4.5! A strong story of sacrifice, loss, and saying "screw it" and finding your own way.

Holly did it all right. Great characters, great stakes, a singular magic system and enough mystery to keep readers tethered to the page.

My only critique? More. This world has such promise and opportunity! Don't leave us hanging, Holly! To be opened to this magical world of night and left with half the journey to go seems rough treatment! I would love to see more from these characters, or ancillary tales from the world!

Also, Red for President!

My thanks to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Holly Black's adult debut, BOOK OF NIGHT, is a heist-y fantasy perfect for fans of the other YA-to-adult transitions in recent years like Leigh Bardugo and Sarah J Maas.

This twisty mystery is all about shadows: if one feeds their shadow blood it can develop abilities other than following your every move...sometimes detaching entirely...

This cover is great and I think the title delivered on an incredibly interesting premise with rich characters. I will certainly be picking up book two as I must know what happens next. That said, I felt the title was about 300 pages longer than it needed to be and became repetitive and/or slow at times. I think a tighter delivery could have packed a better punch, but I did enjoy the read and can certainly recommend for fans of NINTH HOUSE, CRESCENT CITY, or SIX OF CROWS.

I really enjoyed this book! I love everything that I have read from Holly Black so this is not a surprise. This novel gave me Ninth House vibes despite their characters and stories being entirely different. I think it was just the New England underworld atmosphere but that was my favorite part. I loved Charlie as a main character. She was frustrating and headstrong and just relatable enough to me.

What was very different about Book of Night compared to Black's other books was the pacing. Her Folk of the Air series is so plot heavy and past paced whereas this story was a lot slower and showed a lot more characterization through flashbacks. It was not what I was expecting in a Holly Black book but I was pleasantly surprised.

Charlie Hall remembers the way things were before magic was real. Her life would have taken a different course without shadow magic and the underground market it created for stolen shadows, arcane spells, and--most importantly for Charlie--hidden knowledge. She might have become a different woman if she didn't move so quickly from small cons like convincing her mom she was a medium to the much bigger cons of stealing long hidden, very dangerous spells.

But some bullets can't be dodged. You have to take the hit.

Which is why Charlie is more determined than ever to start fresh. No cons. No heists. And definitely no magic. She can't stop her younger sister Posey from searching online for traces of magic at all hours, can't stop Posey from splitting her own tongue so she'll be ready when her shadow wakes up. What Charlie can do is take a boring stable job tending bar, spend time with her boring stable boyfriend Vince, and make sure Posey's tuition is paid on time. Simple.

Except you don't get into the spell market without building a reputation, without meeting unsavory characters, and sometimes being the unsavory character. That makes it hard to start fresh.

When the worst parts of her past come back to haunt her, Charlie's boring stable life is thrown into chaos. Delving deeper into the world she thought she'd left behind, Charlie quickly learns that danger doesn't just lurk in the shadows--sometimes it's the shadows themselves in Book of Night (2022) by Holly Black.

Book of Night is Black's adult market debut and the start of a duology.

Charlie is a pragmatic main character, having survived her share of hard knocks and dealt a few herself along the way. Even in world with magic, Charlie is aware that to be normal means fitting into a very narrow box--one that's hard to find when you're poor and have a past like hers. While this tense narrative centers on a job Charlie can't refuse, at its core Book of Night is a story about growing into yourself and learning to embrace every part of yourself--even the ones you've tried so hard to bury.

When magic can be bought and sold or stolen and hoarded, Charlie walks the shadow-thin line between going too far and not going far enough to protect everyone she loves. Book of Night delivers noir elements with a world-weary heroine like Charlie alongside the fantasy and wonder inherent to a world where magic is real but still new enough to not be fully understood. Book of Night is filled with satisfying twists and gasp-worthy reveals perfect for long-time Holly Black fans and new readers alike.

Possible Pairings: Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert, Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey, Tigers, Not Daughters by Samantha Mabry, Gallant by V. E. Schwab

After reading Black’s previous work, both the cruel prince series and being obsessed with Jude and cardan for years and her middle grade series with Clare, I knew “Book of Night” was going to be nothing short of a story too. I loved this!!! It was a slow burn plot to begin with but let me tell you, once you dig in and get to the heart of the story you simply can’t stop. It was dark when needed to be and had some of the best cast or characters that you get attached to more so then you think. 5/5 what an incredible adult debut for black!

