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Title | Tithe
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Author | Holly Black
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Simon Pulse - 2002
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First Printing | Simon Pulse - 2002
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Title | Valiant
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Author | Holly Black
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Cover Art | Sammy Yuen Jr.
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Publisher | Simon Pulse - 2006
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First Printing | Simon Pulse - 2006
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Title | Ironside
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Author | Holly Black
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Margaret K. McElderry Books - 2019
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First Printing | Margaret K. McElderry Books - 2007
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Category | Urban Fantasy
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Warnings | Drugs
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Main Characters | Kaye Fierch, Cornelius Stone, Rath Roiben Rye, Valerie, Ravus
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Main Elements | Faeries
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Website | ---
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 Tithe
Welcome to the realm of very scary faeries!
Sixteen-year-old Kaye is a modern nomad. Fierce and independent, she travels from city to city with her mother's rock band until an ominous attack forces Kaye back to her childhood home. There, amid the industrial, blue-collar New Jersey backdrop, Kaye soon finds herself an unwilling pawn in an ancient power struggle between two rival faerie kingdoms - a struggle that could very well mean her death.
Valiant
When seventeen-year-old Valerie runs away to New York City, she's trying to escape a life that has utterly betrayed her. Sporting a new identity, she takes up with a gang of squatters who live in the city's labyrinthine subway system.
But there's something eerily beguiling about Val's new friends. And when one talks Val into tracking down the lair of a mysterious creature with whom they are all involved, Val finds herself torn between her newfound affection for an honorable monster and her fear of what her new friends are becoming.
Ironside
In the realm of Faerie, the time has come for Roiben's coronation. Uneasy in the midst of the malevolent Unseelie Court, pixie Kaye is sure of only one thing -- her love for Roiben. But when Kaye, drunk on faerie wine, declares herself to Roiben, he sends her on a seemingly impossible quest. Now Kaye can't see or speak to Roiben unless she can find the one thing she knows doesn't exist: a faerie who can tell a lie.
Miserable and convinced she belongs nowhere, Kaye decides to tell her mother the truth -- that she is a changeling left in place of the human daughter stolen long ago. Her mother's shock and horror sends Kaye back to the world of Faerie to find her human counterpart and return her to Ironside. But once back in the faerie courts, Kaye finds herself a pawn in the games of Silarial, queen of the Seelie Court. Silarial wants Roiben's throne, and she will use Kaye, and any means necessary, to get it. In this game of wits and weapons, can a pixie outplay a queen?
Holly Black spins a seductive tale at once achingly real and chillingly enchanted, set in a dangerous world where pleasure mingles with pain and nothing is exactly as it appears.
It started off too...not sure what word to use, rough? Got a kid whose mom is in a band so they travel around a lot, mom's current boyfriend assaults her in a bar so they go home to grandma, where Kaye smokes, skips school, and it otherwise not what you'd call a good influence.
However, she's not really that bad a kid, she's not mean or cruel, and ever since she was a child she could see faeries, in fact three of them were her best friends and she spent a lot of time playing with them. She hadn't seen them in a while and she begins to wonder if they were imaginary. But Kaye has some powers of her own, when she lets her imagination loose she can imagine a broken down carousel horse coming to life, and other people can see it happen too. Perhaps there is more to Kaye than meets the eye.
At the very least the Faerie are real, as she discovers when she stumbles across an injured faerie knight. After having helped him, he promises her a boon. When he shows up in a cafe while she's pissed off at her friends, she takes it out on him and demands him name. He's a faerie, names have power. Then she gets really mad at him and tells him to kiss her ass, not literally of course, she just wanted him to leave...but he'd just given her his name, he can't refuse, and her commands must be taken as they are spoken. That scene was hilarious.
We eventually find that under a neaby hill there is an entrance to the faerie realm. Bringing her best friend's brother along they go to investigate, but faerie is not a good place for mortals and he is ensnared. She also discovers the Tithe, a sacrifice that is made every seven years which forces the unaligned fae to suffer under the rule of the two faerie courts. For what it's worth, this is good for humans since it keeps those fae from picking on us humans, but its obviously not good for them.
A giant mess ensues as Kaye's secret is revealed, a faerie queen is killed, and a romance blossoms. On the positive, Kaye stops smoking and her skipping school isn't really an issue, it goes from being a tale of a kid living a hard life to all out fantasy adventure, so it definitely grew on me. It's dark at times but it's also very young adult so there's finding one's place in the world, becoming comfortable in your own skin, and figuring out who your real friends are. So there is a weird innocence woven into the darkness, Kaye goes from tough street kid, to clueless teenager that just wants to save the world.
I didn't love it, but it was worth the free read I had on rivetedlit.com, and I'll definitely continue the series once I can get back to the library (ah...COVID's gone wild again with Omicron, not the best time to make use of communal books, I have plenty of my own to read, even if that puts this series on hold for a bit)
June 2023
Took a while but eventually picked up Valiant. I expected it to be a continuation of Tithe but while set in the same world, it is a completely different cast of characters. And like the first one, it was dark and gritty. There's sex, drugs, homelessness, depression and of course a realistic depiction of faerie, beautiful but terrifying creatures that view humans as little more than playthings to ease their boredom. But I will say that I've never seen a portrayal of a troll before that made me wish he could be my boyfriend instead of Val's! So while at times the book can be hard to read and I had little sympathy of some of the characters, I still enjoyed the read and look forward to reading the next one, and I won't wait as long this time to get to it!
October 2023
This third part of the trilogy picks up really where the second one left off. Roiben is now the leader of the Unseelie court but that puts him at war with previous family, and his side just isn't strong enough to win. Kaye is back, still getting used to the idea of being a pixie. Corny is there too, mentally traumatized by his experience under the hill. But together they are determined to save Roiben. They need to enlist help of none other than Luis from Valiant, bringing the first two books together and giving the both a satisfying ending. This book wasn't quite as dark as the first two, no drugs, no rape, but still, we're dealing with the Faerie courts here, it ain't all sparkles and twinkles, these faeries are the real deal, the scary kind!
To read the last book I had to borrow the omnibus version for which I'm happy since it included a short story called The Lament of Lutie-Loo, which appears to be a crossover with Holly Black's other fae series.
I've enjoyed this trilogy enough that I plan to actually purchase the Elfhame series...is it weird that I actually had a dream where I was attempting to do just that (but the book was on a really high shelf so I needed to get a long stick with a grippy thing at the end and by the time I looked back up the book was gone, it was part of an entire book themed dream, but thought it interesting that The Stolen Heir showed up in it...the cage on the cover was very distinct). Wish the year was longer so I could fit them all in while I'm still reading all things Fae!
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