Book of Night by Holly Black Review (Best Book of 2022)

Holly Black’s first science fiction is a metropolitan dream that magically authorizes people to regulate their path, and occasionally other public’s, shadows, and in which the wealthy and influential corporations in secrets and books of myth while struggling for domination. Charlie, the protagonist of the novel, works as a bartender and lives in the world of normalcy. She expects her sister to be admitted to college, and she lives in a world where she is a scam artist and a bandit. 

The publisher has illustrated the story of the novel as : 

In Charlie Hall’s world, shadows can be altered, for entertainment and cosmetic preferences—but also to increase power and influence. You can alter someone’s feelings—and memories—but manipulating shadows has a cost, with the potential to take hours or days from your life. Your shadow holds all the parts of you that you want to keep hidden—a second self, standing just to your left, walking behind you into lit rooms. And sometimes, it has a life of its own.

Charlie is a low-level con artist, working as a bartender while trying to distance herself from the powerful and dangerous underground world of shadow trading. She gets by doing odd jobs for her patrons and the naive new money in her town at the edge of the Berkshires. But when a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie’s present life is thrown into chaos, and her future seems at best, unclear—and at worst, non-existent. Determined to survive, Charlie throws herself into a maelstrom of secrets and murder, setting her against a cast of doppelgangers, mercurial billionaires, shadow thieves, and her sister—all desperate to control the magic of the shadows.

The protagonist is irritable and self-destructive, an awful alternative for a parent. She has feelings for Vince when she gets to know about him. The structure of the book has flashbacks, which arouse a sense of emotional attachment to the protagonist.

This novel is a silent love story, where Charlie is a  devotee that destroys almost every good thing in her life. She also believes that she is from a family where women are cursed for their love lives, therefore she eagerly wanted to abandon Venice. Their relationship attains substantial development at the end of the novel. This text includes abundant worworld-buildingthout the explanation being too cumbersome, which fits the subtle, complicated characters.

My favorite specialty about the novel is that Holly Black has made a refined protagonist, Charlie. This resembles the struggling life of a person in this world. 

However, I loved this illusionary, horrifying and magical novel, but this is meant to only adult readers. I firmly believe that this science fiction should have another part for the amusement of readers.

~Faryal Karim

You can buy this book from:

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Night-Holly-Black/dp/1250812194