attackfish

Holly Black's Modern Tales of Faerie (Tithe, Valiant, and Ironside) are the sort of books that I don't just lend to friends, I lend them to friends, desperately want to reread them, buy them again, and let the friend I've lent them to keep them.

No matter how hard she tries, Kaye's not quite human, and she stole someone else's life. Conversely, the brother of her best friend, Cornelius (called Corny), can't be anything other than human. After a powerful, sadistic Unseelie court faery seduces him and keeps him as a pet, Corny wants to protect himself from the allure of faeries, a feeling that extends to the rest of humanity as a kelpie bewitches his sister into drowning.

In Valiant, Valerie, Val, runs away after she finds her mother sleeping with her boyfriend, and even worse, learns that her best friend knew and didn't tell her. When she meets three street kids that work for a troll, delivering Never, a potion that protects faeries from iron and makes humans able to work magic, she's eager to leave her old life behind.

From the first page of Tithe, as human as Kaye seams, Black shows a bit of what makes Kaye different from humans. "Kaye took another drag on her cigarette and dropped it into her mother's beer bottle. She figured that would be a good test for how drunk Ellen was- see if she would swallow a butt whole." And then, after her mother drinks and then spits the beer and butt out, "Kaye couldn't help the wicked laughter that escaped her lips. Her mother looked at her in disbelief." Kaye, as a pixie, and prone to tricks.

I have a small obsession with folk tales and myth, so I was already well acquainted with truly terrifying faeries, which were after all, just the folk spirits of Europe, and not by any means all good. The Catholic Church and later the Protestant ones claimed they were fallen angels, or demons, and they were as prone to causing trouble and stealing people and goods as looking sparkly. What made Black's books so fascinating to me though weren't the mythologically accurate faeries (kelpies with a hunger for drowning people, hollow backed faerie ladies... oooh) but the way she integrates them into the modern world. Her faerie courts are more like gangs, a potion making troll protects the faeries that live in New York from iron, and Kaye, a changeling, lives and acts more like a human teenager than other faeries.

There are four fantastic gay characters (well, Luis and Nephamael might be bisexual) including Nephamael the sadistic Unseelie courtier I mentioned earlier who tries to kidnap Kaye and torments Corny, Corny himself who loves anime and dresses worse than my dad without my mom's supervision, Luis who has the sight, and loves his addict brother enough to serve a faery queen he despises, and Ruth, the smart talking best friend to straight jock Val. Dave and Luis make two awesome black characters, and the creepy "real" human Kaye is half Japanese. Besides, she has a whole slew of well developed heroines.

Black's books have shout outs to fandom, both anime fandoms to which Corny is part (he calls Human Kaye, the child the faeries stole when they left Kaye who is still a young child, chibi Kaye) and the Star Trek Fandom, to which Corny and Janet's mother belong, resulting in the funniest and least awkward coming out story I've ever heard.

And there's a flour baby, yes, a flour baby, like the ones school officials can't decide whether they're to teach students how to be good parents, or that they don't want children for a while. Ruth and Val raise the baby together, even after Val runs off "without paying child support" and it becomes plot important! A plot important flour baby! And they fail so bad they have to write a paper on infanticide.

At times the writing in Tithe was weak, and her romantic lead Roiben is too angsty and self loathing for my tastes, but that mostly disappeared by Valiant (though the comparisons between how Val felt about things before running away and after got old) and it was another treat just to see Black grow as a writer. The enormous strengths of her books make up for the weaknesses.

With Never, Black paints a horrifying portrait of addiction to a substance that not only skews the perceptions of the user, but allows the user to take anyone near into the user's trip. Luis' codependency with respect to his brother and his brother's addiction made me want to wrap him up in a blanket, feed him soup, and cart him off to Alanon.

Most of all, I love the statement about family and selfhood made when Kaye comes back after rescuing chibi Kaye:

Ellen shook her head. "When I saw Kate [chibi Kaye], I was so afraid. I figured you did something dumb to get her back from whatever had her, didn't you? See, I know you. You."

"Her name's not Kate. She's Kaye. The real-"

Ellen held up one hand. "You didn't answer my question."

"Yeah." Kaye sighed. "I did something pretty dumb."

"See, You're exactly who I think you are." Ellen's arms went around Kaye's shoulders and she laughed her deep, cigarette-rough laugh. "You're my girl."

Black never condescends from her readers of hides ugliness. She never dresses up the lives of Kaye with her neglectful mother or Val, Luis, Dave, and Lolli in the subway tunnels. These are horrible, brutal, enthralling books.

Holly Black can be found on Livejournal at