Their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are
June 01, 2005
Valiant
by Holly Black
I’m a tree that grows hearts
one for each that you take
you’re the intruder’s hand
I’m the branch that you break
— Björk
Holly Black is getting better and better, my little reader-weasels.
Valiant came out this week, and it’s her best yet. Its narrative rests on a twisting web of connections and allusions to folklore, literature, and modern pop culture, and Black’s reassuringly strong grip on the adrenaline-rush wonder of encountering those connections for the first time makes the whole weave sparkle.
This isn’t the kind of book that a synopsis suits—if I’d come to it with no knowledge of Black’s skill and had read that the book was about a runaway human girl who takes fairy drugs, I’d have assumed the worst and moved on. But Valiant isn’t really about those things.
It’s about obeying the insane suggestion to go go go that your lizard brain whispers when you’re standing at a train station or an airport. It’s about the rusty, dirty magic of New York wrapped around a girl with a broken heart. It’s about following those beautiful people down the alley at 4am instead of finishing your watery coffee and catching the morning train home.
So I suppose she had me at St. Mark’s Place, but there’s more here than the trimmings; the story’s bones are strong and important. This is the way a schoolgirl becomes troll defender, knight and protector, Valiant—so hide your daughters, Missouri. This is a story that bangs out space for the girls who can’t help standing up to bullies, and does so without even a whiff of the after-school special.
The same feel for the surreal within the ordinary that made Tithe, which is set in the same world, so successful is even more apparent in Valiant. The exiled fairies scattered across Manhattan are no stranger than the perceptual disconnect between the normal adults strolling through Greenwich Village and the homeless kids they step around without seeing. Black’s monsters can be brutal and deadly, but no more than the heroine’s own friends and family.
This time around, though, the descriptions of the magical world are integrated with the world we know: instead of a sharply defined fairy court, we find a goat-footed beauty living on the Upper West Side. Black hits the right details all the way through, from the cold stone of a squat in an abandoned subway station to the euphoria of even temporary invincibility. A gathering of fairy exiles echoes Tithe’s astonishing underground revels, and an alchemical laboratory inside the Manhattan Bridge seems startlingly plausible.
As with Tithe, I wanted more of some of the secondary characters, but this book felt more emotionally substantial and more complete in the final accounting.
Oh, and can I get a hell yeah for Holly Black’s love stories? I spotted the love interest the moment he entered the scene, but I wasn't sure until much later that we’d actually get follow-through. Well done.
Research on Amazon, buy from Powell’s.
