Holly Black, Valiant (Simon and Schuster, 2005)
Having recently finished Holly Black's Ironside, I wanted to reread Valiant, the preceding book in this YA fantasy series.
From the very first book, Tithe, Holly Black managed to use the genre of urban fantasy to create a sense of the modern city as a surreal landscape which can be simultaneously magical and threatening. In Black's cityscapes, the faerie world exists not as a separate space, but an overlapping realm, a dark reflection of our own abandoned places and derelict dreams.
Val, or Valiant as one of her friends names her, is a teenage girl who has accepted her role as sidekick to the more flamboyant people around her, such as her best friend and her boyfriend. After the people she trusts most betray her, Val runs away to New York City, where she meets up with a trio of other runaways, Lolli, Dave, and Dave's brother, Luis. Val is often cold and hungry and scared, but for the first time she feels she is exerting control over her own life, even while she realizes the self-destructive nature of her actions. She also finds out that there is an almost magical invisibility to being homeless, that she can behave outrageously and no one will judge her or even notice.
...[P]eople passed by her, but they only saw a girl with dirty jeans and a shaved head. Anyone from school could have walked past her, Tom could have stopped to buy a necktie, her mother could have tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, and none of them would have recognized her.
The tricks and cons and petty thievery involved in living on the streets seem fun at first, like a kind of street magic. Then Val discovers that faeries and magic are real and that she can steal faerie glamour to make herself feel more powerful. Like the magic in the video games she loves, however, all magic comes at a price, and Val finds herself making a deal with a monster in order to save her friends. When the magic and her life both spin out of control, Val discovers it is not so easy to tell human lies from faerie glamours, or the good guys from the monsters.
Valiant, even more than Tithe, departs from the cute Disney fairyland which has been packaged and sold by adults to children, and instead reimagines faeries as the shadows of all those dangers and disasters which lie in wait within the dark urban wood: hopelessness, human predators who exploit this hopelessness in order to prey on young people, and, worst of all, the "good" people who pretend they don't notice the despair and the exploitation of such young people.
One of the most notable characteristics of this series, aside from the poetic imagery of Black's writing and the believability of the characters, is the use of fantasy to make subtle but never preachy points about the dangers that teens face in the real world. Valiant makes an excellent talking point to open up honest discussions between teens and adults about difficult subjects such as peer pressure, non-conformity, drugs, and the media advertising used to sell products to teens. Above all, however, it is a modern classic, which shows that girls can be heroes, too.