Holly Black's Book of Night marks the author's disappointing entry into adult urban fantasy. Black's readers will be disappointed by the absence of Black's trademark gorgeous prose, which has been replaced (for some inscrutable reason) by a weirdly disjointed POV that is sometimes deeply embedded in Charlie, the protagonist, and at other times seems to represent an omniscient, unnamed narrator--a weirdly off-key attempt, perhaps, at the tone of a fairy tale.

Wow! Wow! Wow! I wish I could give a detailed review right now but I’m still processing everything!

I can tell you that I LOVE THIS BOOK! I finished it and immediately went and preordered all the special editions! I must have them all and you need them too.😏😆

This is now my favorite Holly Black book! Perfect for fans of This Savage Song and Ninth House.

Pages 114 and 264. Those are the only two spots I stopped in Book of Night, the first because I fell asleep mid-page, and the second because I was pissed at the universe. Book of Night should not end. It needs to keep going. Only forty more pages and then the long, cold wait for the sequel? What the hell, universe! 2022 is hard enough!

This is by no means an indictment of Holly Black’s process or progress, by the way. When you write a book this good, you should have the time you need to follow it up in whatever way suits best. You shouldn’t ever rush a master, and at this point we can safely call Holly Black a master.

This is Holly Black’s first “adult” novel, but her YA has never really been all that young. Lots of girls forced to grow up too fast, lots of “adult situations.” And not in the Gossip Girl way, in which all the “teens” are 25, playing caricatures of rich people written by committees of middle class writers who are half-scornful, half-envious. No, Black has always written teenagers the way they are, angry and horny and desperate for love. Black just carries that forward in time in Book of Night is all. Charlie in her 30s is so utterly the product of Charlie in her teens, which sounds like it should be obvious, but it’s not easy to do. Getting a character to have the same voice and personality but make meaningfully different choices based on experience requires a steady and subtle hand, and Black’s experience shows here. This is a novel that feels like a dark rush, but it’s been carefully, even painstakingly crafted at every one of its many, many turns.

That’s the paradox of the artist: you have to work hard enough to seem like you’re not working at all. And here’s another: the paradox of great stories is that the more particular you are, the more universal your appeal. People may love archetypes and tropes, but they don’t actually want to read the story of Love Interest One meeting Love Interest Two in Offbeat Café. (Actually I would read that, but only as a satire.) Book of Night is so enjoyable because it’s steeped in particularities, both the mundane and the magical.

I guess we have to talk about the magic system as a system. So: it’s effective. It’s internally consistent. It’s spooky and cool and all the things shadow magic should be. I’m more interested in the magic as a part of the world, though. Very much like The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, which put its fantasy elements right out in the public view, Book of Night has its glooms existing as eerie but largely accepted segments of the population. Most of their work is—forgive me—done in the shadows, but there are semi-public figures too, as well as enthusiasts, detractors, and researchers who study glooms and shadows. There is no overriding ethos: glooms are people, and people are as messy, altruistic, narcissistic, smart, dumb, bad, and good as they’ve always been. And Charlie is the best possible person to help us meet all of them.

From putting lipstick on before a fight to getting stuck with Walgreens’ clothing, Charlie inhabits her world as few characters are able to do. The reality of it seems effortless, but I can assure you it’s not. Black has to know the way the floors get sticky at dive bars and the way your makeup feels when you wake up after a bad night out, has to understand the way you live when your car is always on the verge of breaking down. She’s thought as much about those little moments as she has about the big reveals and the thorny intricacies of the plot, and it shows. She’s polished this book until it glows. Every one of Charlie’s jagged edges shines with care, and the book reflects that a thousandfold into its prose and plot, a sharp and gleaming masterpiece.

I’m a huge fan of heists and a big proponent of the “one last score” sub-genre, and this delivers that and more. Considering that it’s only about 300 pages, the book is absolutely brimming over with cons, tricks, and hoodwinks. I appreciate how all of these are pulled without recourse to cinematic nonsense–there aren’t lasers, or life-accurate rubber masks, or any other expensive gimmicks. There’s just Charlie, perpetually broke, with only her knowledge, her moxie, and a couple of good cosmetic tricks to get her into and out of some sticky situations. She doesn’t even have shadow magic! Yet she holds her own as she starts going after a cabal of glooms, getting pulled deeper and deeper no matter how much she wants to stop.

Interspersed with her current capers are glimpses of Charlie’s teenage years as a burgeoning crook, following the only path that would keep her relatively safe and make her feel relatively special. Or so she thinks, but it turns out that “relatively” and “not at all” are close cousins. She runs afoul of a very wealthy and very sadistic man who makes sure she knows that she’s nobody in his world. Charlie already suspected it–her mother badly neglected her–but she spends the intervening years until we meet her both trying and failing to defy that conviction. The only thing she was ever good at (she thinks) was crime.

