White Cat by Holly Black

White Cat

Holly Black

310 pages

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry (S&S)
Release Date: May 4th, 2010

Source: ARC from Library

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.

   If you love books that are full of suspense and danger, White Cat by Holly Black will not disappoint. How many books do you know of that start with a sleepwalking boy named Cassel Sharpe?

   Everything was unique. The fact that Holly Black took the normal world and added 'workers' to it made it even more awesome.

   Everyone wears gloves. Because you never know who's a worker and who isn't. Workers can 'work' you by placing their bare hand on your unprotected skin. They can change your emotions, bring you good or bad luck, change your memories, and some of them can even kill you. The rarest of all workers, is a transformation worker, one who has the capability to transform a living person into stone.

   But Cassel is the odd one. Both his parents are workers, and from his two brothers, he's the only one who isn't a worker. But still, things are weird. There's this cat, who appears in his dreams and sounds just like his best friend, who's dead. Who he killed. And his brothers are acting weird. And the fact that he doesn't remember anything...

   Something's up. And Cassel Sharpe may not be a worker, but he is a clever seventeen-year-old.

   I loved everything about this book, especially Cassel. I liked being able to see how his clever mind came up with all these cons, and the way he had to 'outsmart the conmen'. Overall, White Cat was awesome, in an awesome way.

This cover is really inviting. The leather jacket and leather gloves make it a definite pick-me-up for me. The suspense from the book

clearly leaks onto the cover.