ve read one of Black’s young adult books, Book of Night feels very adult-not necessarily because the subject matter is any darker than the Curse Workers trilogy (for example), but because the narrative’s outlook on life and how the world works is much more realistic. She’s also an infamous thief who’s been out of the game for a while after pissing off one too many shadow-magic practitioners. In a world where many can feed their shadows in order to strengthen them into weapons, Charlie’s just a normie. Here, in her first adult novel, Holly Black takes that concept and switches a whimsical children’s story for a morally ambiguous urban fantasy that revels in greed, violence, and betrayal.Ĭharlie Hall works a crap job, lives in a crap apartment, and has a boyfriend who’s so nice that he’s almost definitely hiding something horrible. In Peter Pan, there’s a memorable scene when Peter loses his shadow, and Wendy sews it back on for him. Determined to survive, Charlie throws herself into a maelstrom of secrets and murder, setting her against a cast of doppelgängers, mercurial billionaires, shadow thieves, and her own sister-all desperate to control the magic of the shadows. But when a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie’s present life is thrown into chaos, and her future seems at best, unclear-and at worst, non-existent. She gets by doing odd jobs for her patrons and the naive new money in her town at the edge of the Berkshires. And sometimes, it has a life of its own.Ĭharlie is a low-level con artist, working as a bartender while trying to distance herself from the powerful and dangerous underground world of shadow trading. Your shadow holds all the parts of you that you want to keep hidden-a second self, standing just to your left, walking behind you into lit rooms. You can alter someone’s feelings-and memories-but manipulating shadows has a cost, with the potential to take hours or days from your life. In Charlie Hall’s world, shadows can be altered, for entertainment and cosmetic preferences-but also to increase power and influence.
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