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Holly Black makes her adult debut with Book of Night, a modern dark fantasy of shadowy thieves and secret societies. In Charlie Hall’s world, shadows can be altered, for entertainment and cosmetic preferences—but also to increase power and influence. 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. 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. And sometimes, it has a life of its own. Charlie 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. She gets by doing odd jobs for her patrons and the naive new money in her town at the edge of the Berkshires. 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. 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.
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This was actually my first time reading Holly Black’s work. The world and concept is very unique and intriguing, but the execution of it all fell a bit flat for me, unfortunately. I’ll definitely be checking out her other work though.
This felt more like 600 pages vs. the 300 it actually was. I didn’t connect with Charlie’s character (she felt like the generic “bad girl” with flaws we’ve all seen before), but I was really interested to know more about her BF.
There was an insane amount of detail and description for things so mundane that ended up having no purpose at all.
I liked the concept and the ending is what will likely suck me in to read book 2. Overall, pretty meh, but the last 25% was really enjoyable.
What did I just read? The characters seemed to be extremely quirky almost like a Tim Burton film, the story was an interesting concept but I don’t think it was interesting enough for more books in a series.
I don’t feel like there was any kind of character arc for anyone except maybe Vince but I’m not sure it’s an arc as much as it’s just a revelation.
I likely won’t finish the series.
A+ for creating a different kind of supernatural being, its nice to see supernatural being a other than fae.