Her stories are dark, but not to the point of scaring me. I’ve always loved her storytelling style and it surprises me every time.

+ The writing is classic Holly Black, she draws you in. Charlie is an anti-heroine and I like how tough she was even though she never came off aggressive. She’s one of the best and her line of work is dangerous and deals with shady people. There are chapters of her past, and we get a good sense of how broken she is inside, with a broken family, but the only good thing she’s at is stealing. We learn how she picked up the tricks of her trade – being a thief. The main character is Charlie Hall and she is a very fleshed out character. It’s set in a contemporary time, in Massachusetts and I love urban fantasy so I was ready to see how the story would play out.

+ This has been advertised as adult fantasy but this is straight up urban fantasy. I saw the bad reviews but I can’t help myself, I’ve been reading Holly Black since 2002! Yup, I’ve been a fan for twenty years so this is what I thought about her adult urban fantasy book. I finally got to borrow an ebook copy of Book of Night and I downloaded right away because I’ve been wanting to read it for the past 2 months now. Holly Black makes her adult debut with Book of Night, a modern dark fantasy of shadowy thieves and secret societies.Ĭontent Warning: abuse, violence, parental neglect, self harm, murder, drug use 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. 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.

Book of night series holly black