Tithe

This is a tremendous first novel by American writer Holly Black. Set alternately in a modern-day New Jersey of trailer parks and grubby curtains and an amoral dazzling Faery court, where the faeries will as soon stab through your eye or seduce you as look at you, it follows the adventures of 16-year-old Kaye. A fast-paced opening finds Kaye drinking too much at a party, being groped by her best friend's boyfriend, discovering she has magical powers and rescuing a charismatic faery knight. She then becomes dangerously involved in feuding faerie kingdoms and faces death, betrayal and torture as she moves between the real world and Faery. The story is told in the third person, but almost wholly from Kaye's viewpoint. Consequently the reader identifies closely with her and becomes absorbed in her conflicting desires to help her friends, humiliate the arrogant Kenny, pursue her obsession with the enigmatic faery knight and establish her own moral values of right and wrong. Older teenagers and adults will be captivated by the combination of stirring adventure, erotically charged romance and the startling accuracy of the teen dialogue. The descriptions of the faery kingdom and the creatures who inhabit it are a Breughellian whirl of colour and detail. These faeries are wild, violent and completely inhuman, and the faery court is hedonistic, cloying and brutish. Indeed the descriptions of that world seem more sharp and in focus than the dreamlike quality of the abandoned New Jersey pier and the woods behind Kaye's grandmother's dingy, labyrinthine home. Holly Black has created a stunning adventure with a fabulous spirited heroine that's also a fable about growing up and coping with the glamour and barely concealed evils of the adult world. It captures all the magic of an 'other' world and the thrill and uncertainty of adolescence in a shimmering, disturbing adventure. An outstanding debut. Ages 14+ (Kirkus UK)