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.

Valiant a modern tale of faerie