So is Charlie doomed to walk the wide and crooked? Or can she stay straight? Those are the options she thinks she has, but this isn’t a world of exclusively black and white. Black (again, sorry, no pun intended) really plumbs the depths of the nature of shadows, exploring the ways that our darker sides are not necessarily evil. Evil can wear a very proper suit and abide by the letter of the law. Shadow magic is legal, after all. So is owning grimoires. But if Charlie doesn’t want a very dangerous “upstanding citizen” to get his hands on dangerous magic, she can’t play by the rules.

Book of Night embraces this Jungian view of shadows at both the personal and societal level, which is to say, we as people and we as members of a culture all have things that we don’t want to acknowledge. We don’t like to think about the fact that the rules are different for the wealthy and powerful, and so we suppress it along with all the other knowledge and desires and powers we wish we didn’t have. Like all the other shadows in Book of Night, the shadow of our collective unconsciousness do eventually come bubbling to the surface. But, mediated by Charlie, we have a chance to examine those uncomfortable truths–and maybe make them work for us.

Every once in a long while, I read a book that is completely different from anything else I've read because I'm interested in the author specifically. Before this, it was An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and, a very long time ago, it was The Casual Vacancy.

This is Holly Black's first foray into adult fiction. In my head, I figured this meant that there would be supernatural elements for an older audience. I WAS NOT WRONG.

There was definitely supernatural elements. This is a world where people's shadows are separate and magical parts of them. The people who can control their awakened shadows are called gloamists. And the only people we really see doing that in this story are Not Good People.

And it was for a much older audience. My goodness, the world depicted in this book, and the point of view character, were both so dark that I had a difficult time coming back to this world each time that I opened the book.

And yet, the writing was such that I couldn't not keep coming back to this book. I had to know what happened next. And, yes, as time went on, I began to become actually worried for what would happen with both Charlie and Vince. Charlie is our main character. At the start, she is pretty unlikeable, living in a dingy apartment with her sister and boyfriend (Vince) and working a dingy job.

As time goes on, we get to see some of her backstory, seeing what brought her to being the kind of person she is. It humanises her. And maybe it's also just that deciding to continue a book after a certain point, you can't help but root for the main character.

And Vince. I was so sure he was going to be a two dimensional throw away character from the way Charlie references him at the start. He's thin but kinda likeable and completely not the kind of person Charlie sees sticking around. So she's trying not to become too attached to him.

We also get some of Vince's backstory as the novel goes on.

What this ends up revealing both in past and present is an incredibly well thought out and interwoven story, right on the border of psychological thriller.

Just when you think there is nothing new!
A person's shadow can have a life of its own. It can even outlive the original host.

I enjoyed the concept of this book a lot. My one criticism is, I wish there was a bit more to the romance. I know Holly Black typically doesn't go all out on the love story but a little more interaction between the love interests would have made the twists have a bigger impact. That being said I am excited for book two and I think with how book one ended readers are in for a treat. I will definitely handsell this book a bunch of times over!

This book was interesting in that I enjoyed the magic system and the shadows were new and exciting to read. The language was there, the main character was annoying and cliché to me, but you can't have everything.

Thanks to NetGalley for this Arc. I am an Indigo employee - this review contains my own thoughts and opinions.

I want to start by stating that this book does not fall into my preferred genre and I know that many readers posting reviews on NetGalley and GoodRead are raving about this book. Also I haven’t read any of the authors other publications which I know sell well among the YA crowd. As such I won’t write much as this book wasn’t written for me.

I found this book difficult to get in to and hard going through the first few chapters. The concept of being able to interact with and alter you shadow was intriguing and I appreciated the magical elements of the books however I found the overall story to be quite dark and I think readers have to be in the right headspace to properly enjoy the book. I know several of my colleagues would hand sell this as it’s more their reading vibe.

As someone who grew up adoring Holly Black's work I was so excited when I found out she would be producing her first Adult debut novel. I dove in immediately upon receiving early access and I didn't stop to put it down even once except maybe to eat or get a coffee!

The atmosphere was such a perfect blend of grungy and dark paired with a close family bond and real downtown urban life. I feel like this is the adult debut I've been waiting for and I can't wait to get my hands on a physical copy.

