Tithe

By Holly Black
Read: February 2010
Rating: REAL

As someone who tends toward fantasy, I’ve heard over and over again that in order to make the fantastic seem believable, you have to ground it in the real. I never expected to find a book, any book, that would seem to mimic my own life so closely.

Kaye is a strange girl, in strange circumstances. Her mother fell pregnant in high school and spent the following 16 years chasing the dream of rock star fame. Kaye has been carted around in her wake, raising herself to a large extent. She dropped out of school to get a job, is adept at shoplifting, and knows some nifty lighter tricks to impress boys. She knows her life is pretty much going nowhere, but she also doesn’t know how to turn things around.

Her mother’s band breaks up and they have to return to the Jersey Shore and move back in Ellen’s mother, Kaye’s grandmother. Kaye, always a lonely child, hopes that the friends of her youth will come back… the faeries she used to play with instead of human children. They do, but it’s no longer to play–there’s danger lurking.

Kaye gets her first taste of this danger when she comes across Roiben, a faery knight impaled on a spear and waiting to die. He is unearthly, gorgeous, infuriating… and soon the only person she can trust with her true nature as a Changeling. Their lives depend on one another.

All that? Not like my life at all. But the setting is ABSOLUTELY like my life.

First, New Jersey. You can tell Black has actually lived in NJ because she knows how long it takes to get between certain places, she knows exactly what an off-season Shore town is like, and the towns are real. Major shit goes down at Delicious Orchards in Colts Neck, which I have totally been to! FYI, they don’t have a small farmers market there, they have a fucking gigantic store, and it is awesome.

Second, the pop references are all current and relevant for me–they’re meaningful to me. It’s not just “She listened to Justin Timberlake on the radio.” Blah, I don’t care about him. Black mentions bands that aren’t pop trash, she uses titles of books people actually read, and her characters read shounen ai. And, hello? Pixie Styx! That’s my youth, right there.

So, MAJOR FRIKKIN’ KUDOS to Holly Black for making me believe, without a doubt, that this book was set in New Jersey, without being stereotypical in any way. The setting feels 100% authentic.

I do have one complaint, and maybe this stems from the high expectations I had, or the February Blues which impair my brain function, but I didn’t feel as engrossed as I felt I should have. I wanted to be sucked in and kept there until the very last page. The beginning was great, I knew instantly that this was some good shit right here. But I started to fade out a bit around the middle and then thought I had missed something important, only to find that I hadn’t, the characters are just stupid.

The end seemed contrived, with a big showdown and everyone in one room while Kaye gives a big explanation of things I had suspected all the time–but, what, how did THAT connotation get there? So, yeah, I’m a tiny bit confused by the last, say, third of the book.

Whatever. When I get my greedy little hands on the next two in the series, I’m going to reread this as well. They’re ruddy small, even for YA books. Which means your teens have no excuse not to read them. Tell girls that Roiben is a bajillion times better than that stony stalker Cullen, and play up the bloodshed for the boys.

As the cover says, this is the realm of very scary faeries.