Holly Black

In Tithe, sixteen-year-old Kaye is a modern nomad. Fierce and independent, she drifts from place to place with her mother’s rock band until an ominous attack forces Kaye back to her childhood home. There, amid the blue-collar New Jersey backdrop, Kaye finds herself an unwilling pawn in an ancient and violent power struggle between two rival faerie kingdoms—a struggle that could very well mean her death. In Valiant, the companion to Tithe, seventeen-year-old Valerie runs away to New York City, trying to escape a life that has utterly betrayed her. Sporting a new identity, she takes up with a gang of squatters who live in the city’s labyrinthine subway system. But there’s something eerily beguiling about Val’s new friends. When one talks Val into tracking down the lair of a mysterious creature, Val finds herself torn between her affection for an honorable monster and her fear of what her new friends are becoming. In Ironside, the sequel to Tithe, the time has come for Roiben’s coronation. Uneasy in the midst of the malevolent Unseelie Court, pixie Kaye is sure of only one thing—her love for Roiben. But when Kaye drunkenly declares herself to Roiben, he sends her on a seemingly impossible quest to find a faerie who can tell a lie. Unable to see Roiben until she has fulfilled his quest, Kaye finds herself in the center of the battle of wits and weapons being waged over his throne.

Tithe; Valiant; Ironside

Modern Faerie Tales

Paula

"You carried my heart in your hands tonight," he said. "But i have felt as if you carried it long before that." 

Absolutely love this and the way this theme travels through other books by Holly Black. 

"In the stories when you fall in love with a creature-" 

"First I'm a thing, now I'm a creature?" Kaye said. 

Roiben laughed. "Well, in the stories it is often a creature. Some kind of beast. A snake that becomes a woman at night, or someone cursed to be a bear until they can take off their own skin." 

"In those stories, one is often asked to do something unimaginably terrible to the creature. Cut of their head, say. A test. Not a test of love, a test of trust. Trust lifts the spell." 

"I loved you too much to trust you. I failed."

Modern Faerie Tales quotes

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