![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
attackfishI have now gotten to the point where I just pop into the library when I’m downtown instead of waiting for an occasion when I actually need to go there. I’m not sure if this is a sign of my improving mental health, or a new coping mechanism, but the upshot is, I’m reading more, and therefore writing more book reviews, and I am not at this time inclined to figure out a way to make myself read less. Anyway, this is another one of those series that I’ve been meaning to read for a while and never got around to it. I’m getting around to them now.
Cassel Sharpe is the only nonworker in a family of magic workers. He is one of the masses, a mark, there to be conned, cheated, and taken advantage of. Magic is illegal, and magic workers live on the edges of society, banding together in crime families, setting out on their own as small time crooks, or trying to keep their powers hidden to lead as law abiding a life as they can. But just because Cassel doesn’t have magic doesn’t mean he’s honest. When he wakes up on the roof of his school with no memory of how he got there, his own crimes, and a murder he doesn’t even remember committing years ago, come crawling out of the past, just waiting to catch up with him.
So right now, just about everything I read are YA Fantasy takes on another genre, in this case, the noir and organized crime thriller. Black blends a coming of age story beautifully with the the noir genre, which much like its antecedent, the gothic genre, is all about unraveling a dark secret.
One of the most crucial differences between gothic and noir is the protagonist. The gothic gives us an ingenue, the innocent, helpless protagonist defined by their passivity. Not all gothic protagonists are female, but the gothic heroine is more common than the gothic hero, since women, in older works especially are assumed to be more vulnerable. Many modern gothics make the protagonist (especially when it’s a woman or girl) less passive, more of an agent in their own story, but they are still an every(wo)man, with no especial knowledge of the danger they are in, and no real way to protect themselves. The noir on the other hand, has a protagonist who already has some grasp on the secret. The noir protagonist is much more often male, less vulnerable, and stronger, and more capable than the presumed readership. This leads to one of the reasons why the gothic and noir genres are terrifying in different ways. In the gothic, we empathize with the protagonist, who is on a level with us. Whereas in a noir, we see someone more powerful than we struggle. If they, this strong, capable person is unable to overcome this dark system, what hope do we have?
The other major difference between the gothic and noir genres is the intimacy of the threat. The noir genre gives us the whole of society as the real threat, a system so damaged and damaging that it has become irremediable. The gothic genre on the other hand, offers a threat much closer to home, within the home in fact, within the family, or in the form of a lover, or even within the protagonist’s own mind.
Black uses the trappings of the noir genre to tell a more fundamentally gothic story. While Cassel seems to be relatively on to of things at first (even when the things he’s on top of in the literal sense are school roofs) and is initiated into the criminal activities of his family, he has no idea how much he doesn’t know, and how vulnerable he really is. This makes the coming of age aspect of YA fit much better in White Cat than it would in a novel with a more traditional noir protagonist. Also, while the crime families, and discovery by the authorities are real dangers for Cassel, the most dangerous threats lie within his own family, and within his own mind. In White Cat, as broken as the system is, it’s a secondary concern.
I feel like I should have something to say about Black’s use of the present tense, but to tell the truth, after being in fandom for a few years, I barely noticed it. It neither added nor detracted. Her use of the first person, on the other hand, showed exactly why first person narration can be such a useful tool in the hands of an author who knows what she is doing. Black, as Cassel, is able to state as fact thinks Cassel believes to be true, or thinks he knows are true, instead of providing the evidence to the audience directly and letting us come to our own conclusions. Cassel’s status as an unwittingly unreliable narrator means that Black can introduce us at the very beginning with the totality of the world Cassel thinks he lives in before knocking that foundation out from under her readers as she knocks it out from under Cassel. It’s not hard for a savvy reader to guess that most of what Cassel tells us at the beginning is probably not true, whether he believes it to be true or not. What having Cassel as the narrator allows is for Black to lay each clue out along with the perfectly reasonable an coherent explanation for it that Cassel has been given, so that once the real reason for each detail is revealed, the reader can share that moment of enlightenment and realization with Cassel.
The biggest clue of all to the mystery surrounding Cassel is Cassel himself, his own revulsion at what he believes he has done, and his own lack of murderous intent. His attempts to poke at the darkness he believes must lurk inside him to have made him kill Lila are horrifying, and yet impressively realistic. His need to reassure himself that the thought of murdering another girl is grotesque to him and unenjoyable really brings home what has been done to him. His bone deep resignation and acceptance of the idea of himself as monster is incredibly painful and incredibly identifiable, and left me waiting on the edge of my seat for the moment when he learned the truth, about what had really happened to Lila.
This is not a happy book, but it’s a good one. Read at your own risk. It contains a long list of triggers, many of which are spoilery.
Holly Black can be found online at her website, blackholly.com, or on livejournal, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
blackholly.
