What are they?

The Modern Faerie Tales is a three-book, young adult urban fantasy series by Holly Black. As the title indicates, they revolve around mischievous-at-best-malevolent-at-worst, folktale style fair folk in a modern setting (usually New Jersey and New York).

The books in the series are:

Tithe (2002)
Valiant (2005)
Ironside (2007)

It should be noted that these books also share a world with Black's more recent trilogy, The Folk of the Air, as well as the stand alone novel, The Darkest Part of the Forest.

What are they about?

The first book, Tithe, is about Kaye Fierch, the sixteen year old daughter of a rock musician who travels the country with her mom's band. After her mom's current boyfriend tries to murder Kaye, the two of them head back home to New Jersey to live with Kaye's grandma. While Kaye's mom is what polite company would call a "free spirit" and what the rest of us would call a boozy mess and a bit of a shitty parent, Kaye's grandma is a more traditional suburbanite who disapproves of her daughter's laissez faire parental style and insists that Kaye do things like go to school and not hang out with drug-head groupies. So Kaye finds herself back in her childhood home, reconnecting with her old childhood friends and trying to get used to living a "normal" life. However, all that is quickly swept aside when Kaye finds out her other childhood friends, a trio of "imaginary" fairies, are very real and have been waiting for her to turn back up. From there, she falls into the middle of a power struggle between the Seelie and Unseelie faerie courts and comes to the aide of Roiben, a fairy knight who is as stuck in the situation as she is, and it soon becomes apparent that there's a reason the book is titled Tithe.

The second book, Valiant, is not about Kaye or Roiben. The second book is about a teenage girl named Valerie who has that mostly-normal suburban life Kaye's grandma thinks so highly of. The problem? Valerie's mom pulls a Mrs. Robinson and slept with Valerie's (also teenage) boyfriend. Instead of calling the police, Val decides to run away to New York, where she quickly joins a group of vagrant teens who are addicted to a faerie drug called Nevermore and work for a troll named Ravus. Ravus is basically the nicest person in any of these books. He's an apothecary who makes medicine for the assorted faeries in New York who have all been banished from the proper Faerie realms for one reason or another. And so Valerie finds herself dealing with the precarious interpersonal relationships of her fellow vagrants, the general danger that comes from working with fairies, and a nefarious series of murders among the Folk that threaten the few new friends she's managed to make.

The third book, Ironside, is a return to Kaye and Roiben (spoiler alert: they lived). A new royal is being crowned in Faerie, and Kaye does A Thing that winds up getting her kicked out of Faerie. Shenanigans and drama ensue, resulting in Kaye trying to rescue a human changeling and characters from Roiben's past showing up to make life miserable for everyone involved. Some side characters from Valiant-- specifically Luis and Dave, two of the vagrants Valerie befriended-- also show up in this one, with their own character arcs that had been started/hinted at in Ironside finally coming to the forefront. If that description seems a little vague, it is because important plot elements in the third book are direct spoilers for the first book.

What did you think?

Full disclosure here: I have a long and pretty biased history with these books. I first read them in high school, and they were something of a guilty pleasure. Specifically, I actually liked them, and my best friend read the first and hated it. She hated how Kaye was a ditzy space case, hated how everybody was a stereotypical 80s/90s "bad" kid (Tattoos! Leather jackets! Smoking! Skipping school! GASP), and how at one point, Kaye's friend dies, and there's very little reaction/grief from any of the other characters.

While I acknowledge those things, and even I agree with a lot of it, I was also enamored by the story and the way Holly Black incorporated the malevolent, dangerous type of faeries from Ye Olde Folklore into a modern setting; previously the closest thing to "fairies, but modern" I had encountered was the Artemis Fowl books. This was essentially my first time reading actual dark Urban Fantasy, as opposed to the more common "children's fantasy that also happens to be in the modern world" like Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher, or Cardcaptors, or whatever the fuck Wayside School is. As such, these books definitely have a place in my heart for that.

My Freshmen classes have a Sustained Silent Reading time in the beginning of most periods, so I took the opportunity to reread these books a couple years back, and I was pleased to find that they still hold up. They are unquestionably very 90s-early-2000s, and with few exceptions, a lot of the characters are kinda terrible people, but dangit, I rooted for them back then, and root for them still. Kaye and Roiben specifically make a cameo appearance in the Folk of the Air books, and I was so happy.

That said, I don't actually know how well these would go for an adult who did not have that specific connection. The books have a lot of very teenage tropes/ideas and I can see how that, along with the dated feel of the books would be a turn off. If you like YA, and fairies, and don't mind the early 2000s aesthetic, then I say give them a go. If you're looking for something a little less dated and a little more refined, then I recommend skipping straight to The Folk of the Air.