White Cat by Holly Black

I inserted Simon & Schuster's trailer for the book, so you can get a sense of the plot from that. It'll save me from recapping. I liked the book, but I expected to like it a lot more than I did. I loved her other faerie novels, and the premise of this (that a small percentage of the population is able to perform magic "curse work" with their hands, but it's illegal and everyone has to wear gloves on their hands and avoid ungloved hands by others) was really interesting. The first half to 2/3 of the novel kept me kind of confused. I didn't totally get the different types of curse work, the history, what Cassel's brothers did/do, the "families," what happened with Lila, etc. Part of this is because Cassel himself doesn't know what is really going on and part is because Black is not setting out the entire backstory of curse work all at once; like any good writer, she tries to let it unfold in the narrative. But I did like the last 1/3 of the book quite a lot, once I got a better grip on the whole idea of curse work. I really liked the climax; it was very suspenseful. And if there are more books in the series, I'd probably be interested in reading them.