I expected to enjoy Tithe a lot more than I actually did. A YA book promising dangerous fairies would normally be exactly the kind of thing I’d read with glee, but the rushed writing style really didn’t work for me.
Sixteen year old Kaye spends her life moving from place to place, tagging along with her wannabe rock star mother and going to work rather than school in order to pay the bills that her mum is incapable of financing. When her deadbeat boyfriend attacks her mum, they pack up and head to grandma’s, a place that Kaye remembers fondly due to her childhood friends, both real and imaginary. Except it turn out that the fairies of her childhood memories weren’t imaginary after all and, after saving a fairie knight in distress in the woods bordering her home, Kaye finds herself agreeing to allow them to present her as tithe – a human sacrifice required to bond the ‘solitary’ fae to either the Seelie or Unseelie Courts. Except there’s more to Kaye herself than meets the eye, throwing a spanner into the plans of both sides.
There wasn’t much real effort at giving this world or its characters any depth, with events simply happening one after the other without any time for reflection that wasn’t about the hotness of Roibin (the fairie knight Kaye had ‘rescued’ in the woods) – even the attack on her mum that sets the events of the book into motion is dashed off within a page, with Kaye witnessing the boyfriend stabbing her mum, who in the next breathe packs them off to grandma’s with no further mention of this traumatic event ever coming up again. Mum, by the way, may as well be entirely absent as she seems to have been written in a way so we could have our heroine do exactly what she wants, whenever she wants without any real world consequences. Not giving a shit if Kaye goes to school, comes home at all, or brings home adult men at 3 in the morning, Kaye’s mum’s character can be summed up by this exchange between them:
“Tell Grandma I won’t be home late.”
“You come home when you want. I’m your mother.”
And the relationship between Kaye and Roibin that the whole book revolves around seems to spring up out of nowhere, with him seeing her as “kind, lovely and terribly, terribly brave” for no apparent reason, given that all she’s really done is make a few tart or idiotic comments. In fact, she’s pretty much the opposite of that, getting off on her best friend’s boyfriend constantly feeling her up (no matter how much it upsets her ‘friend’), barely giving a shit about the death of a ‘friend’ at a rave that she’s inexplicably gone to whilst in the middle of a supposedly life or death fairie conspiracy, and with most of her thoughts revolving around being jealous of whichever beautiful fairie Roibin talks to.
I could go on, but I’ve probably already kicked this enough. Needless to say, I won’t be reading any further in this series.
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