Review Time--The Good Neighbors: Kind (Book Three)

As I've mentioned, I'm a big fan of the fantasy genre. There was a time when read high fantasy exclusively and though I have expanded my go-to genres since eighth grade, I will always harbor a fondness for elves and orcs alike. Holly Black, author of The Good Neighbors: Kind (Book Three)is the queen of modern fantasy. She has written a whole bucketload of great fantasy books for children (The Spiderwick Chronicles) and young adults (Tithe) and has enjoyed great success. And beyond that, she just looks like she'd be really cool to hang out with.

In this latest book, we meet Rue, a half-fey girl living in a frightening world. The lines between the mortal and fey worlds have collapsed and the fey have taken over Rue's home. As a half-fey, she is torn between both worlds. On the one hand is her father, her friends, and the world she grew up in. But on the other hand, she is strangely drawn to her fey half--her ethereally beautiful but terrifying mother, her connection to the earth, and the strange and wonderful fey realm. As tensions mount between the humans and the fey, violence breaks out. Can Rue fix the divide between the two races or is it already too late?

Okay, if you're like me, you're going to skip straight to the end of this review and see the grade before bothering to read anything else I write. Go ahead, it'll probably save you a bit of time.

Back? Okay, so here's the thing: I haven't read Books One or Two of The Good Neighbors series. I was completely lost from the start because the author and illustrator (the inimitable Ted Naifeh) have spent the last two volumes explaining the world they have created to their readers. They waste no time in jumping into the action without preface or backstory. Some novels take a chapter to explain everything that's led the reader to this point. This is not one of those. That isn't necessarily a criticism, just a warning to those who think to jump into this series in the middle. Don't.

All of that isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the parts of Kind that I actually understood. Black has a talent for taking the light and fluffy things we loved in fairy tales and showing their darker sides. Her fey have teeth and claws. Her mermaids feast on human flesh. I love that she doesn't rely on any pre-existing notions of what a fairy should be or how an elf should behave. What's more, by exposing the dark side of things we take for granted, she forces us to take a look at the dark parts of ourselves that are sadistically drawn to flesh-eating mermaids.

Naifeh's illustrations are perfect for that. His fey are creepy but beautiful, simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. They're the stuff of very sexy nightmares. My one criticism of his style was that I sometimes had a hard time telling characters apart. Most of the human faces were drawn with androgynous, exaggerated features that reminded me a little of Mila Jovovich (who is scary beautiful). He did such a great job creating variety among the fey, I would have liked the same attention to be paid to their human counterparts.

Final Grade: N/A
Sorry folks, I know this is totally anticlimactic but I don't feel qualified to grade this one yet because I don't have the background I feel would be necessary. It's not fair to judge one book in a series, especially one that relies so heavily on the previous volumes, without knowledge of the entire story arc. It'd be like trying to read The Return of the King with no foreknowledge of the rest of the trilogy. I wouldn't have reviewed this one at all except that it's a Cybils nominee. I'll revisit it when I've had time to read the other books in the series.