(no subject)
All the most interesting bits of Holly Black's White Cat that I want to talk about are spoilers! The frustrations of the bookblogger are great. :(
But I will make an attempt at summarizing anyway: so this book is set in an alternate version of the present day where specific magical talents (manipulating emotion, manipulating luck, kiilling people with a touch, etc.) are innate for a small percentage of the population. However, they've been illegal since Prohibition, so magic has become pretty much tied up with organized crime. (For the record, due to misreading various reviews, I totally thought when I picked it up that it was set in the 1920s. It is not. People have cell phones, and use them.) Cassel, our protagonist, is a teenaged boy who's trying really hard to be a decent student and lead a relatively straight-edge life, despite the following problems:
1. He comes from a family of con artists and mafia magic users, so he's pretty entangled in the underworld despite not having any magic talents himself. And his mom is currently in jail, so that's also awkward.
2. Also he is about to be kicked out of his posh boarding school, not for running an illegal gambling ring - they haven't caught him on that yet - but because of a mystery sleepwalking bout that ended him up on the roof.
3. Also he brutally murdered his best friend - the daughter of one of the big organized crime bosses - when he was a teenager, despite not remembering how or why or anything but the aftermath, so, uh, there's that.
Initially, Cassel's goal is simple: get accepted back into school and continue trying to be not the kind of person who kills people! But his extremely criminal older brothers have other plans, and so apparently does the white cat that seems to be following him around, and then there are twists and double-crosses and long cons and before you know it you're attempting to con an entire giant mafia organization with your geeky special-effects-obsessed roommate and his hippie liberal girlfriend, plus the aforementioned cat, and then things get complicated.
So, the short unspoilery version: what I found most interesting about the book - aside from the characters, most of whom are fascinatingly grayscale - was the questions it raises about identity. Cassel's mom, besides being a con artist, is an emotion worker; another character is a memory worker, and both of them can erase and rewrite emotions and memories pretty much at whim, although not without cost. And the questions become, how much do your memories make you who you are? If you erase a significant memory and replace it with something else, how much of what you've now forgotten are you responsible for? I am fascinated by the idea that the Cassel we know and sympathize with, "our" Cassel, is not the complete Cassel. We think of the Cassel who is missing a chunk of memory, who is horrified by the idea of killing people, as the "real" Cassel. He thinks of himself that way. But he's only half-a-Cassel; with his memories back, the memories that apparently made him ignore Lila (and I suspect there's some kind of Lila-related memory that'll be coming out in later books to explain his anger at her) and be totally fine with cold-blooded murder, is he a different person? Basically I think the Cassel we know is essentially on a parallel with the "rewritten" Barron - who now believes himself to be the kind of person who would do the things Cassel considers better, and so he becomes that "better" person. Cassel doesn't know how to deal with that, how to treat the "new" Barron and how much to consider him responsible for original!Barron's crimes, and neither do I. But I am incredibly curious to see how this plays out, as well as how different love-manipulated Lila will be from the Lila we already know, and how she'll react to finding out that she's been manipulated.
But I will make an attempt at summarizing anyway: so this book is set in an alternate version of the present day where specific magical talents (manipulating emotion, manipulating luck, kiilling people with a touch, etc.) are innate for a small percentage of the population. However, they've been illegal since Prohibition, so magic has become pretty much tied up with organized crime. (For the record, due to misreading various reviews, I totally thought when I picked it up that it was set in the 1920s. It is not. People have cell phones, and use them.) Cassel, our protagonist, is a teenaged boy who's trying really hard to be a decent student and lead a relatively straight-edge life, despite the following problems:
1. He comes from a family of con artists and mafia magic users, so he's pretty entangled in the underworld despite not having any magic talents himself. And his mom is currently in jail, so that's also awkward.
2. Also he is about to be kicked out of his posh boarding school, not for running an illegal gambling ring - they haven't caught him on that yet - but because of a mystery sleepwalking bout that ended him up on the roof.
3. Also he brutally murdered his best friend - the daughter of one of the big organized crime bosses - when he was a teenager, despite not remembering how or why or anything but the aftermath, so, uh, there's that.
Initially, Cassel's goal is simple: get accepted back into school and continue trying to be not the kind of person who kills people! But his extremely criminal older brothers have other plans, and so apparently does the white cat that seems to be following him around, and then there are twists and double-crosses and long cons and before you know it you're attempting to con an entire giant mafia organization with your geeky special-effects-obsessed roommate and his hippie liberal girlfriend, plus the aforementioned cat, and then things get complicated.
So, the short unspoilery version: what I found most interesting about the book - aside from the characters, most of whom are fascinatingly grayscale - was the questions it raises about identity. Cassel's mom, besides being a con artist, is an emotion worker; another character is a memory worker, and both of them can erase and rewrite emotions and memories pretty much at whim, although not without cost. And the questions become, how much do your memories make you who you are? If you erase a significant memory and replace it with something else, how much of what you've now forgotten are you responsible for? I am fascinated by the idea that the Cassel we know and sympathize with, "our" Cassel, is not the complete Cassel. We think of the Cassel who is missing a chunk of memory, who is horrified by the idea of killing people, as the "real" Cassel. He thinks of himself that way. But he's only half-a-Cassel; with his memories back, the memories that apparently made him ignore Lila (and I suspect there's some kind of Lila-related memory that'll be coming out in later books to explain his anger at her) and be totally fine with cold-blooded murder, is he a different person? Basically I think the Cassel we know is essentially on a parallel with the "rewritten" Barron - who now believes himself to be the kind of person who would do the things Cassel considers better, and so he becomes that "better" person. Cassel doesn't know how to deal with that, how to treat the "new" Barron and how much to consider him responsible for original!Barron's crimes, and neither do I. But I am incredibly curious to see how this plays out, as well as how different love-manipulated Lila will be from the Lila we already know, and how she'll react to finding out that she's been manipulated.