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2.75 stars

Alright y'all, take this review with a grain of salt because I'm sucker for Holly Black. I liked this because it was Holly Black, faeries, and drama. Was it amazing? Nope. Did I enjoy it though? Oh yeah.

Concept: ★★�
Plot: ★★
Enjoyment: ★★★★ (so sue me, I love any and all things Fae and under the mound)

Keeping this review SUPER short and sweet because there's not much to say about this book with spoiling it and/or getting way too involved in a larger discussion on the tropes of early 2000s YA fantasy.

Tithe is one of Holly Black's earliest novels, and I don't think it's a bad thing to say that it reads that way. Every author starts somewhere. This was a solid series opener considering the time it was published, the tropes at play in that era, and the concepts of faerie/Fae that were being developed in the YA scene in the realm of "real world" and "urban fantasy meets faeries"—which Holly Black had a major hand in forming, along with Melissa Marr and few others. I was trash for that trope then and I'm trash for it now. (Who doesn't want to be walking down the street one day and see a faerie???)

One of the interesting elements of Tithe was how many concepts were clearly rough blueprints for her Cruel Prince trilogy. It's not a direct comparison—which is good—but the bones are there. And in some cases, that is literal: Roiben and Faye, the two protagonists in Tithe, are actually IN The Cruel Prince as distanced minor characters. Once I'm done with this series, I'll probably revisit The Cruel Prince to see how her timelines line up.

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