Had fingers made for piking pockets, a tongue for lying and a shriveled cherry pit for a heart.” It does not make for the most friendly and moving heroine!Ĭharlie Hall is a con artist and comes in all shades of grey. Never met a bad decision she wasn’t willing to double down on. When you read “There’s always been something wrong with Charlie Hall. What also took me some time was to warm up to Charlie. That’s because Holly Black doesn’t do info dump but intertwine them throughout the plot. I didn’t comprehend what shadow magic, gloomists, quickened shadows etc were for a long time. The world in which Charlie is living is weird, with shadow magics and as it reads as an urban fantasy, I really needed time to get my footing. The beginning of the story gave me similar vibes as Ninth House, the first adult book of Leigh Bardugo.

Honestly if it wasn’t for a book club read and if friends didn’t tell me that it really kicked in from chapter 12, I would probably have DNF the book! It took me some time to fall into the story. The surprises are the best part of the book!

That review will be short as I don’t want to spoil anything. 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. Holly Black makes her adult debut with Book of Night, a modern dark fantasy of shadowy thieves and secret societies.

Holly black book of night series