Review: White Cat

White Cat by Holly Black
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think I've finally found a Holly Black book I super-enjoyed the first time around...and I think a lot of that owes to the fact that this one would make a great comp title for my own literary agent querying. That is, if I query again. I seem to have run out of literary agents, though there could be more that I haven't tried yet.

But the point that I'm really trying to make here is that there's quite a few surface similarities between this book and mine. Like, the fact that it's an alternate world with more than a bit of influence both paranormal and X-Men. And that they have two-word titles with the first word being a color. And that the main character is a teenage boy attending a boarding school, with sleepwalking problems, and a hell of a lot of family secrets to discover. For bonus points, Holly Black even writes Cassel as an example for TVTropes' "Ambiguously Brown" page, not unlike how I do with Alex Snow - though Alex's darker skin owes to Moroccan and Maltese blood instead of Indian like for Cassel.


There the similarities end, though. Cassel is a much more Holly Black-type character, kind of a jackass and a brooding anti-hero, whose result on a Shadowhunters personality quiz would be Jace Wayland. (Humorously, Black even throws in a passing reference to a classmate of Cassel's named Jace, who's got a certain...sensitivity...about angels.) My boy Alex is much more Simon-like, which makes sense since he's pretty much me, lol. But yeah, Cassel's not the nicest guy around. And that's by design given that he's from a family full of criminals. And I don't mean "criminal" like how some of the nicer curse workers are in this universe, basically like recreational pot smokers who don't hurt anyone but are seen as criminals in the eyes of the law nonetheless. Cassel's family? They're an actual crime family, one of six in an honest-to-God magical mob. So of course he's got to have a tough and edgy skin to get ahead.

So, yeah, he's not the most likable protagonist there is. But after that cliffhanger? There's no way I don't keep going in following his adventures.

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