The Cruel Prince

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The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air, Book 1) by Holly Black

The best bad book of 2018. 👍

Its fascinating how good The Cruel Prince is, considering how many things are wrong with it.

I mean... it... it's bad. Or... I mean... it should be. But... it's not. W-what? 🤔🙃

It seems to embrace every trope and stereotype, not just in fae fantasy, but in YA fantasy as a whole. (I would list them off, but just think of all the ones you can and, yeah, they're here). And that’s where this book somehow succeeds. It takes everything bad that a book shouldn’t do, and does them in a good way. And even more impressive, gets away with it.

I was well aware how blatantly this book was cheating my experience, it’s like Holly Black just took all the best concepts from a bunch of different sources and put them all into one book, but it was doing such great job of it that didn’t I care.

But I do want to quickly mention the 3 biggest flaws that would all but condemn any other book:
- (As previously stated) Complete unoriginality to the point of borderline laziness.
- Wildly inconsistent pacing.
- And (yeah, I'm nitpicking here) an utterly nonsensical hierarchy.

And in spite of all of this, it still manages to have an emense amount of entertainment value. Jude's journey from outcast to a... psuedo-queen type person (again, weird hierarchy) is actually pretty good, and turns into a sort of Game of Thrones-esque type suspense. Whose gonna die next? Whose gonna be king?

As often as all its concepts have been done before, they still remain interesting.

But that fact is that The Cruel Prince relies heavily on the tried and true of an already oversaturated genre, and has absolutely NO right to be good, yet somehow... it is.