This is not quite the sequel to Tithe, reviewed here, by Holly Black, but it is a companion novel. Some of the same characters show up, but only briefly. Apparently Ironside is a direct sequel to Tithe, but I haven’t gotten to read that yet. While I enjoyed Tithe, despite its somewhat dark overtones, Valiant is much, much darker and, for various reasons, less enjoyable for me.

Valerie (Val) comes home one day, early in her senior year of high school, to find her mother having sex with her boyfriend on their couch. She runs away to New York City (she used to live in Jersey), cuts off all her hair, and finds a makeshift existence on the streets of New York. Her new friends, Lolli and Dave, introduce her to Luis, who has The Sight. Thanks to Luis, Dave has been running errands for a troll named Ravus. Ravus makes a powder which gives faeries a limited immunity to the iron in the city; for humans, it gives them the power of glamour for a brief period of time, in addition to a pretty good high. Dave has been skimming off of his deliveries and has gotten Lolli and, later, Val, addicted to this drug. However, some of the faeries to whom Ravus has been selling the drug have turned up dead, and Ravus needs to find out why and how.

This is, obviously, not a light novel. Val’s descent from runaway-who-will-go-home-when-she’s-over-it to ‘Never’-addict is fairly straightforward but not exactly cheerful. She injects it into her arms, watches people freebase, steals for her addiction, and eventually goes through withdrawal. It’s not pretty; it’s not intended to be pretty, and it certainly won’t make you happy. While Tithe was fairly dark, it still had the ability to let light in. I mean, the Unseelie faeries weren’t all bad, and Kaye came to some kind of reconciliation with her friends. In Valiant, we see a dead, half-eaten mermaid; junkies of several flavors; death; betrayal; and other unsavories.

Nothing is nearly as hard-hitting or straightforward as it would be if this were a book intended for adults. I mean, it doesn’t have the pages upon pages of waking up in one’s vomit that characterizes addiction-recovery fiction such as A Million Little Pieces (which no, I haven’t and won’t read, but I did see the “South Park” episode), and there aren’t very many descriptions of actually taking the drugs themselves. It’s still dark, though, and it certainly didn’t put me in a good mood once I’d finished it. There was barely any light at the end of the tunnel, let alone true happiness.

One character who was actually happy was Ruth, Val’s best friend from high school. She could still go home and not feel strange, at the end. While she was both Goth and a lesbian, it didn’t appear to me that she was doing either solely for the shock value. Val, on the other hand, started out a jock with issues with her mother (who was pretty and wanted a girly daughter), and descended into hell.

It was, in the end, well-done. The writing style is very close to that of Tithe; the subject matter is just a couple notches darker. If you needed a three-hundred-odd page reminder on why not to do drugs, here’s one. Just because it’s a fictional drug, it doesn’t make it any less dangerous. If you’re looking for a romance and a happy ending, this ain’t it. (That’s not to say that it has a Hamlet ending, either.) I should also warn that there is violence against cats in this book. I’m also fully willing to admit that I didn’t like this book because of the subject matter, but that gives me no reason to give it less than 4/5 stars. It was well-written; it just didn’t happen to be to my tastes.