White Cat, Holly Black

I started this unsure, thanks to some reviews I read, moved to being quite intrigued, and then stopped on page 125 to inform the internet that I knew the entire plot and I would be very surprised if I was wrong. The disappointing thing is that I was completely right. Everything panned out exactly the way I expected, which was discouraging, and became boring.

At first, I was interested in Cassel, in the way he worked all the angles, his cons. I liked the setup of a mob family with magic: all of that worked fine. What didn’t work fine was the fact that Cassel’s meant to be smart, meant to have his eye on all the angles, and yet he’s so easily manipulated and conned. He doesn’t see the most obvious things.

Like, one example: we’re told about blowback, something that happens to people who use their powers; whatever they’ve done rebounds upon then. So he’s pretty sure his memories are being messed with — sure enough to mutilate himself to try and prevent it — but when someone he knows well has big gaps in their memory and uses a journal to remind themselves of what they’re doing/saying, he doesn’t even think of blowback. He doesn’t seem to think much of it at all, even. And he asks about how this kind of magic works, and someone tells him and then starts to mention his brother and he… cuts her off. It seems a bit like plot-induced stupidity and just completely pushed me out of the story.

So I won’t be finishing this series. It is light fun reading, if you can get past points like that or you don’t see it from the angle I do, but I like some subtlety in the narration (even if I already knew the ending, the example I gave is just too blatantly signalling it for me).