So when I read the first few pages of Book of Night, I knew it was going to be one of those special books that pulled me into its world and would not let me return to reality until I had savored every last page.Ĭharlie Hall is a low level con artist who does the occasional odd job here or there when she’s not bartending, having left the more dangerous world of shadow trading and gloamists behind. It’s a feeling that I search for every time I reach for a new book. Or when someone says my name for the hundredth time, trying to draw my attention away from whatever story I’ve lost myself in. The catch: she is to monitor Yale's elite secret societies, who have their own dark secrets.How do you know when you’re fully immersed in the world of a book? For me, it’s when I forget to check if I’m at my train stop. High-school dropout and homicide survivor Alex Stern is given an unlikely free ride at Yale University. If you like this, read: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (Orion, 2019, $17.95, buy here), another dark adult debut from a bestselling young-adult author. Room for a sequel? No shadow of a doubt there.
The novel enjoyably pours itself into the shape of a fantasy heist, and ends on a canny cliffhanger. Prickly, jaded Charlie harps perhaps too much on her tendency to make bad decisions, but there is pleasure in the details of her thieving prowess.
Once the plot gets going, however, it proves absorbing enough. The early part of the novel is devoted to set-up and thus a bit of a chore to get through, and the magic system is neither dazzling nor original. The untethered shadow of a dead gloamist becomes a Blight, which may run rampant and commit massacres. Gloamists covet ancient documents for dangerous experiments, sometimes dying if a PDF is digitised wrong. In a shady underworld controlled by a corrupt cabal, people sell their shadows for a quick buck, or have them stolen for the black market. Book Of Night joins Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (2019) and Veronica Roth's Chosen Ones (2020) on the better end of the spectrum.īlack has put much thought into building a world set aslant from ours by an explosion of shadow magic, which has deepened the divide between the haves and have-nots. She is among a slew of hit young-adult authors who have lately taken the leap into adult fiction, with varying results. Black has been working in children's and young-adult fantasy fiction for 20 years, producing bestsellers such as her series The Folk Of The Air, starting with The Cruel Prince (2018, buy here, borrow here).
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