"White Cat" by Holly Black

From Goodreads: "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."

I am not going to lie, this is the most complex/ complicated book I have read in some time (and by complicated I do not mean "the author clearly does not know how to write/ doesn't know how to convey to the reader what they are trying to say and therefore the story is unnecessarily complicated with big holes in the plot", but complicated as in, "Holly Black is a genius who was able to create a world that no one else has ever imagined before (let alone written about), and was able to flawlessly seam each layer of this world together"). If I had to compare this book is something recent, I would compare it to the film "Inception". Both have plots that are full of twists and turns and both leave you thinking about them/ processing their story line hours, if not days, after finishing them.

I don't often read books where the main character is male and I think that that is a mistake. Cassel is such an interesting and intriguing character and seeing inside his inner thoughts/ working is indescribable. As for the other slew of characters? Well either you love 'em or you hate 'em, but that adds even more to the atmosphere of the story. Take Cassel's grandfather for instance or his roommate, both are such likeable characters whereas his brothers are complete doorknobs. And even though I want to hate his brothers for their actions I can't completely do so because I do sympathize for them. Yes their actions weren't the greatest and overall they were quite shady but the world that they live in is super tough on them and they have to struggle day in and day out to survive within it.

Now parts of this story are quite predictable, I was able to predict two of the largest plot elements within maybe a quarter of the book, but it didn't bother me too much just because there was so much else going on that I was unable to predict. I am very excited to see what the next book in the series, "Red Glove", has in store for us!

Rating: 4/5

PS. Don’t forget to enter my giveaway of Sean Beaudoin’s “Going Nowhere Faster”!