I really enjoy Holly Black's writing style and the Book of Night continued that trend. This book was a bit slow to start and the terminology was confusing at first. I felt like I had been dropped into a universe where I should know, but didn't. It did sort itself out though, and once the plot really got going I couldn't put it down. I also didn't see that twist coming until pretty close to the end, so that was nice for a change! If you like Holly Black's other books then I think you'll like this one as well.

What an interesting book - absolutely not the YA Black is known for, but what a strong jump into adult fantasy this is. The plot jumped around a bit, and there were some things I had to think harder to follow than I loved, but generally I loved how quietly creepy this plot was for a fantasy book, and the prose and worldbuilding so far were pretty strong. Generally it was a fun read (with a little spicy), even if at times it was a bit slow.

I have high high hopes this one turns into a series - I am completely here for these characters and would love to see this world expand.

There's never been a book by Holly Black that I haven't absolutely loved, and her jump into adult fantasy is no exception. We still get to experience the classic gritty magic world Black is best known for, but instead of faeries we're introduced into the world of gloamists and shadows.

"The Book of Night" follows Charlie Hall, a sort-of ex-thief, who is pushed into a terrible situation and forced to find and steal one of the most coveted books in the world to protect her family. We get to meet her boyfriend Vince and her sister Posey, the two most important people in her life. After giving up stealing gloamist artifacts and books, Charlie is trying to make a fresh start working at a new bar and encouraging Posey to go to college, until she stumbles upon something she never should have seen.

I really hope this doesn't end up being a standalone, and that the author continues evolving more of the story and the characters in this new, complex world. Charlie is the perfect morally grey heroine, and even when she's making questionable choices I can't help but root for her every step of the way.

Holly Black is a master of unique set ups. I love the Curseworker series, so I was thrilled to get this book early and it did not disappoint. Charlie is a clever, interesting protagonist, the magic set up was different than anything I've read and I can't wait for the next book in the series.
Things I loved:
Charlie
The shadow set up - unique and creepy
Vince
The con plot - love a good con plot where the reader isn't fully aware of all the actions the protagonist has taken, but is hoping they're as smart as they seem during the reveals.

Things I didn't love as much:
Posey - I found her selfish and self-absorbed. Charlie was always so worried she was the "bad" one, but Posey came off worse to me at times in the pursuit of her gloamist goals
A few confusing plot points - This may be because this is still a galley (and because I was reading a bit sporadically due to work busy-ness), but there were a few things that felt like I had to work a bit to grasp. The Cabal is all talked about at the beginning of the book and then not truly introduced until the end, so I felt like I'd forgotten who was who and why they were important and what their skills were. I also wasn't clear on why *minor spoiler* Salt was in charge of the Hierophant when he wasn't in the Cabal. I'm not too worried about this in the long run because I'm absolutely going to re-read it before the sequel comes out so I imagine a few of things I am vague about will make more sense the second time around.

All in all, loved it as much as I expected to, plan on recommending it to my book friends, and can't wait for the next one!

This is my first Holly Black title and it certainly won't be my last. I really liked the style of the prose and found myself connecting to the characters. Overall, I'd say it was a 4 out 5 for me. I know our students will love it, so I've purchased a couple of copies for the library.

The book overview for Holly Black’s latest offering promises readers an exciting dark fantasy of a magical underworld replete with thieves, shadows, and mysteries. Overall however, this doesn’t read as one of Holly’s best efforts. Rather, the novel can be likened to a lengthy introductory prologue, with the real action only happening among the final pages, a hinted promise of more to come as the novel closes.

Rather than visual action, readers are mainly presented with real world situations…financial woes and family issues, addictions and like obsessions. It all simply exists…acknowledgements on the page rather than a series of confrontations that would bring about change. Even the relationships are akin to mere shadows in the background, introduced, but never really reaching their full potential.

Perhaps this is due to the back-and-forth structure of the narrative. Holly takes readers from the present to a hodgepodge of moments from the past—a means of providing background to explain what’s transpiring in real time. The alternating chapters affects the natural flow of the story, creating a story that’s messy and impulsive, without much depth, not unlike the book’s narrator and heroine.

Astute readers should readily be able to piece together the story’s mystery plot within the first few chapters. So many pieces of information are introduced within those early moments that it’s easy to make inferences and predict what will happen.

The book ends with the promise of a future tale, one that’s not unlike the journey made by the heroine in the fairytale East of the Sun, West of the Moon. This particular journey may not necessarily involve the travel of great distances and far off lands, but involves the journey of thoughts and feelings, a journey of lost time, that may effectively allow the characters to reach their full, emotional potential. If there is a sequel, one would hope that it will be more satisfying to readers than this tale.