Review

This is a tremendous first novel by American writer Holly Black. Set alternately in a modern-day New Jersey of trailer parks and grubby curtains and an amoral dazzling Faery court, where the faeries will as soon stab through your eye or seduce you as look at you, it follows the adventures of 16-year-old Kaye. A fast-paced opening finds Kaye drinking too much at a party, being groped by her best friend's boyfriend, discovering she has magical powers and rescuing a charismatic faery knight. She then becomes dangerously involved in feuding faerie kingdoms and faces death, betrayal and torture as she moves between the real world and Faery. The story is told in the third person, but almost wholly from Kaye's viewpoint. Consequently the reader identifies closely with her and becomes absorbed in her conflicting desires to help her friends, humiliate the arrogant Kenny, pursue her obsession with the enigmatic faery knight and establish her own moral values of right and wrong. Older teenagers and adults will be captivated by the combination of stirring adventure, erotically charged romance and the startling accuracy of the teen dialogue. The descriptions of the faery kingdom and the creatures who inhabit it are a Breughellian whirl of colour and detail. These faeries are wild, violent and completely inhuman, and the faery court is hedonistic, cloying and brutish. Indeed the descriptions of that world seem more sharp and in focus than the dreamlike quality of the abandoned New Jersey pier and the woods behind Kaye's grandmother's dingy, labyrinthine home. Holly Black has created a stunning adventure with a fabulous spirited heroine that's also a fable about growing up and coping with the glamour and barely concealed evils of the adult world. It captures all the magic of an 'other' world and the thrill and uncertainty of adolescence in a shimmering, disturbing adventure. An outstanding debut. Ages 14+ (Kirkus UK)

Product Description

Do you believe in faeries? Not the soft, gentle kind, but the sinister, feral kind - the ones that wreak havoc on everything in their path...Sixteen-year-old Kaye is a modern nomad. Fierce and independent, she travels from city to city with her mother's rock band, until an ominous attack forces them back to her childhood home. To the place where she used to see Faeries. They're still there. But Kaye's not a child anymore. This time she's dragged into the thick of their dangerous, frightening world. A realm where black horses dwell beneath the sea, desperate to drown you...where the sinister Thistlewitch divines dark futures...and where beautiful faerie knights are driven to perform acts of brutal depravity for the love of their uncaring queens. Once there, Kaye finds herself an unwilling pawn in an ancient power struggle between two rival faerie kingdoms - a struggle that could end in her death...