The Cruel Prince (Folk of the Air, #1)

by Holly Black

[ladygrey]

So I totally gave in to peer pressure with this one. All the book quotes on pillows and graphics on Instagram, all the authors at panels who said Holly Black is so fabulous with plot. I was curious what all the hype was about.

And that’s the thing with hype, almost nothing lives up to it. This wasn’t a bad book, but I don’t think I’d have loved it even without all the hype.

Hype problem 1 - I know it’s a trilogy and while I’m not entirely spoiled I have an inkling off a few things to come. So a few plot points in this one (show spoiler)[like all the “I hate you, you hate me” with Cardan and her power plays] (hide spoiler) I didn’t really buy into.

Non-hype problem 2 - I’ve read a few fairy books. So while I hasn’t quite worked out all the details, I wasn’t supposed by much. Faries can’t be trusted and the helpless assumptions are pretty much always wrong. (show spoiler)[So the good guys are obviously the bad guys—I didn’t believe Locke’s intentions for a second. Or Dain’s. The bad guy isn’t really the bad guy—of course Cardan is attracted to her and all her ideas about what he most be thinking are off base. Ok, Balekin was actually bad so that wasn’t a surprise. Cryptic messages never mean what you think they mean—so Oak was not a surprise at all. ] (hide spoiler) And when you don’t get caught in the misdirects in a story there’s not a lot of tension.

So your characters had better be good enough to carry the story without it. Jude worked well enough for this. I liked that she was both kind of naïve but also clever. I liked that she was a bit ferocious and determined.

But like most books, the interesting parts are when she’s interacting with Cardan and there’s not a lot of that. The first pay of the third act when they finally start talking for real and kind of working together was really the best part of the book (show spoiler)[and no her double cross of him want a surprise—in part because Black tips her hand with Jude trying to figure out how to hold the throne in Oak’s absence and also I knew a little about the second book. I will day that Card as n’s genuine hatred of Jude rather than the typical attraction making as hate and his contrasting desire for her was a good surprise.] (hide spoiler)

While I definitely don’t think this is YA (from a content perspective), and it reminded me a lot of Julie Kagawa’s Iron King series (because they both draw from the same fairy lore) and it’s not bad but it’s also not spectacular— I have the whole trilogy from the library so I’ll keep reading to see how it ends.