Rating: 5/5 stars

Category: Adult, Romance, Contemporary, Fantasy

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Pages: 304

Hello Readers, welcome back to my blog.

This was a surprisingly enjoyable read and I love it when I pick up a book that I wouldn’t normally have interest in but I enjoy it when I read it. This was one of the reasons I enjoyed my fairyloot subscriptions and hope to go back to it someday.

SYNOPSIS

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 doppelgängers, mercurial billionaires, shadow thieves, and her own sister—all desperate to control the magic of the shadows.

Review

The reader goes back and forth between Charlie’s past and her present until events catch up and we also get to read a little of Vincent’s past as well – Vincent is the male protagonist. The world building is done in stages and the magic system is not clear at the beginning because it is part of what drives the plot; discovering the magic system. As the main character learns more about the magic system, so does the reader. We mainly read from Charlie’s POV and she is the female protagonist. The book is divided into chapter numbers as well as titles to those chapters.

It took me a while to get into the book and even though there weren’t a lot of ages, when the scenes drag it’s difficult to stay focused. This changed as I got more invested in Charlie as a character; I wanted to find out what she would do and how she would uncover the mysteries. It had some heist elements but because the heist plans were not detailed, the heist element is subtle.

Sometimes I couldn’t feel the romance because it wasn’t really emphasised neither was it a driving force in the plot but at the end, it is evident that there was some romance.  I gave 5 out of 5 stars because I really liked Charlie and wished better for her.