Remember how people used to talk a lot about how Buffy is really a metaphor for the teen years (high school is hell!)? You could look at Valiant in a similar fashion.
In some ways, Valiant could be seen as a metaphor for the dangers of being a runaway. There’s adventure and chaos, friendship and betrayal, growing up and going home. Val has grown closer to Ravus, but being in his circle becomes more and more dangerous. Meanwhile, someone is murdering solitary fae, and suspicion falls on Ravus, the bridge toll who creates and distributes the magical potion. It’s also highly addictive, and none of them seem able to resist it for long. What Val’s friends have discovered is that when a human uses this potion, especially by injecting it, it gives them all sorts of delicious borrowed power. It turns out that they do odd jobs for the faerie underground in the city, making deliveries of a special potion that helps the Fae stay healthy in a world full of poisonous iron. Val’s new friends - Lolli, Dave, Luis - have secrets. She soon finds herself squatting with them at an abandoned subway platform, where they can be relatively safe, keep warm, and have a regular place to sleep. She shaves her head and takes to the street, fortunately meeting up with a few other teen runaways who welcome her into their circle. Distraught, she takes a train into Manhattan to get away for a few hours - but then can’t bring herself to go back home. Val is 17 years old when she discovers a major betrayal by the people she trusted the most. In Valiant, we meet a completely new cast of characters in a mostly new setting, and it’s only toward the end that there’s some cross-over with the previous book’s characters. While Valiant is the 2nd book in Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tales trilogy, don’t pick it up expecting to continue where Tithe left off. Now drawn into a world she never knew existed, Val finds herself torn between her affection for an honorable monster and her fear of what her new friends are becoming. When Val is talked into tracking down the lair of a mysterious creature, she must strike a bargain to make it out with her life intact. But there’s something eerily beguiling about Val’s new friends that sets her on edge. Sporting a new identity, she takes up with a gang of squatters who live in the city’s labyrinthine subway system. When seventeen-year-old Valerie runs away to New York, she’s trying to escape a life that has utterly betrayed her. Return to New York Times bestselling author Holly Black’s enthralling realm of faerie in the second Modern Faerie Tales novel, where danger and magic come hand-in-hand in the dark underground of New York City.
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