It’s gripping, and most of all it’s realistic. This is a rarity in the urban fantasy genre. Sandwiched between various flashbacks, typically such pacing of a novel would feel slow and sluggish but these flashbacks gave perfect context to the characters in the world. We have to praise the overall writing style of Holly Black in her Book of Night. It feels like she matches her dark and twisted environment perfectly. She’s a little prickly and has a tendency to lean towards self-destruction, yet we felt so drawn to her. With an intricate world and complex magic systems, this feels like the perfect foundation for another hit series, akin to The Cruel Prince series.Ĭharlie is nuanced and complicated. Not that we don’t love her YA stuff, but it’s refreshing when a beloved author switches it up!īlack held back no punches.

It’s so releving to read a Holly Black book which moves away from teenage and young adult romances. When a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie descends into a maelstrom of murder and lies.ĭetermined to survive, she’s up against a cast of doppelgangers, mercurial billionaires, gloamists, and the people she loves best in the world-all trying to steal a secret that will give them vast and terrible power. Not to mention that her sister Posey is desperate for magic, and that Charlie’s shadowless, and possibly soulless, boyfriend has been hiding things from her. Bartending at a dive, she’s still entirely too close to the corrupt underbelly of the Berkshires. Now, she’s trying to distance herself from past mistakes, but getting out isn’t easy. And to rob their fellow magicians, they need Charlie Hall. Gloamists guard their secrets greedily, creating an underground economy of grimoires. She’s spent half her life working for gloamists, magicians who manipulate shadows to peer into locked rooms, strangle people in their beds, or worse. Charlie Hall has never found a lock she couldn’t pick, a book she couldn’t steal, or a bad decision she wouldn’t make.

Book of night holly black review