'Tithe' by Holly Black

'Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale', by the author of 'The Spiderwick Chronicles' (which I have never read, but intend to at some point), is a Dark Romance novel I'd be proud to recommend to pretty much anyone.

It concerns Kaye Fierch, a girl who has always been...well, a bit different, in that magic happens around her and she can see fairies. Like every faerie romance, there's an attractive and tormented supernatural love interest, and some slightly confusing court politics, but this is pure stardust. Black has written a fairytale with roots in concrete - Kaye's world is one of very mundane glitz and glamour, with her wannabe-singer mother dragging her from city to city and passing down a sparkly catsuit to her daughter. The crossing place to the fairy world isn't some mystical glade but a creek filled with old, broken bottles. This is Neverwhere with fairies, baby, and it's as down-and-dirty as you want.

When she comes across a man wounded late at night and helps him, Kaye can't possibly understand what she's starting. He's gorgeous, but this isn't a normal love story. For a start, the good and evil fairy queens he's enslaved to are equally nasty in their own way. Practically no one in this is pure good. Also, (spoiler warning!) when Kaye finds that she's actually a changeling, her skin peels away and she is green all over. Quite a contrast to, say, the shiny shimmery vampires of 'Twilight', but charmingly weird.

Black clearly knows her myth (Janet, Kaye's friend, is hopefully a reference to the Janet who saves Tam Lin in folklore, and there's a depiction of a kelpie that is perfect and chilling) but she doesn't use it as a way to avoid making up her own. The spider-spinning dressmaker is a memorable example, as is Nephamael, the Unseelie knight, who exemplifies the twisted pleasures of the Unseelie court with his cloak covered with thorns on the inside.


Kaye is not always sympathetic, and she often has a resonance of that feeling that all imaginative young teenagers get, that they are somehow out of kilter with the real world, but she's got a good reason for it at least. 'Tithe' itself feels like a dream, swerving between a real world that verges into magic and Faery, beautiful, fascinating and terrifying. Kaye has a distinct character, but when I came to the end of the novel, I felt like I had lived the dream myself rather than through Kaye.


It's a difficult novel to take, darker than most of the vampire 'dark' romance for YA out there right now, and definitely a change from the pretty fairy and angel stuff, but it's enchanting. This, along with 'The Stolen Child' by Keith Donahue, is the closest fiction has come to the World of Darkness roleplaying game 'Changeling', that I've found. Gritty and weird, but beautiful at the same time.