Tithe (Modern Faerie Tales, #1)

by Holly Black

Do you believe in faeries? Not the soft, gentle kind, but the sinister, feral kind ~ the ones that wreak havoc on everything in their path...

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 them back to her childhood home.

To the place where she used to see Faeries.

They're still there. But Kaye's not a child anymore and this time she's dragged into the thick of their dangerous, frightening world. A realm where black horses dwell beneath the sea, desperate to drown you… where the sinister Thistlewitch divines dark futures… and where beautiful faerie knights are driven to perform acts of brutal depravity for the love of their uncaring queens.

Once there, Kaye finds herself an unwilling pawn in an ancient power struggle between two rival faerie kingdoms ~ a struggle that could end in her death…

From the author of the bestselling Spiderwick Chronicles and The Coldest Girl in Coldtown.
 

• ISBN10: 0689860420
• ISBN13: 9780689860423
• Publish Date: 2 February 2004 (first published 1 October 2002)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 17 March 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Imprint: Simon & Schuster Children's
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[moraa]

You can break a thing, but you cannot always guide it afterward into the shape you want.

(Reading this to prepare myself for November 24th so gear up for my Cruel Prince series review coming soon at some point before then)

Anyway, Tithe, is a solid book by most standards. It's an easy story to follow with plenty of laughter and interesting faerie stuff mixed in (if you've read and loved the Wicked Lovely series by Melissa Marr then you'll enjoy this).

It's very different from Black's work today, not necessarily in a bad way but you can see her writing has grown even though she's still as just as fascinated with the fae.

The one thing I didn't like was the stakes. I know the (solitary and unseelie) fae are depicted as being very brutal and we get a close look at that and worse, Jane dies because of one of them, but for some reason I felt very... disconnected from it all. I don't know if it has more to do with Kaye's reaction to things or my own perception of the unfolding events but it just didn't cut it for me.

But in one word: a short, cute, fluffly but also angsty book that I enjoyed immensely.

(yes, that was more than one word)

Bonus points for:
-LGBTQ+ representation (guess what, the lgbt character didn't die!)

[nannah]

Holly Black proves time and time again she's young adult's edgelord.
This has been on my to-read list for forever; I think it was recommended to me in high school? It's about time I finally got to it!

Book content warnings
sexual harassment (+ also what I include here is non-consensual kissing situations)
rape

Ever since she was young, Kaye could see faeries. "Imaginary friends", everyone else thought, and Kaye was teased for it. But when she grew older, Kaye realized her imaginary friends weren't so imaginary, and she might be closer to the Faery world than she thought when she stumbles across a Faery Knight, saves his life, and tumbles head-first into a plot of the Seelie and Unseelie courts.

Whew, this was a ride. I'm not sure it was altogether a pleasant one, though. More like a "whoa, where is this going?" kind of ride. The first half was readable and enjoyable, even if a bit annoyingly "edgy" (a personal clash of tastes, really), but towards the second, things really seemed to slide out of control.

The climax seemed 3/4 of the way into the book, and after it passed . . . there still was 50 or so pages left. What was happening? There was a major clash between the romantic interests that was never resolved except for some romantic touches--and then I was to have assumed things were mended from there (how?). Suddenly things climaxed again with an explanation from Kaye that sounded like a Scooby Doo mystery wrap-up (literally with a page-and-a-half summary of "this is what happened, wasn't it??" that I had to read over a couple times to actually understand what she was trying to say). If your protagonist has to explain the plot of the entire book coming together in two pages . . . something's not coming together right.

Also . . . I haven't read every book by Holly Black, but I'm noticing a disturbing trend of gay side characters. Disturbing because they're always side characters, and they're always men. I haven't seen anything on Holly Black about this, but I'm starting to worry about fetishization . . . ? Again, I haven't read everything, and I'd love to be proved wrong on this.

Anyway, it just wasn't for me.

[Chelsea]

This definitely was not one of the better faerie books. It wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t something I really enjoyed either. It was just really strange. I didn’t understand why a lot of things were happening. The main character was stupid which made the book that much harder to enjoy. The plot wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t the greatest. The start was definitely the worst part because you hate everyone and everything but later on it gets a little easier to like some things. I don’t really have much to say about this one. I didn’t enjoy it but i didn’t hate it.

[Linda]

This was a very strange, modern fairy tale. It started with Kaye, her mom and her mom's boyfriend in a bar. Kaye is a young girl, who smokes, drinks, and has dropped out of school to do deliveries for a Chinese restaurant.

Kaye and her mom, Ellen, move back to Jersey Shore, in her grand-mother's house. She hooks up with her childhood-friend Janet, and things are just weird. They go to a party, Kaye is upstairs and makes a broken wooden-horse stand up on its' legs, where Janet's boyfriend Kenny sees her. He starts to touch her, until she runs away.

When walking home, she finds a hurt fairy, Roiben, near the road, and she helps him get an arrow out and to get help from a kelpie.

The whole story was a little confusing to me, and even at the very end, it does not make a whole lot of sense.

I guess what it made me think the most is that fairies, and yes, Kaye is also a fairy, are even weirder than I thought before...

*My reviews are personal reflections of what I read and take notes of. It is in no way meant to dissuade a person from reading a book from authors who put a lot of work into their stories. I do not get paid for my reviews nor have I been asked to give my opinions concerning these books. This book, like most of the others I've read belongs to my kindle-collection*

[Joni Reads]

I loved this book. I could not put it down. It was so easy to become wrapped up in Kaye's world as she is thrown headfirst into the world of faeries. I almost forgot that I was reading a fantasy novel. Kaye is a very likeable character and Roiben is lovable and I looked forward to every scene that included him. When I was not reading this book, I was thinking about the next time I would be able to pick it up. Finished in one day.
My only complaint is that I wish there was a glossary in the back to define the different terms. Sometimes the story moved to quickly that I wasn't sure I understood what the difference was between the different faerie kingdoms.

[wyvernfriend]

This one was a fairly quick read.

Not your usual story it started out all teen angsty and ended up twisting itself into interesting knots.