Here’s the #1 reason why I think people of all ages read young adult novels these days: No love feels as dramatic and earth-shattering as your first one. And though I’m pretty relieved to have left that first disastrous romance in my past, through fiction I can recapture that feeling anytime I want to. All summer long, here on VH1 Celebrity, I’m going to introduce you to my favorite new fictional boyfriends — the bad boys, the torn heroes, the sensitive types, the vampires, the demon slayers, what have you — and, naturally, the novels in which they’re waiting to seduce you on a hot, lazy beach day. First up is a boy I’ve been swooning over since last spring.

Who: Cassel Sharpe

From: White Cat, Red Glove and Black Heart, the Curse Workers trilogy by Holly Black

What’s His Story?
Unlike most of the boys I plan on covering here, Cassel is actually the main protagonist of the trilogy. We first meet him when he wakes up from sleepwalking on the roof of his boarding school dorm, and that happens to be one of the safest places we’ll ever see him. In Cassel’s world, a portion of the population has a genetic ability to work magic on others by touching them — these so-called “Curse Workers” can give people luck, erase their memories, make them fall in love, kill them, influence their dreams or, in extremely rare cases, transform them into something else entirely. Many Workers belong to mob-like crime families, like the one led by Cassel’s best friend Lila’s father. Cassel comes from a long line of con artists, and while he can work a con with the best of them, he thinks the Worker gene skipped him. He also thinks he killed Lila three years ago, though he has no memory of how.
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