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 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.

I've been wanting White Cat since it came out on March 4th, but I didn't really know what it was about because the back gives you a vague outline of parts of the plot but you don't really get the whole thing. You know? Anyway, I was still SUPER intrigued by this book and REALLY wanted to read it and see if it was any good. I finally bought it and read it during my trip and it was awesome, it greatly surpassed my expectations!

Cassel lives in a family of curse workers. What's a curse worker? Think of it as an illegal, magical hit-man. The only problem with Cassel's family is that he's the only person who doesn't have the power to be a curse worker, and you thought you were different from your family. Anyway, Cassel Sharpe was an amazing main character, (and what a cool name is that?! it should be added to the LOTW I did a while ago) Cassel was also a great hero to read about, his journey from having no power in a family with exceptional power to realising his potential power was a great story, you could also relate to how different and alienated he felt in his own family, because everyone feels like the odd one out at some point. It's hard to talk about the supporting characters because there wasn't any main main supporting characters, but I didn't strongly dislike any of the characters that were in the book. The plot was the most confusing and the most ingenious of the whole book. It was confusing because you are left completely in the dark until the very very end, and you also learn things after the character learns them, so you'd think that things were going in a completely different direction than the direction that things actually were going. And the characters kept double crossing each other so you'd think a character was good then they'd double cross the good guys to be evil only to triple cross them and really be what you thought they were in the beginning. All in all the plot was annoying, twisting, turning, suspenseful and amazing! Finally, the writing was fantastic! Holly Black knows how to keep you in the know without telling you too much! Overall, great book! Amazing read and I can't wait for the next book Red Glove!

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xoxo,

Shelbie