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White Cat.
Oct. 28th, 2010 13:28Black, Holly. White Cat. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010.
So I heard Holly Black talk about the genesis of this book and this series, The Curse-Workers, in her Guest of Honor speech at Sirens and, as well as being utterly hilarious, her speech definitely made me glad that I had this book waiting for me at home in my room. (Yeah, you don't even want to know how many books I have here in my room.) And it's good.
In brief, a certain segment of the population is born with the ability to work curses on others via their hands--but each worker can only work one type of curse, and each curse creates blowback directly in the worker, so that death-workers, for example, are always liable to lose fingers. To make things even more complicated, Prohibition outlawed curse-working in the States, and of course, to deal with that, workers have formed organized crime families.
( When a white cat crosses your path... )
So I heard Holly Black talk about the genesis of this book and this series, The Curse-Workers, in her Guest of Honor speech at Sirens and, as well as being utterly hilarious, her speech definitely made me glad that I had this book waiting for me at home in my room. (Yeah, you don't even want to know how many books I have here in my room.) And it's good.
In brief, a certain segment of the population is born with the ability to work curses on others via their hands--but each worker can only work one type of curse, and each curse creates blowback directly in the worker, so that death-workers, for example, are always liable to lose fingers. To make things even more complicated, Prohibition outlawed curse-working in the States, and of course, to deal with that, workers have formed organized crime families.
( When a white cat crosses your path... )