Dirty pretty things
May 13, 2005
Tithe
by Holly Black
Tithe surprised the hell out of me. I’d found Holly Black’s Spiderwick books because of my long-standing affection for the work of her collaborator, Tony DiTerlizzi—and they were enjoyable, but I’ve had such terrible luck with books marketed as “urban fantasy” that I didn't expect to get along with Tithe.
My problem with much urban fantasy is this: no matter how many fantastic characters come and go, if Detroit still feels like a cardboard cut-out of Detroit plus a colony of fairies, I'm going to throw the book against the wall. Without getting shirty, I theorize that this has something to do with balancing the emotional weight of magical and non-magical realities, and by pinning down and opening out the sparking, shifting moments that bind the two together. Terri Windling pulls it off, as do many horror writers, but it’s rare in YA.
Tithe is clever and sharp and remembers the viciously high resolution of childhood, and it completely succeeds. The “urban” part of the fantasy is handled with as much attention to the darkly weird as the scenes that take place in more traditional settings—so when a fairy knight shows up in a New Jersey diner, neither he nor it feels tacked-on. Furthermore, the clashes between human social assumptions and the knight's behavior, bound as it is to the rules of magic, make him far more real and far more terrifying than the airbrushed magical companions of so many urban fantasy heroines.
Black also allows her characters a sexuality fraught with ambiguity and electricity and complicated motivation as well as absurdity. This is precisely the stuff, so dangerously close to the id, that most YA fiction either shies away from or overplays. Tithe refuses to flinch and handles tricky sexual interactions with style, whether Black is dealing with drunken teenagers or jealous pixies. (A casual coming-out conversation between two friends delighted me so thoroughly I had to go find someone to read it to.)
The book isn’t perfect. When the protagonist, Kaye, undergoes a kind of transformation, we don't get to see enough of the impact it has on her psyche. And when something un-fantastically bad befalls one of her friends, we don't get to see it soak in: the plot swings by and drags us on before we're ready, robbing us again of weight. This kind of emotional compression and elision is so common in young adult fiction that it starts to seem part of the genre's definition. But when, having loosed such vibrant and interesting characters on us, an author steps away too quickly from the emotional repercussions, it feels like a dodge. Tithe is sharp and sleek and utterly engaging, but I wanted more of Kaye's sharply drawn pain and curiosity and desire.
Black does a magnificent job of making the Unseelie court and the Jersey shore flicker convincingly past and through each other. In this, Tithe reminds me of a Weetzie Bat wiped clean of cloying whimsy or a flash-flood version of the more persuasive of Elizabeth Hand’s crossed-over realities—and this is high praise indeed.
Research on Amazon, buy from Powell’s.
