skygiants

I always struggle with how to write up second and third books in series I've been reading, especially when any individual details might be spoilery for the first books. Like, what do you say? Goliath is still about an awesome cross-dressing girl and an Austrian prince on a steampunk airship during AU World War I! Black Heart is still about a teenager consistently in over his head with his very complicated identity-shifting memory-stealing curse working family and his star-crossed Mafia love interest! Goliath could probably use more exploration of complicated questions of identity and Black Heart could definitely use more cross-dressing, but they're both fun YA trilogies with impressive worldbuilding and reasonably satisfying endings, Becca Stamp of Approval, The End.

I mean, I do have spoilery thoughts -- especially about Black Heart, since it's the conclusion of a much more ambitious and complex story; I mean, the Leviathan trilogy is basically a fun romp, and as long as it continued to be a fun romp that was going to be pretty satisfying no matter what. Black Heart was actually not as satisfying to me because ( spoilers )

Anyway, the comments here are a spoiler-happy zone, talk to me about your thoughts! That is the main reason I do these posts anyway. :D

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? ( And now I go into spoilery territory. )