Author: Holly Black
Publisher: Margaret K McElderry
Rating: WORTHY!
Well we're back with Curse Workers #2, and with Cassel, and Cassel is back in school. And so is Lila, which is a shock to him. He's supposed to be staying away from her because she was emotionally compromised into falling in love with him by Cassel's mother, who is one of the seven varieties of curse worker. Cassel refuses to take advantage of Lila, even though she's pretty much begging for him to take advantage of her; he's resolved to stay distant from her until the curse wears off. He's not doing a very good job of it, and neither is she. But then she doesn’t want to!
That's when the FBI shows up and reveals to Cassel that his brother Phillip has been assassinated. They want him to help them bring down the assassin - someone wearing red gloves, who appears to be female. Here's my wild guess: it’s either Cassel's ex-girlfriend Audrey or it isn’t a female. Now you know for a fact that it’s not Audrey, but it is a female, given my history of appallingly wrong guesses! Unfortunately, Cassel is already feeling wretched about the murders he was forced to commit (and then forget) by his brothers, Phillip and Barron. This entire family consists of men with two consonants in the middle of their name, and the reason Phillip was killed was because he has one too many letters in his name. There. Solved!
Okay, so the seven deadly workings are: emotions, death, dreams, luck, memory, physical, transformation (now you know how the Transformers really arose…). Lila is a dream worker. Cassel is a transformation worker. Cassel's two friends Sam and his girlfriend Daneca are both interested in the case files which the FBI gave to Cassel, despite his never giving them permission to snoop. Cassel discovers that he both killed and hid his victims in one fell swoop by transforming them into inanimate objects. He browbeats Barron into revealing one of the objects to him, but when Cassel transforms it back to its original state, the guy appears alive for a split second and then deteriorates rapidly, confirming what Cassel already knew - you can’t transform a living person to an inanimate object and hope to get them back alive. He really did murder those people. He also knows that you can, for example, transform a young girl called Lila into a white cat and get her back safely. So could you transform someone into a pair of red gloves?
Cassel becomes ever more confused and trapped in this lifestyle that he was so hoping to escape. Zacharov comes courting him by first asking a 'favor' - to change the appearance of one of his assassins. After Cassel complies (he doesn’t feel he has much of a choice), he's treated to a luxury dinner at an exclusive members only club, and later, Cassel finds he's the recipient of a brand new luxury Mercedes, a gift he doesn’t return. So has Zacharov finally bought him? We don’t know. When he later learns what the assassin did, he feels awful that he helped him escape justice.
Meanwhile, the FBI guys are pressuring him to uncover the murderer of his brother. Cassel is reluctant to do this because he's convinced it’s his mother; then he suspects it's Lila! Finally he decides to take matters into his own hands by fingering a person he really dislikes, and who he knows for a fact has put out a contract on someone else in the past. In this way he gets the FBI off his back and metes out harsh justice to someone who he knows is a bad person. He sets this person up by planting the murder weapon from his brother's case in this victim's apartment. I am in somewhat of a state of confusion about exactly how this weapon came to be in his hands and what it means that it ended-up there. Did Cassel kill Phillip?
Yes, Cassel isn't really such a nice guy, and it’s harder to like him in this novel than in White Cat, but he is still, even given all the pressure, trying to do the right thing as he sees it, only to have things go sideways on him at the most inopportune moment. There's one intriguing event when he actually performs a transformation on himself. I had wondered whether a worker could do this, and here we learn of it not only in Cassel's case, but in another instance, too. This made me wonder if Black is slipping this in as a concept so she can use it later to much greater effect on us.
This revelation also brought into focus a question I'd entertained when reading volume one, but never got around to discussing (curse this hectic charge from one novel to another!). This is a technical question as to how, exactly, this cursing business works. I believe I read in volume one that it doesn't manifest itself until somewhere in childhood - maybe onset of puberty? - which is how child-bearing women manage to deliver the kids without being killed or transformed, for example, by the fetus touching them! I don’t recall reading how cursing actually works in practice. There exists this obsession with wearing gloves: everyone wears them, even non-curse workers, because touching is such a verboten activity in this society. Hands are always covered, like breasts and genitals, which effectively turns them into sex organs (after a fashion!).
That reminded me of an old Mad magazine I read once where this series of panels featured three young men at the beach eyeing the semi-exposed girls around them. One of the guys goes off on a riff in his mind about how, if noses were considered sex organs instead, then women with large noses might be considered to be "stacked", and those with snub noses would be considered under-endowed. Right then, this young girl strolls by with a large beak-nose with a Band-Aid on it and the guy blurts out how sexy it is. His two friends look at him in askance. The weird thing is that I actually think that noses can look sexy, or can be a turn off, yet my perspective isn't based on whether they're overly large, or particularly cute, or if they're misshapen. I guess I just like what I like; but I digress!
So anyway: this business of cursing by touch! Clearly if workers can curse themselves, then it can’t be done by nothing more than a touch of the fingers, because the death-dealers would all have inadvertently offed themselves in their sleep at a very young age! There has to be some intent behind it when the victim is touched, yet this isn’t ever really made explicitly clear. This was really brought home to me by a rather erotic scene in this novel when Lila and Cassel start to kiss this one time and their hands are bare yet they're touching each other. Nothing really happens between them, yet this really moved me in the context of this novel because it was so forbidden! The touching seemed far more sinful than any amount of naked flesh or intimate kissing, or of feeling of breasts, or of organs rubbed against each other. Curious, huh?
I think Black has subtly revealed this self-cursing ability to us (or not so subtly, since I noticed it!) because she plans on using this at some point in the novel (or in the finale when she thinks we forgot it!). I guess we'll have to wait and see. I love this series and I'm already looking forward to volume 3.
Back to Cassel! Sometimes he appears to do things way out of left field. Lila is still liking him very much, and the temptation to take advantage of her is ever-growing, so finally, he asks someone who is quite close to him, and who he has discovered unexpectedly, is an emotion worker, to zap Lila with a neutral vibe. He wants her to quit liking him so much, but not to hate him, either. He'll be just another student at her school; no one special. It hurts him to do this, and he knows it will hurt worse when it goes into effect, but he does it because he's convinced that it will be best for her. He honestly feels he can never trust her if she keeps liking him, because he'll always feel it’s the remants of the curse which his mother worked on her. This seems to be the most selfless thing he's ever done.
OTOH, Cassel is, foremost, a con man. He's always gaging all the angles even if he's not working them, so I'm not sure that he truly is doing this for purely selfless reasons, but when I considered why he was asking that this be done on Lila, and not worked on himself, which seems selfish at first glance, I could see that it would be actually less selfless that way. If he did it that way, it would result in Lila (assuming she does have any honest feeling for him) being left high and dry if he suddenly stopped caring for her, so maybe he's putting her first and taking the hit himself rather than dumping it on her, which is a very romantic act in many ways.
But if you wanna know more, then you're gonna hafta read tha novel! I recommend it.
