Tithe

When you find out you're a fairy and you've been switched at birth with another human child, to have been brought up as a human. Interesting idea, and it all seems so cloudy somehow, and I was left fairly untouched by the characters.

Tithe wraps smudged eyeliner, smoke, and cigarette ash around faerie wings, grinning past a bloody sword of oaths, duty, and blood. Faeries may be truthful, but they're never safe.

For a very long time, Tithe was the first book I'd reach for when someone told me they’d like to start reading books with fae. It’s full of the grit, darkness, capricious, and wit which, to me, are the essence of faerie stories. The female MC used to play with faeries when she was younger, but as she's interacting with the Courts for the first time in years she's seeing the cruelty and light which is intertwined within the fae. I love the way it depicts what tropes surrounding the fae could actually be like if they played out in the present day. 

The characterization is great, all the POV characters feel very distinct, and the secondary characters have enough detail to obviously have their own lives apart from the MCs. The human characters didn't feel plot-convenient, they felt like humans having normal lives and not knowing that this normalcy was in danger from their proximity to the fae. The fae in each court have their own ways of being inhuman, some of them mimic humanity (rarely virtue, frequently vice) and some don't even try. The messaging around trauma and recovery (especially how while you might still love the people who hurt you, you don't have to stay) is really good. It's a book about pain and brokenness, how beauty and pleasure aren't always bound together, and just because pain can feel good you don't need to hold it forever. 

As much as I love this book, I do have two major caveats to give before recommending it. I'll give the spoiler-free version of my caveats and then include the more complete spoiler-filled explanation further below. The MC is half white half Japanese, and never knew her Japanese father. Her biracial identity mostly matters early on in the ways that she's fetishized by guys for her appearance. It reads at first as a critique of that kind of obsession with her looks but not really having anything to do with her, but several things about how it plays out later in the book don't fit well. The second caveat relates to one of the male MCs and concerns the way he's handled as a gay teenager. His identity is heavily linked with bondage and masochism throughout the book, and while both of those things can be a lot of fun in the right context, it fills every single moment that relates to his queerness. On the other hand, for someone who is this kind of teenager, that's got to be so freeing. His queerness isn't a big deal, he's not traumatized by it, this isn't a story about homophobia and he usually doesn't feel like a prop. Having a character who's into gay bdsm comics and not ashamed about it isn't standard for a YA protagonist.

Trying to reassess my feelings about this book after writing out my caveats, I do still love it. It doesn't require the MCs to be good or to have the "right" upbringing in order to make things better and to try to do the right thing. As a kid from a broken home, this book was so important to me because it's so messy. It's not polished or pretty, the characters don't have some big internal transformation in order to stand up and save the world or something (Transformations abound, but not that kind). 

The female MC is <spoiler> assumed to be mixed-race, white/Japanese. I say "assumed" because one of the things we discover is that she's actually the changeling (a pixie) who was swapped out for the actual white/Japanese child of her parents. That child is now in the Seelie Court, either stuck as a child or just aging very slowly (it's unclear). That means that not only is she fetishized by secondary characters for her appearance, it turns out that she isn't actually biracial and literally isn't even human. While I know that there are people who for various reasons aren't connected to different bits of their heritage, this doesn't read to me as an attempt at representation for people in that situation. It feels like an excuse for the MC having "upturned eyes" that are as plausibly Japanese as they are literally faerie, in a way that seems very othering. I've described her as white/Japanese because that's my best read on the character descriptions, this book very much treats whiteness as a default state. </spoiler>

As for the male MC's identity <spoiler> as a gay guy, everything from the way he hints to the female MC that he's gay in their first conversation by asking if she knows the Japanese name for a particular kind of gay Japanese porn (then makes it clear when she finds the comics in his room), to the way he interacts with a particular faery later on in the book, are wrapped up in tropes that link queerness with masochism and bondage. Later in the book he ends up in a very toxic situation (not quite a hookup, more than a flirtation) with a male faerie who uses him for his body and his humanity as an amusement for the Court. It feels like the main reasons for this character to be gay were so that he could be used by a male faery within the narrative and for there to be no question as to whether he might get together with the female MC. It didn't feel like his queerness was about him, at all, and that doesn't sit right with me. It feels like the character is secure in his identity, which is really good, and part of why I still like this book, I love him as a character. But, thinking about the way that his gayness is convenient for the plot, it feels off. </spoiler>

Eh

It was okay. I had a lot of trouble with the writing. I found paragraphs had to be reread to make sense. Or maybe I'd lose my train of thought and have to jump back.

I've read better fairie / urban fantasy.

The closer I got to the end, the more I wanted to know how it ended so I could move onto another book. It was good enough to knot bail, but I also had trouble staying focused reading. I kept finding myself skimming paragraphs, reading only a couple words a page to get closer to the end. I want to see where it was going but at 85% it felt more like a chore than pleasure.
If characters got hurt, or bad things happened to them, I didn’t seem to care. They seemed pretty flat. Even the main characters, who you spend a lot of time with, I felt nothing when bad things happened to them.

I wouldn't recommend it, but wouldn't stop anyone from checking it out.

—

And with that, the ending, I kinda feel disappointed.

This is a very good series, the first set of books I read by Holly black. All the characters are likable and the story is good. This was pretty much my introduction into all these YA books.

The book is quite short too, which was good in this case, no extra nonsense filling up the pages. As soon as I finished this book I went straight out and bought the second and third books.

This is a gritty-magical sweetly-cynical quick read and it is easy to see why it is on YALSA's (young adult library association) top ten. It will delight most readers and reluctant readers. It hits every teen button- disappointment/resentment with parents, sexy, dark stranger (think of a watered-down Angel from Buffy), concern with friends and appearances, driving. But it is a fairy tale a la Tanith Lee not J.K Rowling, thankfully, and it is appropriate for older teens and adults more than the sheltered teens in my area. I couldn't help but think that I liked this book with the same part of me that likes bats in Philadelphia, where the story begins. The three stars are because the plot moved in a dreamy, disoriented way, like an oneiric film noir and the unraveling of the "mystery" did not satisfy me. Still, I am looking forward to reading more of her books, I hope there are more deadly sea kelpies, that particular character gets 2 thumbs up at least!