Skip to main content

"Tithe" by Holly Black

Why I read it: For Christmas this year, rather than listing off a stack of books I wanted, I listed off a stack of authors, and let my sisters and dad and people pick the books for me. My dad bought me this one. Right now, I read it because I wanted something shorter and quicker than the last leaden tome, because I have a library book around here also, but it's non-fiction, and I was in the mood for fiction on Sunday.

Bookmark: What bookmark?

Tastes like chicken: Justine Musk's "Uninvited" for the edgy YA feel, and "Blood and Iron" for the seelie/unseelie court stuff, the kelpie, etc.

It's the story of a girl who grew up with fairies for playmates, but then she left town to be dragged around behind her mother's band. She's 16 now, and back in Philly where the fairies are. A little bit she seeks them out, but they fall on her as well. She spends a lot of time navigating between the human teens and the fairies, trying to seem normal, though that's kind of impossible for some people.

What I liked: The characters were well-drawn -- at least until one of them turned into a fairy. That didn't work so well for me. The human teens were not the suburban upper-middle class ones I know and am used to. Or I assume the ones I know are.

Not so much: The ending seemed kind of frenetic and rushed.

Lesson: Describing things. I need to work on this, I think. The world is painted more brightly than my writing. Something to work on with draft #2.

Popular posts from this blog

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.
Read more

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...
Read more

What I read: March 2024

  LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by  Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence.  "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read.  LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes.  I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...
Read more