White Cat by Holly Black

If you're Holly Black, I am your favorite sort of reader (or maybe more accurately, book buyer). I go into book stores and go, oh, I'm missing a book out of that series, but is it #3, or #4, or #5? And then I buy a copy and get home and wonder how I have three copies of #3, but I'm still missing #4. Keep an eye out to win some of these extra copies in a weekend giveaway!

On the other hand, I am a bad, bad reader, because White Cat (Simon and Schuster), the first in a new series, has been in my to-be-read pile for months. My only excuse is that the pile got far too big for a while. I didn't read it until last month even though I heard Holly speak about the story of the white cat at Sirens and loved it. In the post I linked, Holly also talks about characters that have to straddle worlds, and that's absolutely how Cassel, the only non-magical person in a family of magical people--curse workers, to be precise--has to look at his world.

In White Cat, Cassel is hanging out at boarding school, running betting rings and taking it easy. Well, he's taking it easy to avoid thinking about Lila, his best friend, his girlfriend, the girl he killed. He can't remember how it happened. But he's just a regular old criminal, it seems, in a world where everyone wears gloves as a courtesy: touching another person could help them or harm them, all through magic. Still, something odd is going on. Someone's out to con him--and someone's out to get him. His only choice is to beat the bad guys at their own game.

When Tithe came out, I think it started a phenomenon that's visible today in the many books with fairies and other paranormal romancey beings. If I had to pick something from White Cat that I hope catches on, it would be the masterful plot work. While I have a hard time giving you a summary, the plot works like this: The author ties red ribbons to the ends of each finger, and crumples the ribbons in her hands. Then, she laughs and throws the ribbons, and somehow they fly into the air in a tight braid. It's a neat trick how all the ribbons tie together in White Cat, and a good read.