A review by letstalkaboutbooksbaybee
Valiant by Holly Black

3.0

I know a lot of people don’t like this one because it doesn’t follow Kaye and Roiben and instead introduces a whole new set of characters set in Faerie. But the whole series is called Modern Faerie Tales, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe her original intent while writing them was to write a bunch of interconnected stories all set in the same world? Who knows. 

Either way, this one was still aggressively 2000s grunge. A lot of things were very dark and wouldn’t age well today, there was a lottttt of drug usage and a lot of questionable consent sex scenes that made me uncomfy when thinking too hard about it. 

But I liked Val a lot more than I liked Kaye and I thought Ravus was a compelling and interesting love interest. 

I still am having a hard time reconciling that the person who wrote Folk of the Air wrote this, but it is definitely a product of its time.