April 15, 2008 at 2:01 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Young Adult Literature
55. Ironside: A Modern Faery’s Tale by Holly Black (Fantasy) 323 p.
I was going to wait for this to come out in trade paperback to buy it, but I was out looking for Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide last night, and stumbled across a used hardcover copy. It reeks of incense, not surprising if you know Seeker’s Books, the store where I found it, but it didn’t bother me once I got used to it. Better incense fumes than cigarette smoke.
Anyway. Ironside is the direct sequel to Tithe, but also stars one of the characters from Valiant. If you plan to read the series, you probably shouldn’t read this review, because it will inevitably contain spoilers for those first two books. Okay? Okay!
As usual, I found myself a little dragged down by the darkness of the atmosphere at the beginning. And just like the first two books, the story soon drew me in and made me forget why I’d ever been bothered by it. In this book, Kaye is still living with her grandmother in New Jersey, although her mother has an apartment in New York. At Roiben’s coronation, Kaye is goaded into making a declaration of her feelings for him, and is rewarded with an impossible quest: find a faery who can tell and untruth. Until she fulfils the quest, she cannot see Roiben again.
Meanwhile, Queen Silarial of the Bright Court is determined to gain control of the Unseelie throne, but is hampered Roiben’s hatred of her. Kaye and Cornelius do their best to help him, but they each have problems of their own to deal with.
I actually liked this the best of the series so far, although I can’t put my finger on the exact reason. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting more used to Black’s depiction of the faerie courts, so I feel like I have a better grasp of what’s going on. Or maybe the story she’s telling in Ironside just appeals to me more. I loved the shout-out to Emma Bull early in the novel, since the series clearly owes a great deal to War for the Oaks, even though there’s a lot that makes it unique. And as always, Black does a fantastic job of making faeries alien and strange in believable ways.
I really hope Holly Black will write more about these characters, although I’ve heard this will likely be the last book.
Pages read: 15,136
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Holly Black, Modern Faerie Tale, Once Upon a Time II
March 15, 2008 at 8:34 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Young Adult Literature
31. Valiant by Holly Black (Young Adult Fantasy) 313 p.
Set in the same universe as Tithe, although it isn’t a sequel (that place is reserved for Ironside.) Instead, it introduces a new heroine. When Valerie is betrayed by the people she trusts, she runs away to New York City and falls in with a group of teens who live an abandoned part of the subway system. Through them, she meets and becomes indebted to a troll; one who is luckily as honourable as he is ugly.
This book is, if anything, even darker than Tithe. Val’s new friends are very screwed up, as is Val herself. You watch her digging herself deeper, consoling herself that at least she’s making her own choices, even if they’re bad ones, and just want to shake her.
As well as Val’s personal problems, there are also a series of murders for her to contend with. The troll, and by extension Val and her friends, who have acted as his couriers, are suspected of poisoning some of the medicine he makes for fellow faeries.
I liked this book, but not as much as Tithe. I’m not a fan of drugs, alcohol, or smoking, and I don’t really like reading stories that talk about people using or abusing them. Just a personal thing—her writing about addiction was totally appropriate for the story she was telling, and she did it with tremendous skill. I still enjoyed the book, because she’s a very good storyteller.
Valiant truly felt like an urban fairy tale to me. Val and her friends lead a strange, half-magical, half-terrible existence on the margins of life in New York, and there a few things near the end of the book that cemented the impression for me (namely, the harp strung with hair and the business of the heart.) The atmosphere was perfect, recalling the original reputation of fairies as malicious creatures who often tormented humans for revenge or for sport.
Pages read: 9,141
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, A ~ Z Reading Challenge, Holly Black, Modern Faerie Tale
March 15, 2008 at 7:47 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Young Adult Literature
30. Tithe by Holly Black (Young Adult Fantasy) 331 p.
Based on this book’s blurb and first hundred or so pages, I was worried it was going to be a young-adult re-telling of War for the Oaks. All the basic elements seemed to be there: a modern American woman connected with a band is drawn into the conflicts among fairies. Luckily, Holly Black takes her characters and her world in a completely different direction.
After some trouble with a fellow band mate, Kaye and her mother move back into her grandmother’s home, in the New Jersey town where Kaye grew up. The same place where she first met faeries. Glad to see her friends again, she agrees to help them with their plan to escape the rule of the Unseelie Court.
I think Tithe is the first time I’ve read about faeries who genuinely seemed both frightening and alien, rather than merely arrogant. Booklist apparently calls it dark and edgy, a description I loathe, but which has the virtue of complete accuracy in this case.
This isn’t a straightforward story of good vs. evil, and Kaye is no perfect heroine. She doesn’t always trust the right people or mke the right choices, and she makes some truly terrible mistakes.
I don’t want to suggest that Tithe doesn’t have a lighter side. For instance, it has one of my favourite coming-out stories ever, from a teenage boy whose mother collects Star Trek memorabilia:
“Yeah, the whole family knows. It’s no big deal. One night at dinner I said, ‘Mom, you know the forbidden love that Spock has for Kirk? Well, me too.’ It was easier for her to understand that way.”
Pages read: 8,828
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Holly Black, Modern Faerie Tale
