Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

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 her back to her childhood home. There, against the industrial, blue-collar New Jersey backdrop, Kaye finds herself an unwilling pawn in an ancient power struggle between two rival faerie kingdoms.

NOL
An Accelerated Reader® title for ages 12 and up

Available only in Young Adult 3 Series.

Average Customer Rating:

Great Book	Customer Rating:
This was a great book. Right along the lines of Melissa Marr books. It does had a bit of inappropriate items for very young readers but for actual "Young Adults" it is just fine. Highly recommend this book.

Gritty blend of urban desolation and otherworldly faeries

Customer Rating:

Holly Black's "Tithe" is based on Celtic folklore of faeries and changelings; faeries who were switched in place of human babies. The protagonist Kaye is a world-weary sixteen, tired of fishing her mother's head out of toilets and hauling her home from seedy dives after she's too drunk to stand up. Kaye dropped out of high school in order to work at a Chinese restaurant to earn money to support her mother in-between her mom's abusive boyfriends and succession of run-down apartments. Her friends Janet and Corny are also on similarly dead-end paths. Corny dreams of drive-bys and killing people and is full of suppressed rage. Kaye's mom sees nothing wrong with her daughter getting drunk enough to pass out, or to do drugs, or waking up in bed with a stranger; so much for a strong mother figure. This is not a book for sensitive readers; you have alcoholism, drugs, rape, violence, and torture. As a child, Kaye imagined that she saw faeries, and when she concentrates, she can cause things to happen. This all comes to a head one night after a strange encounter with a mysterious wounded man in a forest; Roibin is a faerie prince of the Unseelie court, and associating with him brings Kaye and her magical friends into danger as they are swept into the brutal conflict between the two rival faerie kingdoms. Kaye learns that she's been leading a double life, and tries to wrap her head around the fact that her childhood memories of faeries and magic are in fact true. The novel is briskly paced, alternating between Kaye's grim urban reality of poverty and violence and the magical world that she is now a part of. Black does a good job incorporating elements of faerie lore from classic literature and folklore; each chapter begins with a verse related to Kaye's predicament taken from poetry, including Shakespeare, Rilke and Teasdale. The ending is clearly set up for the sequel Ironside: A Modern Faery's Tale. As a child, I was mesmerized by faeries, beginning with The Perilous Gard and Josepha Sherman's Child of Faerie, Child of Earth and Windleaf. Tithe is a fine heir to these tales of beautiful, otherworldly beings and the intricacies of their courts and rituals.

One of My ALL TIME Favorites

Customer Rating:

I received Tithe as a gift soon after its publication and was immediately sucked in. Many books are hard to get into, with a lot of back story clumped at the beginning - Tithe is not one of them. There is plenty of action, emotion, danger and intrigue to keep you reading and guessing. The humans are real, the faeries are fantastic, and Black refuses to paint an unrealistic picture of either the human or faerie realms for the sake of keeping her YA literature innocent and candy coated. This is YA literature that respects its readers' intelligence, and we need more of it. I love the way Black blends natural teenage emotion (feeling alienated, longing for the attention of the cool guy, struggling to keep your identity while fitting in SOMEWHERE) with grander, more pressing issues (love and hate, good and evil, war and resolution). Tithe is urban fantasy at its best: enough of the real world to believe it, enough of the Faerie world to make you sad to leave it. Black's writing makes me feel torn between harboring the book like a sacred secret, and shouting of its grandiosity to everyone I meet. Inevitably I settle for something in between, tolling its virtues to those who are worthy of receiving it.

Torn

Customer Rating:

I find it rather hard to choose what type of review I would like to write, positive or negative. I suppose mine will be a bit of both. One the one hand, I have to give Holly Black credit for attempting to write characters that do not fall within the norm. Not everyone is of a certain race, hair color, eye color, personality type, etc. and it is refreshing to read something other than a Mary Jane. However, I felt that Black made her rather unidentifiable. She may not have been All American, but she certainly fell within a stereotype, just not a very flattering one. She came across a redneck/goth hybrid if such a thing were possible. She certainly was not anyone I would look up to or befriend. And is this really the kind of women any of us would strive to be? One that chain smokes, steals, dresses like a street walker, and messes around with her best friend's loser boyfriend? Also, while I can appreciate a book that attempts a unique structure, I found the writing style hard to enjoy. It was disjointed and I found myself having to reread several passages in order to make sense of what they were trying to convey. Lastly, Did anyone else find the love with Roiben hard to swallow? I get that she thought he was cute, but why is she attracted to him exactly? More importantly, why is he attracted to her? Black did a poor job of making their love believable. I did however, feel his love and attraction for the Seelie Queen. All in all, the story made for an entertaining read, but it certainly did not live up to the hype.

Amazing book, one of my favorites!	Customer Rating:
I absolutely love this book. I've read it about 4398403 bajillion times. I think that it is very well written, Holly Black is so creative. I have to admit that I fell in love with Roiben. I strongly recommend reading this book!