I wanted to throw her into the shower, give her clean clothes, feed her, and tuck her in for a nap (probably not coincidentally, physical needs like showering and eating and sleeping get a lot of room in this book).

I hearted her with a thousand heart emojis. Charlie is prickly and self-destructive, a terrible substitute for a parent, and emotionally closed off, yet I was completely invested in her. This book contains a shit ton of worldbuilding without the exposition being too clunky, which matches the nuanced, complex characters. Determined to survive, Charlie throws herself into a maelstrom of secrets and murder, setting her against a cast of doppelgangers, mercurial billionaires, shadow thieves, and her own sister-all desperate to control the magic of the shadows. 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. She gets by doing odd jobs for her patrons and the naive new money in her town at the edge of the Berkshires.

And sometimes, it has a life of its own.Ĭharlie 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. 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. 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. In Charlie Hall’s world, shadows can be altered, for entertainment and cosmetic preferences-but also to increase power and influence. This book includes a love story but has a cliffhanger ending, so keep that in mind.

The protagonist, Charlie, lives in the world of normality, where she is a bartender hoping to put her sister through college, and the world of magic, in which she is a con artist and a thief. Holly Black’s first novel marketed for adults is a gritty urban fantasy in which magic allows people to control their own, and sometimes other people’s, shadows, and in which the rich and powerful trade in secrets and books of lore while jockeying for power. Child abuse and grooming, drug and alcohol addiction and abuse, self-harm, body modifications, cons, murders, blood, secrets, lies, theft, captivity and coercion.

At night all blood is black book review