Blissbat.net

This review was written in 2005 for an older incarnation of Blissbat.net.

by Holly Black

Valiant came out this week, and Holly Black’s her best yet. Its narrative balances on a twisting web of connections 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 synopsis suits. There’s a runaway girl who takes fairy drugs, and there’s a war on among New York’s magical creatures. But Black’s book isn’t really about those things.

It’s about obeying the insane suggestion to go just go that your lizard brain whispers when you’re standing at a an airport, and about the grimy magic of New York wrapped around a girl with a broken heart, and about following a pack of beautiful people down the alley at 4am instead of finishing your watery coffee and catching the morning train north from Grand Central. And in the middle of all that, a schoolgirl becomes troll-defender, knight, and protector–valiant. It’s one of those rare stories that bangs out space for girls whose brains are wired in ways that make them jump between predator and prey.

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 gutterpunks they step around without seeing. Black’s monsters can be brutal and deadly, but no more so 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: a goat-footed beauty lives on the Upper West Side, and Central Park, of course…well, I can’t spoil that. Black hits the right details all the way through, from the frigid filth of a squat in an abandoned subway station to the euphoria of temporary invincibility. A gathering of fairy exiles echoes Tithe’s astonishing underground revels, and an alchemical laboratory inside the Manhattan Bridge seems feels perfectly 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 unrepentantly nonstandard love stories? I spotted the love interest the moment he entered the story, but I wasn’t sure until much later that we’d actually get follow-through. Well done.