The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

“As I gradually restore Words Like Silver to its archive of reviews written between 2011 and 2024, I'll aim to first and foremost make my reading history explorable by publishing the blurbs and short reflections as books cross my mind, with the goal of eventually transferring and fleshing out the original WLS content. For now, please enjoy this brief spotlight.”

"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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I always have to brace myself going into a Holly Black book, because they’re a little brutal. I’m pretty solidly an optimist about human nature, and she’s more cynical. That tends to infuse her writing style, so her characters are usually uglier and harsher than I would like. That being said, that’s not a reason to dislike the books, because the characters tend to be well-done and her worldbuilding skill is one of the best.

Part of the reason her style actually works well for this plot is that the old, folklore rendition of faerie/fey is that they are extremely amoral, extremely cruel, and focused on tricking you with ruthlessly honesty. The epitome of "be careful what you wish for" in that all words have perverse meaning and can be purposefully misconstrued. There are books that gloss over faerie intention and try to make them these happy little creatures, but if you go back to the Biblical sense of faerie…yeah, very different.

As a European History major, I’m intrigued. My taste in books does tend to be folklore more so than fantasy, because they have an atmosphere and complexity to them that isn’t necessarily present in fantasy. It can be, but that’s less likely.

For context within the YA sphere, The Cruel Prince really took off; it’s one of those books that is often referenced on social media. It has a distinctive fandom and bestseller status. Most people (it feels like) have read it or have a strong opinion about it. It just took me a long time to get around to, because I felt like I had to be in the mood for it. If I don’t think I’ll be able to get into complex worldbuilding right away, I won’t pick up a book, because I don’t want to do it a disservice. I do enjoy high fantasy when I'm in the mood, but pick it up less frequently.

CHARACTERS

Let’s start with Jude, our main character. She was tough, stubborn, and unafraid to fight. She wasn’t necessarily my favorite, but I did admire her brazenness. As said, I have a healthy respect for Holly Black in that I think she’s a great writer and enjoy her books, but I have to be in the right mood for them because everything about them is about two shades too bleak for me. Jude was no exception. She wasn’t really ever soft, and did horrible things, but (and this is key) we understood why, and could root for her regardless.

My big issue with the characterization of this was that of her sister, Taryn. As an identical twin myself, I’m a bit biased. Any twin will tell you that being a twin is extremely different from simply being a sister. (I have another sister too, and that’s equally a valuable relationship, but being a twin is significantly more complex and tight-knit. Even if you are a pair of twins who don’t get along or have grown apart.) So I was disappointed by how Holly Black was able to use Taryn for convenience, but never seemed to lend her the complexity or intricacy that she did for Jude. It seemed to entirely miss the point on “twin” and I’m picky about that. Their relationship felt super flat, but could have been so much better.

Also, if Taryn is supposed to be a foil for Jude — in that she’s assimilated to Faerie, and chosen a different path — she should have been a lot more dynamic. Using her in the beginning of the book and then largely giving her a passive, unaffected role in the latter half felt like an ineffective cop-out.

I loved the sinister nature of Valerian. I loved Vivi’s indecisiveness and the liminal space she occupied between the human and Faerie courts. I especially loved Madoc, the father, although I thought Jude was really binary in how she treated him (either loved him or hated him at a given time.) I would have loved to see more levels and questions within their relationship rather than the ability to flip a switch and decide, with certainty, about his character.

Maybe that’s what I had trouble with about Jude. For such a complex, amoral world such as Faerie, she was pretty all-or-nothing when it came to judging peoples’ character. That doesn’t mean she didn’t change her mind, but it made it a little less believable to suddenly change her perception of somebody.

Which brings us to…Cardan. The cruel prince.

He’s clearly being set up as the love interest, which is a choice that I don’t think I will vibe with AT ALL. My problem is this: there’s a huge difference between someone with flaws vs. an innately cruel person. Yes, Jude might see a different side of him, but he spent the entire first half of the book being goddamn awful and not even through actions that can be clearly explained away. The characterization was perhaps a little too good: it was showing that malevolence, manipulation, and selfishness were part of his nature. It was the way of the Faerie courts.

