It’s been 20 years since Holly Black published Tithe, the first of her Modern Faerie Tale series. Since then, Black has written a lot of things—the beautifully eerie middle-grade novel Doll Bones; The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, the vampire book that made me love vampires again; the Folk of the Air series, which shifted her faerie style into a new key—but you can always tell a Holly Black book. It’s like walking into a certain kind of bar. There are young women who don’t always make the best decisions. There are men with secrets. And there’s a specific, netherworldly sense of place: Black’s stories often take place in in-between towns, not the country or the city, boundarylands where things and people cross over. “They were close enough to Springfield for light pollution to dull the night skies, but galaxies still spangled the air above them.” That kind of place.
Book of Night, Black’s first novel for adults, picks up in the kind of not-fully-a-college town where people order both shitty beers and shots of chartreuse in the local bar, and it feels like a homecoming. We’re obviously in a Holly Black story. Charlie Hall, bartender and thief and con artist, is about to face a dame who walks in and asks Charlie to do something. She should say no. She won’t.
It’s familiar territory and yet not, because Black sets this scene a little differently—with a short prologue that introduces the idea of a blood-sipping shadow. Peter Pan this is not.
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