By Amber McGee
Weekly Reader Columnist
Curse Workers can change another person’s emotions, dreams, memories, or shapes with a simple touch. They can also kill you with a single touch. Cassel comes from a family full of Workers, but unlike them he doesn’t have the gift. With a brother working for one of the biggest organized crime families and a mother in jail, one would think that Cassel is geared for a life of trouble. They’re right.
Three years ago Lila Zacharov, daughter of the Zacharov family boss, disappeared. No one except Cassel knows the truth–Lila, his best friend and first love, died by his hand.
Or is she? Memories of that day are fuzzy at best, and though the eternal question of “Why?” haunts Cassel everyday he’s finally begun to move on. That is, until he wakes up one night hanging from the roof of his school complex in his underwear.
It all sounds very dramatic, and with single sentence paragraphs littering the book, it does really seem dramatic. When you’re reading from the perspective of a teenage boy who killed his best friend and is now struggling to retain his “normal” image it makes sense that it’d be dramatic. What brings White Cat down, in my opinion, is not the obvious attempt at having an edgy, cool, and jaded main character. What brings it down is that for all that makes sense in the setting, there’s a large part of the plot that doesn’t.
When you boil it down to a simple summary it does, but once the action began to pick up in book and the endless revelations began there were many times I had to pause and put the book down to sort things out. For sake of spoilers there won’t be too many details, but it involves Curse Workers and their powers.
Another issue in White Cat is that Black builds an interesting world but barely expands on it. Here we have an oppressed minority of people whose only choices are to hide their nature or turn to crime families, and the only real explanations we get on their powers is convoluted and confusing. For the first book in “The Curse Workers Trilogy” it does not do a good job of explaining Curse Workers. One can hope that the next two books will only expand and not create more confusion.
Overall though White Cat was an enjoyable read. It could easily have been a standalone, but even in 2010 trilogies were hot stuff. If you’re interesting in seeing how young adult fantasy novels have changed, or not, over the past five years then this is a good read. Black gets credit for creating a rather plain but still somehow interesting protagonist in Cassel, even if he does drop cringe worthy lines at times.
“She tastes like every dark thought I’ve ever had,” really? Really? Is that necessary Cassel?
Although this book didn’t exceed my expectations, in fact it actually met them, take that for what you will, it was still interesting enough to convince me to give the rest of the series to try. Here’s to hoping that in Red Glove Cassel will have finally stopped listening to The Black Parade and dropped out of that poetry class.