ROMANCE

I’m willing to give people (and even more so, characters) room to grow and change. I’m usually pretty open to relationships on paper that other reviewers might deem toxic, because the whole point of fiction is to be able to explore situations and dynamics and figure out what you think about them. So the bar, fictionally, is pretty low. (It is quite high in reality; never fear!)

But Cardan does not pass it. I’m curious to see how that will be handled in later books, and I’m even pretty respectful of it as a craft choice, because it takes a trope we’re familiar with and turns it on its head. Cruel boy turns out not-so-cruel? Unlikeable love interest is actually likeable?Instead, unlikeable love interest is actually unlikeable, truly.

I’m not normally in the position of hating the love interest. If anything, I’m neutral or lukewarm about them if I don’t absolutely love the setup. So I have to give a begrudging amount of respect to Holly Black for executing that choice. I hope it will pay off by adding more tension and dynamism to the books. It would be enough to make me really dislike the book though if Jude seems to fall for him without a second thought. If it’s a redemption story, make him earn it. Holly Black, I believe in you! Don’t let me down!

PLOT

Plot-wise, we have an an antihero protagonist of sorts, an unconventional family dynamic, a cruel love interest. There’s the usual, wholesome desire to belong. But because the world of Faerie is so dark and harsh and complicated, the desire to belong is actually a bit…disquieting. The ways of the courts are undesirable, unless you’re a little cruel yourself. That’s where the fun comes in, that specific sharpness to this book that makes it fundamentally different from most YA out there.

This book does a phenomenal job with court politics. The Cruel Prince is unafraid to do the hard, gutting thing. It’s unafraid to kill people off, to make people have horrible intentions, to force characters into their worst case scenario. The execution is there.

So if you love the ruthless political sphere of Game of Thrones, you may love this even if you’re not used to reading about fey.

In most peoples’ book, I think that willingness to do the difficult thing made it an A+ plot. For me, I was still a little picky. I love that Holly Black could pull all of it off, and I really do think she did pull it off. That being said, I think that the binary qualities of Jude that I’ve established made her choices a bit difficult to follow and/or believe. Her plans were great, and the twists were shocking, but I needed to believe a bit more in her motivations before calling it an out-of-this-world read. I think she needed a bit more indecision, or a bit more clarity about how her thoughts and beliefs changed, in order for some of her actions to make sense.

The twists were fantastic, and I think will be the reason a lot of people would take to this book. There were spots in the pacing where it felt like it lagged (mostly towards the end, after the midpoint twist, when she was figuring out what to do) so I found the third quarter of the book to be a bit unexciting. The beginning and middle seemed to do the most work.

OVERALL

Overall, I really liked The Cruel Prince. I respected it a lot, and think this is easily Holly Black’s best work. Her expertise with the dark world of Faerie is fully utilized, and the amorality of her characters leaves me with a lot of questions that linger after the last page. I’ll likely read the sequel when my hold on it at the library comes through; I probably wouldn’t buy it.

For readers who follow and align with my taste, I’m not sure what you’ll think. I would love to see if the rest of the series executes and transforms the issues that I flagged. There was vulnerability infusing the narrative, but little softness. Instead, it lent The Cruel Prince an atmosphere that was compellingly and consistently felt off-kilter and unsafe. Did I like the characters? I don’t know. Did I like the plot? Mostly. It’s exciting and different and a risk, for sure, so I do recommend it because I always like reading books that challenge my conceptions and style.

For fans of:

The Call by Paeder Ó Guilín; The Iron King by Julie Kagawa; Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake; Heartless by Marissa Meyer; Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros; City of Bones by Cassandra Clare; Lament by Maggie Stiefvater; genuine enemies-to-lovers; dark romance; faerie folklore.