I really love the world building and Kaye, the main character. Everyone else within this book was questionable, like for example I feel like Kyes relationship with Roiben is weird. It feels as though there was no tension or chemistry between the two of them. They never really had any deep conversations, and their attraction to each other felt weak. Corny gave me the ick. I know the fae enchant the humans to make them more subservient and enthralled with the fae, but even before any of that, Corny had a disturbingly gross fascination and obsession with the fae. He gave me the ick in a way that a creepy old man leering at me would. And although I do quite like Kaye, her sense of intuition and her judge of character is literally the worst I have ever seen in my entire life. Like, not one of the people in the book other than Kaye herself is someone I would consider a decent human being that I would be willing to spend any amount of time with. Literally everyone is sketchy, over-all weird, or rude. And I mean EVERYONE. But I truly love this world and I love the cruel prince trilogy, which is why I picked this up. The political intrigue was also lacking, whereas in the cruel prince is was marvelously scrumptious. The reason I say the diversity of the characters is complicated is because well, a lot of the characters aren't human. For the character's that were set in the human world, I can't really remember if they were diverse because I read 60% of this book then stopped reading it for a few months and then picked it back up and finished it. So all the introductions of the human characters had already occurred and I could barely recall much about them.

 

Just not my style of book. I cant even try and rate it but maybe someone else will like it.

I didn't remember a lot of these characters from the Cruel Prince series, and that was a good thing because it would have spoilt it.

Slow going at first with depressing teenage life.

the unseelie court makes the greenbriar family look downright laidback.

written about 10 years before the folk of the air, i can definitely see holly black's growth as a writer. though i like tfota more, i still really enjoyed tithe! more of a contemporary urban fantasy setting (a major portion is in human side of new jersey lol) there was more brutality to this one imo bc of the faeries proximity to humans and the general nature of the unseelie court.

as always, i love holly's protagonist kaye and the tortured knight lord roiben rath rye (say that three times fast). i also really enjoy corny and can't wait to see what happens next with his character 👀

Even though this was definitely weaker than “the Cruel Prince” (no wonder, with whole 16 years difference), I still enjoyed the story and the characters. The early 2000s vibes are strong, the faeries – as wicked as I like them. A fair amount of scenes and dialogues are awkwardly written (sudden changes in mood, kisses out of nowhere etc.), but with some polishing “Tithe” could hold up even today (though it certainly would never get published as YA).

Few things that bothered me:
1. Corny’s violent thoughts/behaviour (expressing the urge to hurt people, even his mother);
2. The age difference between Kaye and Roiben. He is clearly an adult man and she is sixteen. Made me feel icky every time I stopped to think about it, especially since they both act in accordance with their age.


P.S.: “She let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding” (x3)

Edit: thinking about this book after a few months, the depiction of homosexuality and race is definitely… not done well.

Tithe wraps smudged eyeliner, smoke, and cigarette ash around faerie wings, grinning past a bloody sword of oaths, duty, and blood. Faeries may be truthful, but they're never safe.

For a very long time, Tithe was the first book I'd reach for when someone told me they’d like to start reading books with fae. It’s full of the grit, darkness, capricious, and wit which, to me, are the essence of faerie stories. The female MC used to play with faeries when she was younger, but as she's interacting with the Courts for the first time in years she's seeing the cruelty and light which is intertwined within the fae. I love the way it depicts what tropes surrounding the fae could actually be like if they played out in the present day. 

The characterization is great, all the POV characters feel very distinct, and the secondary characters have enough detail to obviously have their own lives apart from the MCs. The human characters didn't feel plot-convenient, they felt like humans having normal lives and not knowing that this normalcy was in danger from their proximity to the fae. The fae in each court have their own ways of being inhuman, some of them mimic humanity (rarely virtue, frequently vice) and some don't even try. The messaging around trauma and recovery (especially how while you might still love the people who hurt you, you don't have to stay) is really good. It's a book about pain and brokenness, how beauty and pleasure aren't always bound together, and just because pain can feel good you don't need to hold it forever. 

As much as I love this book, I do have two major caveats to give before recommending it. I'll give the spoiler-free version of my caveats and then include the more complete spoiler-filled explanation further below. The MC is half white half Japanese, and never knew her Japanese father. Her biracial identity mostly matters early on in the ways that she's fetishized by guys for her appearance. It reads at first as a critique of that kind of obsession with her looks but not really having anything to do with her, but several things about how it plays out later in the book don't fit well. The second caveat relates to one of the male MCs and concerns the way he's handled as a gay teenager. His identity is heavily linked with bondage and masochism throughout the book, and while both of those things can be a lot of fun in the right context, it fills every single moment that relates to his queerness. On the other hand, for someone who is this kind of teenager, that's got to be so freeing. His queerness isn't a big deal, he's not traumatized by it, this isn't a story about homophobia and he usually doesn't feel like a prop. Having a character who's into gay bdsm comics and not ashamed about it isn't standard for a YA protagonist.

Trying to reassess my feelings about this book after writing out my caveats, I do still love it. It doesn't require the MCs to be good or to have the "right" upbringing in order to make things better and to try to do the right thing. As a kid from a broken home, this book was so important to me because it's so messy. It's not polished or pretty, the characters don't have some big internal transformation in order to stand up and save the world or something (Transformations abound, but not that kind). 

The female MC is

assumed to be mixed-race, white/Japanese. I say "assumed" because one of the things we discover is that she's actually the changeling (a pixie) who was swapped out for the actual white/Japanese child of her parents. That child is now in the Seelie Court, either stuck as a child or just aging very slowly (it's unclear). That means that not only is she fetishized by secondary characters for her appearance, it turns out that she isn't actually biracial and literally isn't even human. While I know that there are people who for various reasons aren't connected to different bits of their heritage, this doesn't read to me as an attempt at representation for people in that situation. It feels like an excuse for the MC having "upturned eyes" that are as plausibly Japanese as they are literally faerie, in a way that seems very othering. I've described her as white/Japanese because that's my best read on the character descriptions, this book very much treats whiteness as a default state.

As for the male MC's identity

as a gay guy, everything from the way he hints to the female MC that he's gay in their first conversation by asking if she knows the Japanese name for a particular kind of gay Japanese porn (then makes it clear when she finds the comics in his room), to the way he interacts with a particular faery later on in the book, are wrapped up in tropes that link queerness with masochism and bondage. Later in the book he ends up in a very toxic situation (not quite a hookup, more than a flirtation) with a male faerie who uses him for his body and his humanity as an amusement for the Court. It feels like the main reasons for this character to be gay were so that he could be used by a male faery within the narrative and for there to be no question as to whether he might get together with the female MC. It didn't feel like his queerness was about him, at all, and that doesn't sit right with me. It feels like the character is secure in his identity, which is really good, and part of why I still like this book, I love him as a character. But, thinking about the way that his gayness is convenient for the plot, it feels off.