Book of Night (Book of Night #1)

by Holly Black

There’d always been something wrong with Charlie Hall. Crooked, from the day she was born. Never met a bad decision she wasn’t willing to double down on. Had fingers made for picking pockets, a tongue for lying, and a shriveled cherry pit for a heart.

There are countless differences between the lives of people with money and people without. One is this: without the means to pay experts, it’s necessary to evolve a complex ecosystem of useful amateurs.

Manipulated shadows were the specialty of alterationists, the most public-facing of the four disciplines. Alterationists could cosmetically shape shadows, use them to trigger emotions so strong they could be addictive, and even cut out pieces of a person’s subconscious.

The other gloaming disciplines were more secretive. Carapaces focused on their own shadows, using them to soar through the air on shadow wings or armor themselves. Puppeteers sent their shadows to do things in secret—in Charlie’s experience, largely the kind of foul shit no one wanted to talk about. And the masks weren’t much better, a bunch of creeps and mystics intent on unraveling the secrets of the universe, no matter who it hurt.

It was believed that shadowless people had an absence in them, a lack of some intangible thing.

And sometimes knowing someone for a long time seemed more important than liking them.

Too often, people acted like her curves were some engraved invitation. They seemed to forget that everyone gets born into bodies they can’t just kick off like slippers, figures they can’t transform as though they were shadows.

Psychics were therapists for people who couldn’t admit they needed therapy. They were magic for people who desperately needed a little magic, back before magic was real.

Posey said that a guy had to have a hole in his head, his heart, or his pocket for one of the Hall women to go head-over-heels for him.

It turns out that men have more authority, even when they’re not real.

With no good ideas, she was going to go for the bad one. They better carve that on her tomb.

What’s in the past doesn’t matter now.” “Oh, honey.” Odette put her hand on Charlie’s arm, giving her a fond squeeze. “The past is the only thing that matters.”

If she couldn’t be responsible or careful or good or loved, if she was doomed to be a lit match, then Charlie might as well go back to finding stuff to burn.