The Darkest Part of the Forest Review

This week's book is The Darkest Part of the Forest, a young adult fantasy by Holly Black.  I enjoyed the writing, and I think one day I'll pick it apart on a technical level to see how it ticks.

In this book, a community of fairies gets up to enough mischief in the small town of Fairfield that tourists come for the chance to see sprites and possibly receive boons (and occasionally get murdered).  The fairies know to leave the locals alone, and the locals know to show respect.  But when the horned boy, who's spent the last several generations asleep in a coffin in the woods while teenagers party around him, wakes up and the monster at the center of the forest threatens the town, the locals have to fight back.  Secrets come out and it turns out nearly everyone in town has dealt with the fairies both to their benefit and misfortune.

You may remember that I'm often uncomfortable with books about fairies because they so often tie into a larger lore with which I'm not familiar.  I spend a lot of time puzzling through if I'm supposed to have prior knowledge going into a story or if this thing I don't know is a mystery of the book I'm reading and will be explained in due time, or if this thing I don't know about is just a little easter egg for people who are familiar with the lore and I can just ignore it and read on.  I didn't feel that with this one.  A large part of that was the fairies were introduced the same way as everything else.  In places they're treated almost like part of the setting, showing how the modern world and the fairy world interact.  In other places specific fairies and specific types of fairies are introduced the same way characters in town are introduced.

Fairfield High was a small-enough school that although there were cliques (even if a few were made up of basically a single person, like how Megan Rojas was the entire Goth community), everyone had to party together if they wanted if they wanted to have enough people around to party at all...Liz was in charge of the playlist, broadcasting from her phone through the speakers of her vintage Fiat, choosing dance music so loud it made the trees shiver.  Martin Silver was chatting up Lourdes and Namiya at the same time, clearly hoping for a best-friend sandwich that was never, ever, ever, going to happen.  Molly was laughing in a half circle of girls.  Stephen, in his paint-splattered shirt, was sitting on his truck with the headlights on, drinking Franklin's dad's moonshine from a flask, too busy nursing some private sorrow to care whether the stuff would make him go blind...

Here a bunch of characters are introduced really quickly.  Some of them we see again, some of them not really, but mostly this section works to set the scene at the party.  Reading this, I'm not concerned with keeping track of everyone.  Let's compare this to a fairy party later in the novel:

Creatures spun on the earthen floor, some with long-limbed, liquid grace, others tromping or gamboling.  Small faeries flitted through the air on tattered moth wings, baring their teeth at Hazel.  Short folk in heath-brown clothes, with hair that stuck up from their heads like the pistils of flowers, played at dice games and drank deeply from ornately blown glass goblets and wooden cups alike.  Tall beings, shining in the gloom as though they were lit up from the inside, whirled in their dresses of leaves, in cleverly shaped corsets of bark, in exquisite silvery mail.

These passages feel really similar.  Again, there are quick introductions to set the stage and we don't need to worry about remembering everyone.  The fairy descriptions are less specific since they don't have names, but that works to show us that Hazel isn't all that familiar with them.  That's kind of comforting as a reader too. So the writing ends up with this careful balancing act between showing that the fairies are familiar to the characters who have lived in this town all their lives and yet alien enough since the characters aren't experts on fairies.  It's also a balancing act showing me, the reader, that the fairies are an immersive part of the environment without making me feel left out.

The other thing I really liked in this story was how the backstory was shown.  The backstory here was all really tightly tied to the characters' motivation.  It read a bit like a mystery in that I wanted to know what had happened, but I didn't feel like I was being denied information that the characters had just to carry on the suspense.  I think a big part of why it worked so well was that everyone's backstory read like a fairytale.  Over the last couple of days, I've been pondering a few questions about this.

• Fairies are involved in all theses backstories, but it's really the language that makes it feel like a fairy tale.  What about the language gives it that tone?
• Why does this tone make the backstory work in the greater structure of the story? 
• (Can I make this work for me?)

I don't have answers for these, but it looks like next week's book is going to rub up against them again, so we'll talk about it again after giving it more thought.  Until then, what are your ideas about this?  What language do you associate with a fairy tale?  Why would presenting a character's history as a fairy tale be beneficial?  

***

Next week: Deathless by Catherynne Valente.