The Cruel Prince Spoiler Free Review

The Cruel Prince
by Holly Black

Release Date: January 2nd, 2018

Synopsis:

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. 

My Thoughts:

I gave this book 4.5 stars. I’ve only just finished it so my judgment may be clouded as of right now so I might change it in the future. But for now, 4.5 is a good place for it.

I’ve read a lot of books that remind me of Paper Princess, but I have never liked any as much as Paper Princess, until now. So this book isn’t overwhelmingly similar to Paper Princess and that may be why I enjoyed it so much. It didn’t feel like a copy of the same story. It was fresh and exciting, and most importantly, fantasy.

This book wasn’t that high on my radar even though everyone and their mother has read and loved this book. It’s just so hyped and I’ve read Holly Black books before and wasn’t that amazing. This book though was pretty fricken great. I haven’t been reading a lot of physical books lately, so it’s been a bit of a slow journey when it comes to my actual TBR pile, but I got through this one so fast. The Cruel Prince is full of so many interesting characters and a lot of them I don’t really understand, which goes to show just how good Holly Black is at writing fairies. They are so often morally ambiguous and hard to read. They are one of the harder mythical creatures to write about and I applaud Holly Black and her ability to bring so many of these characters to life.

I pretty much did not like Jude’s twin sister Taryn from the beginning. She was so fucking annoying. She was honestly such a wet blanket and spineless on top of that. She did so much fucked up shit that you should never do to your sibling. She has no sense of loyalty and that’s probably one of the things I hate most in a character. 

Now, Jude, she wasn’t exactly my favorite character. She’s ruthless. There were a lot of things she did in this book that I myself would never do and it was kind of hard to tell what her motivations were. I liked her ten times more than her twin though, so that’s definitely something. Jude is still a hard character for me to read, so I hope that in the next novel we get more character development. I don’t think I know her as well as I should.

Cardan was a difficult character to like, but much like all the other hate to love romances, we find another side to him we didn’t realize was there. He started out the novel as the pompous rich prince who had the world at his fingertips, but throughout the novel, we get exposed to more and more that shows that that isn’t exactly true. There is more to him than just a pretty face and cruel smile. 

If you’re interested in reading some dramatic shit, this book is for you.