Cassel Sharpe is the only nonworker in a family of magic workers. He is one of the masses, a mark, there to be conned, cheated, and taken advantage of. Magic is illegal, and magic workers live on the edges of society, banding together in crime families, setting out on their own as small time crooks, or trying to keep their powers hidden to lead as law abiding a life as they can. But just because Cassel doesn’t have magic doesn’t mean he’s honest. When he wakes up on the roof of his school with no memory of how he got there, his own crimes, and a murder he doesn’t even remember committing years ago, come crawling out of the past, just waiting to catch up with him.
So right now, just about everything I read are YA Fantasy takes on another genre, in this case, the noir and organized crime thriller. Black blends a coming of age story beautifully with the the noir genre, which much like its antecedent, the gothic genre, is all about unraveling a dark secret.
One of the most crucial differences between gothic and noir is the protagonist. The gothic gives us an ingenue, the innocent, helpless protagonist defined by their passivity. Not all gothic protagonists are female, but the gothic heroine is more common than the gothic hero, since women, in older works especially are assumed to be more vulnerable. Many modern gothics make the protagonist (especially when it’s a woman or girl) less passive, more of an agent in their own story, but they are still an every(wo)man, with no especial knowledge of the danger they are in, and no real way to protect themselves. The noir on the other hand, has a protagonist who already has some grasp on the secret. The noir protagonist is much more often male, less vulnerable, and stronger, and more capable than the presumed readership. This leads to one of the reasons why the gothic and noir genres are terrifying in different ways. In the gothic, we empathize with the protagonist, who is on a level with us. Whereas in a noir, we see someone more powerful than we struggle. If they, this strong, capable person is unable to overcome this dark system, what hope do we have?
The other major difference between the gothic and noir genres is the intimacy of the threat. The noir genre gives us the whole of society as the real threat, a system so damaged and damaging that it has become irremediable. The gothic genre on the other hand, offers a threat much closer to home, within the home in fact, within the family, or in the form of a lover, or even within the protagonist’s own mind.
Black uses the trappings of the noir genre to tell a more fundamentally gothic story. While Cassel seems to be relatively on to of things at first (even when the things he’s on top of in the literal sense are school roofs) and is initiated into the criminal activities of his family, he has no idea how much he doesn’t know, and how vulnerable he really is. This makes the coming of age aspect of YA fit much better in White Cat than it would in a novel with a more traditional noir protagonist. Also, while the crime families, and discovery by the authorities are real dangers for Cassel, the most dangerous threats lie within his own family, and within his own mind. In White Cat, as broken as the system is, it’s a secondary concern.
I feel like I should have something to say about Black’s use of the present tense, but to tell the truth, after being in fandom for a few years, I barely noticed it. It neither added nor detracted. Her use of the first person, on the other hand, showed exactly why first person narration can be such a useful tool in the hands of an author who knows what she is doing. Black, as Cassel, is able to state as fact thinks Cassel believes to be true, or thinks he knows are true, instead of providing the evidence to the audience directly and letting us come to our own conclusions. Cassel’s status as an unwittingly unreliable narrator means that Black can introduce us at the very beginning with the totality of the world Cassel thinks he lives in before knocking that foundation out from under her readers as she knocks it out from under Cassel. It’s not hard for a savvy reader to guess that most of what Cassel tells us at the beginning is probably not true, whether he believes it to be true or not. What having Cassel as the narrator allows is for Black to lay each clue out along with the perfectly reasonable an coherent explanation for it that Cassel has been given, so that once the real reason for each detail is revealed, the reader can share that moment of enlightenment and realization with Cassel.
The biggest clue of all to the mystery surrounding Cassel is Cassel himself, his own revulsion at what he believes he has done, and his own lack of murderous intent. His attempts to poke at the darkness he believes must lurk inside him to have made him kill Lila are horrifying, and yet impressively realistic. His need to reassure himself that the thought of murdering another girl is grotesque to him and unenjoyable really brings home what has been done to him. His bone deep resignation and acceptance of the idea of himself as monster is incredibly painful and incredibly identifiable, and left me waiting on the edge of my seat for the moment when he learned the truth, about what had really happened to Lila.
This is not a happy book, but it’s a good one. Read at your own risk. It contains a long list of triggers, many of which are spoilery.
Holly Black can be found online at her website, blackholly.com, or on livejournal, as
blackholly.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-01-19 01:30 pm (UTC)The title of your post is a parody of anti-gun-control rhetoric, no? It's a more interesting statement than at first glance when I think about it. It has been true of some goods (alcohol and drugs), but gun control has been successfully implemented in many countries (Australia, Korea etc.) Regulation is far too context-dependent to say gun control always works or that prohibition never does, but some of that context appears to be the nature of the good, political will and government effectiveness. So the effectiveness of magic control would depend on the way that people use magic in this world and the nature of the government, among other factors.
(no subject)
From: