Fairies are terrific; they inspire terror

That was a Terry Pratchett quote. I am not, however, reviewing Pratchett books (note to self: Catch up on Pratchett books). I am reviewing books about fairies!

I read Holly Black's Valiant and Ironside, having read Tithe in high school. I should probably have reread Tithe before reading these, particularly since I have a (signed!) copy, but I didn't.

Valiant made sense without remembering much about Tithe, since very few of the characters overlap--Roiben makes a brief appearance at one point, but most of it's about a different set of people. The main character, Val, runs away from home after she finds out that her boyfriend is having an affair with her mother (GROSS). Val runs away to New York and falls in with some homeless kids who are squatting somewhere in the subway system. One of the kids, Luis, has the Sight, and so the group of them are now all involves with what is basically the faerie exile community. NYC is not really faerie territory because there's too much iron, so it's where all the exiles have to go, until they die of iron-sickness. Luis (and occasionally his fucked-up brother, David) mostly run favors for a troll dude who makes potions that help keep iron-sickness at bay. David and the girl in the group, Lolli, also have an odd habit of skimming bits of faerie potion and then using it as a drug, which they call Never, which basically gives them glamour powers. Val starts running errands too when she runs up a debt with the troll, Ravus. When the faeries Ravus delivers too start dying, Ravus is the prime suspect--but Val has her doubts (partly because she is in love with Ravus, and I'm like, awesomesauce, a romance with a troll, that one is new!), and has to get deeper into the world of Faerie intrigue and craziness to find out who the murderer really is and prove it to the Faerie courts.

Ironside contains characters from both Tithe and Valiant, and was a bit confusing for me, because I had basically forgotten everything about Tithe except that Kaye was really a pixie and Roiben was her love interest and now some sort of Faerie king. But anyway, so it turns out Roiben is getting coronated as King of the Night Court, which is the creepier one, and Silarial, the Queen of the Bright Court, which is still pretty creepy, is planning to declare war on them. Roiben is originally from the Bright Court and used to be in love with the Queen until he realized what a totally terrible person she is. Kaye ill-advisedly engages in a fairy ritual where she declares her love for Roiben publicly and he has to send her on a quest, and he sends her on an impossible one (to find a fairy who can tell an untruth). Kaye and her friend Cornelius (who is secretly trying to avenge his sister who was murdered by a kelpie) and Luis from Valiant all team up to deliver the real (human) Kaye back to her mother, and wind up entangled in the Bright Queen's weird game to defeat Roiben. Kaye and her friends have to figure out Silarial's plan and warn Roiben, in addition to completing the impossible quest and a bunch of other twisty things.

I really liked both of these books; I like them more than I remember liking Tithe, even, so maybe I will have to go give Tithe a reread sometime soon, and see if it really is weaker or if I was just being put off by the characters being not enough like me or something stupid. (I have a feeling it may well have been that.)

Thus concludes my booklogging for 2012! Yes, I know we're almost a week into 2013; shut up. Next up will be dithering about Les Misérables.