2.5 stars

When Val finds her mother and her boyfriend hooking up, she runs away to New York and falls in with an odd group of teens, living in underground tunnels and completing deliveries for a real life troll. As Val figures out what she's going to do with the rest of her life, she needs to figure out whose behind the murder of exiled fae, and keep up with her sword lessons with troll Ravus. Just ordinary teenage things!

This book is very dark and gritty - much like all of the Modern Faerie Tales but the emphasis on teenage homelessness, and heavy drug use in Valiant brings this one to another level in my opinion, and honestly, made it a bit unpleasant to read at times. The way the characters are all living - in literal tunnels with no access to toilets or showers etc, made me as a reader feel just a bit gross and dirty as well. Which is good atmospheric writing, but also not so pleasant to read.

I do think this entire trilogy just suffers a bit from being a bit dated. Certainly, earlier in the 2000s, this type of writing, and the grittier type of teenager wasn't always seen in YA so it was fun and exciting. Whereas now, we have characters like this a lot, and their stories are written a bit better and certain issues are explored with more sensitivity.

The romance in this is very soft, but I would have liked a bit more to really draw the characters together. It felt like there was very little between them before Val and Ravus were moony over each other.

All of the characters in this are kind of gross too, particularly Lolli and Dave. Meh.