Tithe
Holly Black
Description > character > plot
Holly Black is one of my favorite Fantasy authors. I am especially fond of her Folk of the Air novels. Looking for more Black to read, I read Tithe.
Tithe is Black's debut novel, and it shows. It shows mainly in a lack of balance. Tithe is told in the first person by Kaye. Kaye is a teenage girl. Her mother is a musician and doesn't take care of her. Kaye lives on the edges -- she has not attended school for a year or two now. She has no money. She likes to go shopping, but that is a euphemism for shoplifting. She also likes to tell stories about fairies she knew when she was a girl. Her mother dismisses these as "imaginary friends" stories.
Kaye is a well-drawn and interesting character, albeit a little too chaotic to easily understand. The plot of Tithe is less well done. It felt to me like one damn thing after another, a little too much like Real Life and too little like a story.
This novel is written with a lot of detailed sensory descriptions. Having myself taken a bunch of creative writing classes recently, I felt as if I knew where this was coming from. An exercise that is often posed to creative writing students asks them to write a description of something or other, in which all five senses are used. (Never mind that there are about twice that many senses in reality -- creative writing classes eschew neuroscientific realism.)
As an exercise this is not a bad thing. As a way of writing an entire novel, it is not, in my opinion, a great idea. Being myself mostly aphantasic, I tend to find hyperdescription more annoying than illuminating. I prefer authors who leave room for imagination. If you describe a character as, for instance, "a small, nervous-looking man," I'm apt to feel that you've given me all the description I want or need.
If you make any ironclad rule for writing, for instance "show, don't tell" or "describe things using all five senses," it becomes a tic that your readers come to recognize and find annoying.
All that said, Tithe is not bad. It is visibly the work of a less experienced author than Black has since become. I will continue to read Modern Fairy Tales. It'll be interesting, I think, to see how her writing evolves.