Book Review: White Cat by Holly Black & AUTHOR EVENT

 The Odyssey Bookshop welcomes 

Holly Black & Cassandra Clare 

in a duo-author event on 

May 11th at 7 p.m.!

Holly Black's New Release!

White Cat (The Curse Workers #01)
by Holly Black
9781416963967, $17.99, Pub. Date: May 2010

Introducing the beginning of a new Holly Black series! So dark, so complicated, so witty - so wonderful.

How to explain this book to without giving a page-by-page detailed explanation? Okay, let's begin with setting. The time is now, or sometime mirroring now, with the cars, phones, technology, etc. that we have. The difference is the existence of curse work. Some people have the ability to work curses, magic, by touching other people with their bare hands. There are different types of curse work - memory curses, emotion curses, and transmutation curses. Curse working has been outlawed and everyone wears gloves to avoid touching each other with bare hands.

Enter Cassel Sharpe. He was born into a family of curse workers, and though he's an excellent con artist, he's not actually a curse worker. That doesn't mean there isn't something a little magical going on. Cassel keeps dreaming of a white cat, and waking up not in his boarding school dormitory bed. His dreams tend to center around one event he'd like to forget: the night he killed the girl he loved, Lila Zacharov. She was the daughter of the powerful head of the Zacharov crime family. The only reason Cassel is still alive is that his older brothers, all powerful curse workers, covered up for him.

While this all sounds strange in its own right, the part that's more bizarre is that Lila's curse magic was an ability to turn into other animals, and a white cat was her favorite. How is Lila controlling Cassel's dreams if she's supposedly dead? As the complex plot unfolds, Cassel begins to realize he can't trust anyone or anything - not his own family, and worst of all, not even his own memory. Someone has been curse working him. Now if only he could figure out who and why...


Throw in a dysfunctional family, a girlfriend who just dumped him, the beginnings of actual friends for the first time in his life, and you've got one heck of a teenage life to get through.

-Rebecca

See this review on my personal blog.

Cassandra Clare's Trilogy, Mortal Instruments!

City of Bones
9781416955078, Simon & Schuster, $9.99

City of Ashes
9781416972242, Simon & Schuster, $9.99

City of Glass 
9781416914303, Simon & Schuster, $17.99

Reimagined Fairy Tales - YA article

Hi all,

Here's an article I received today from the Macmillan Kids e-newsletter. Thought you all might find it interesting. It's about reimagining/retelling fairy tales for the YA audience.

Enjoy! - Rebecca

Author Heather Tomlinson Discusses
Fairy Tales for a New Generation

Spoiler alert: Cinderella goes to the ball! Beauty saves the Beast!

Old news, right? And yet, like mushrooms in a fairy ring, fairy tale-influenced novels for teens are popping up all over. What compels authors and readers to revisit stories they already know?

A shared familiarity allows writers to play with their readers' expectations. You remember what happened to Rapunzel? Well, what if the author changes the setting, reverses key details, or combines characters from different tales? Voila! Like magic, old stories are new again.

With such a treasure trove of material to draw from, how's an author to choose? The stories that interest me have elements that annoy or perplex. Questions, I've learned, are the surest clue that a tale could turn into a novel. The story that inspired my first book, The Swan Maiden, is usually told from the male protagonist's point of view. I wondered what the girl in question might say about her own journey. Forthcoming Toads and Diamonds sprang from a pet peeve: Why is the oldest sister in fairy tales always the bad one? Furthermore, why don't stepsisters ever get along? What if a fairy's mismatched gifts turned out to be equally important? How and where would such a scenario be plausible? To answer my own questions, I had to write the book.

How does it end? Now, that would be telling.

New to the genre? Here's a trio of fairy tale-inspired novels to enjoy:

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
Toads and Diamonds by Heather Tomlinson
The Wager by Donna Jo Napoli