Swindlers & Sentient Shadows | Book of Night by Holly Black

Title: Book of Night
Series: Book of Night #1
Author: Holly Black
Published: May 3, 2022
Genre(s): Urban Fantasy
Page Count: 320
Rating:

Summary from Goodreads:

In Charlie Hall’s world, shadows can be altered, for entertainment and cosmetic preferences—but also to increase power and influence. You can alter someone’s feelings—and memories—but manipulating shadows has a cost, with the potential to take hours or days from your life. Your shadow holds all the parts of you that you want to keep hidden—a second self, standing just to your left, walking behind you into lit rooms. And sometimes, it has a life of its own.

Charlie is a low-level con artist, working as a bartender while trying to distance herself from the powerful and dangerous underground world of shadow trading. She gets by doing odd jobs for her patrons and the naive new money in her town at the edge of the Berkshires. But when a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie’s present life is thrown into chaos, and her future seems at best, unclear—and at worst, non-existent. Determined to survive, Charlie throws herself into a maelstrom of secrets and murder, setting her against a cast of doppelgängers, mercurial billionaires, shadow thieves, and her own sister—all desperate to control the magic of the shadows.

In Peter Pan, there’s a memorable scene when Peter loses his shadow, and Wendy sews it back on for him. Here, in her first adult novel, Holly Black takes that concept and switches a whimsical children’s story for a morally ambiguous urban fantasy that revels in greed, violence, and betrayal.

Charlie Hall works a crap job, lives in a crap apartment, and has a boyfriend who’s so nice that he’s almost definitely hiding something horrible. In a world where many can feed their shadows in order to strengthen them into weapons, Charlie’s just a normie. She’s also an infamous thief who’s been out of the game for a while after pissing off one too many shadow-magic practitioners. But then people start getting murdered, he boyfriend’s secret is even worse than she thought, and best of all: there may be an opportunity to get revenge on her nemesis.

Although it’s been quite a while since I’ve read one of Black’s young adult books, Book of Night feels very adult—not necessarily because the subject matter is any darker than the Curse Workers trilogy (for example), but because the narrative’s outlook on life and how the world works is much more realistic. And by realistic, I mean grim. Charlie Hall is 28 and it shows; she doesn’t believe that good deeds are rewarded, that bad deeds are punished, or that there’s some unseen order to the universe where things get sorted out eventually. She’s had far too much shitty luck to be so naive, and she’s caused too much harm to even want that kind of karmic balance.

As a protagonist, Charlie is interesting because of how deep her trauma cuts and how abrasive she is as a result. The plot starts off slow (very slow, perhaps), but that allows Black to really wallow in Charlie’s thought processes, in her avoidant attamment style and her “you can’t hurt me if I hurt you first” approach to interpersonal relationships. Charlie is a grownup, and like all grownups, she comes with baggage. Yet at the same time, I think Black could and should have taken more opportunities to expand upon Charlie. Sure, she’s traumatized, but what does that mean, really? How many times can a narrator tell readers they have attachment issues before it becomes meaningless? Book of Night communicates very clearly that its heroine is messy and broken and jagged—but I’m not sure the author took enough time to show what that really looks like.

Yet by the time I started to get irritated with Charlie’s endless loop of “look how fucked up I am,” the actual storyline got started, so my frustration never became anything more. Book of Night is not a long book and, weirdly, it’s not very fast-paced, either. The plot unfurls slowly, and rather than pointing in any one direction, it goes everywhere at once—sort of like a ripple in a pond. You start just with Charlie and her grimy job and weird apartment, then the camera zooms out to give you a picture of the world she inhabits, the ins and outs of the magic system, and the obstacles we’re up against. As a function of this, the readers gets the sense that there’s much much more to be explored, that we are given the answers we need to understand the plot, but Black has notebooks and notebooks full of extra content in case anybody cares to ask. The worldbuilding in this book is roomy and expansive; whether or not there’s a sequel in the works, it’s clear the author has plenty of material left in the sandbox.

Although… I hope there’s a sequel. Not because there were any loose threads hanging, but because the ending was just open-ended enough to tantalize me. And a mass consumer of romance novels, the ho-hum relationship between Charlie and her love interest didn’t quite do it for me, but I feel like it might in a sequel. (Note: the “romance” in this book is underwhelming both in terms of allotted screentime and chemistry between the characters.) Also, I feel like the leisurely pace and somewhat unfocused narrative would be better justified if this was a first book in a series, with the intention to circle back and build on this foundation in future installments.

I enjoyed Book of Night. Here, Black couples an intriguing magic system with a prickly main character and deliberate, easygoing pace. This is not quite a heist book, but the Leverage style gotcha at the end satisfied the same part of my brain. I don’t know what the author’s intentions are for future projects, but as far as I’m concerned, more adult urban fantasy titles (with or without Charlie Hall) would not be unwelcome.