The Cruel Prince by Holly Black
(The Folk of the Air, Book 1)
Released: January 2, 2018 | Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Romance
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Of course I want to be like them. They’re beautiful as blades forged in some divine fire. They will live forever.
And Cardan is even more beautiful than the rest. I hate him more than all the others. I hate him so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe.
Jude was seven when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants nothing more than to belong there, despite her mortality. But many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King.
To win a place at the Court, she must defy him–and face the consequences.
As Jude becomes more deeply embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, she discovers her own capacity for trickery and bloodshed. But as betrayal threatens to drown the Courts of Faerie in violence, Jude will need to risk her life in a dangerous alliance to save her sisters, and Faerie itself.
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The Cruel Prince actually has roots in a fantasy world Holly Black created with her husband years before the book existed. They originally built the world together as a kind of ongoing story after playing D&D, and Black eventually stole a piece of it for The Cruel Prince.
REVIEW
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ☆
The best bad book of 2018. 👍👎
It’s fascinating how good The Cruel Prince is, especially considering how many things are wrong with it.
I mean... it’s bad. Or... it should be. But... it’s not. W-what?
It embraces nearly every YA fantasy trope and fae cliché you can think of (seriously, just make a list, they’re all here). Yet instead of falling flat, it somehow works. Holly Black takes everything we usually roll our eyes at, mashes it together, and spins it into something undeniably entertaining. I could see how blatantly it was manipulating me, but it was doing such a good job that I didn’t care.
That said, there are three big flaws that would sink almost any other book:
Unoriginality to the point of borderline laziness.
Wildly inconsistent pacing.
A baffling hierarchy that makes zero sense if you think about it too long.
And yet… it’s still fun. Jude’s rise from outcast to a kind of pseudo-queen (again, the hierarchy is weird) actually builds into a Game of Thrones–style suspense: Who’s going to die? Who’s going to take the crown?
As tired as its tropes may be, they remain engaging here. The Cruel Prince has absolutely no right to be good, but somehow, it is.
