White Cat

The Curse Workers, Book One

By: Holly Black

Narrated by: Jesse Eisenberg

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 criminals. Many become mobsters and con artists. But not Cassel. He hasn’t got magic, 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.

Cassel has carefully built up a façade of normalcy, blending into the crowd. But his façade starts to crumble when he finds himself 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. As Cassel begins to suspect he’s part of a huge con game, he must unravel his past and his memories. To find out the truth, Cassel will have to outcon the conmen.

Meh - least favorite Holly Black novel

Performance was weird, narrator had difficultly keeping pace. He struggled to keep the story moving and spoke slowly a lot. I was disappointed with the slow story line and repetitiveness of the same things happening. I found myself kind of annoyed with the main character, hopefully there will be character growth in book 2. I thought the ending plans for the crime family were done hastily & I was left unsatisfied with the state of affairs. Holly Black did such a great job with her other novels & this one fell so very flat.

She did do a good job leaving off on a cliff hanger for a followup novel and building lovable side characters.

Good, solid series

I love Holly Black and I'm less of a Jesse E. fan, nonetheless it's a solid series.

Not one of my favs but kept me interested…

Although this isn’t one of my favorite Holly Black books, she kept me interested enough to enjoy it. Overall, it was pretty good.

loved it!

can not wait to start the next one! I loved the story line and how it kept my attention

Like the storyline

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?

Sometimes I couldn't tell the difference between one character from the next because he used the same tone of voice half the time between the brothers.