I really didn't like this book. It started out interesting, but it quickly slid into depravity and cruelty. It's a teen book, but it reads like the senseless horror of the worst of depraved reality that fills many adult books. It made me sad. Sad when the main character, Valerie, ran away from home. Sad when she began injecting faerie drugs. Sad when she forced herself into a home and tormented a strange family. Sad when she was cruel to strangers she'd pass on the street. Sad when her friend threw a kitten under a train and she did nothing but shrug. I don't like this book at all. I'm going to wrap it in red electrical tape and put it backwards on my shelf so I remember to never read anything from this author ever again.
It was full of so many dark things. Valerie's mother sleeping with her boyfriend. Valerie's anger and need to destroy. The homeless friends she makes who are lost and cruel. Their world that she willingly joins. The Fae who die, the Fae who revenge, the Fae who bind her to them. The whole book is full of dark deeds done by creatures who obviously have no conscience or feel no remorse. It was a tiring read. I kept going because I hoped that it would end happily or that some sort of good would come out of so much bad. But nothing came of it. Nothing at all.
It's a pity. The book had so much potential to be an interesting story before the plot suddenly changed and everything went black. The author calls Valerie an "angry angsty girl", but she was more than that. She was lost and cruel and hurtful. Valerie wasn't a character I could ever even slightly like. If you sit back and allow something cruel to happen you're just as much to blame as the person who commits the cruelty.
Not Valiant at all, Betrayal would have been a better title.
