My Thoughts: White Cat by Holly Black

 4 chewy peanut butter cookies.

Cover Love:  The top one is the cover I had and I like it, but I like the bottom cover better.  This is the newly designed cover.  I bought the first two in the series for my library with the old cover but the third one only came out in the new cover version.  That ticks me off!!

Why I Wanted to Read This:  I bought a personal copy when it first came out but had never gotten around to reading it.  I read on another book blog how they finally got around to reading it and loved it, so I figured it was time I read it as well.  Here's the synopsis from GoodReads:

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 criminals. Many become mobsters and con artists. But not Cassel. He hasn't got magic, so he's an outsider, the striaght kid in a crooked family. You just have to ignore one small detail - he killed his best friend, Lila, three years ago.

Cassel has carefully built up a facade of normalcy, blending into the crowd. But his facade starts to crumble when he finds himself 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. As Cassel begins to suspect he's part of a huge con game, he must unravel his past and his memories. To find out the truth, Cassel will have to outcon the conmen.

Romance?: Yes.

My Thoughts:

This is such an interesting premise.  What I love most is that it is set in our today with our history, there is just this additional wrinkle of people who work curses and magic.  It has fascinated me. The prejudices against workers is examined more in the second book.

There isn't a lot of likable characters in this book, but Cassel is fighting to be good.  His grandfather seems like a good guy, but he was a death worker for a mob boss.  Daneca and Sam, Cassel's school friends, are good people, but that is about it.  Despite all this I was rooting for Cassel and wanted him to stop being so hard on himself.

Cassel has such an awful family!  His brothers are horrible and although we don't see him mom much she seems so flighty.

This is a book I can't review too heavily because I don't want to give things away.  However, I had read the synopsis for book 2 before reading this one, so I knew how this one played out.  It did not ruin the book for me at all, but it would have been cool to read it without knowing what I did.

To Sum Up:  Great idea with interesting characters.  New kinds of magic that I liked!

Book from personal library.