Book of Night: YA Star Holly Black Levels Up with Her Dark Adult Debut
If you’ve read any popular young adult fantasy authors in the last few years, odds are you’ve encountered the work of Holly Black before. A New York Times bestselling writer who is probably best known for her “Folk of the Air” series, Black’s work is richly imagined, lushly written, and usually populated by an assortment of fairy folk with questionable, often sinister intentions. (But generally great cheekbones.) And her books are a blast—creative, propulsive narratives populated by an array of memorable characters you’ll either love immediately or love to hate, and the sort of addictive storytelling that means you’ll “accidentally” tear through one in the course of a day or two.
Book of Night may be Black’s first adult fantasy novel, but it contains many of the hallmarks that have made her writing so popular for years. There’s a prickly heroine, a twisty plot, and a central relationship that is something other than what it initially appears to be. But something about the contemporary, urban setting seems to free something in Black’s writing, allowing her to really dig into a story that is, at its heart, about trauma. From absentee parents and child abuse to toxic living situations and a magical system that involves no small amount of bodily mutilation, this is her messiest, most complicated book yet. (And I mean that in all the best ways.)
Set in a world in which it has only recently been discovered that some people can control and command their own shadows, popular consciousness and culture have become obsessed with so-called shadow magic. This has led to regular folks attempting to alter their shadows to grant new abilities or simply achieve cool cosmetic enhancements like having a shadow in the shape of a cat. (Admittedly? Kind of awesome.) Society’s elites, as is their wont, attempt to claim this power for their own, often offering large sums of money to those who can help replace their non-awakened shadows with those of a more magical or powerful variety.
Heroine Charlie Hall isn’t anyone’s role model—a con woman and a thief who can’t seem to say no to a challenge, she’s no angel, even when she’s at least attempting to be a better person. Having sworn off stealing things for a variety of unsavory gloamists (a fancy name for those who can control shadows and use them for various forms of magic), she’s working as a bartender, trying to convince her sister Posey to go to college, and making the best of things with her very normal if occasionally dull boyfriend Vince.
But when she’s inevitably drawn back into another scheme, her search for a missing object—the infamous Book of Night rumored to be full of the darkest sorts of shadow spells and rituals—will not only take over her life, it will put everything she loves at risk, forcing Charlie to decide who she is, and who she’s willing to become. Because in order to survive, she’ll have to confront every skeleton she was hoping to leave buried in her closet.
Black has spoken before about the ways that shifting to writing an adult novel has allowed her to explore more complex sorts of issues, such as the stagnation of adulthood and the ways we’re less able to adapt and change as we get older than perhaps we once were. And that’s honestly a big part of the reason Charlie feels so relatable as a heroine. Because even though you (probably?) can’t magically control your shadow, well, who among us hasn’t wondered what we were doing with our lives? Or questioned whether we were failing at this whole adulting thing?