Spoiler-free!

Title: The Cruel Prince
Author: Holly Black
Publisher: Little Brown
My Rating: 5 stars! ⭐️
Description:
Jude was seven years old 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.
In doing so, she becomes embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, discovering her own capacity for bloodshed. But as civil war 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 Review:

What a book! I am honestly blown away with how much I enjoyed this book…considering the fact that I went into it with neutral feelings. I always find that I get disappointed with hyped books, so I tend to lower my expectations, BUT HOLY CRAP THIS BOOK WAS SO GOOD.

It took me a little while to get used to the setting of this book, but I was instantly intrigued and enraptured by the complexity and fantastical nature of the world that Holly Black was able to create. I was honestly stunned by how Holly was able to integrate the modern world with the fey world SO well.

We follow our main protagonist Jude, who is the youngest of her three sisters, and has been brought up by the Faerie world, despite the fact that she is human. Throughout the book we follow the problems she faces due to her mortality, as well as the political intrigue and cruel nature of the fey around her. (Trust me, I’m not doing the book justice with this tiny little synopsis. Read it, it’s soooooooooooo good).

Jude is by far one of my favorite female protagonists I have ever read. I just loved everything about her. She’s this character who is clever and dangerous, someone who realizes that there are actually some parts of her that aren’t all that good. She is consistently facing extreme bullying from her peers, due to the fact of something she cannot control, and yes, it does get pretty intense, but it’s what develops Jude into this unique character. It’s so good and so real in a way? Like the things that happen in this book aren’t glamoured at all, its raw and unfiltered, and it shows the cruelty in these characters that we don’t usually see the side of in other types of literature.

The characters in this book are so well developed, they are properly fleshed out, with flaws that make them different to others. Even the side characters in this novel are so much more than they originally seem! You think they’d be left as background characters, but a lot of them develop so much more as the story continues on.

I highly, HIGHLY recommend this book to those of you who even had a tiny inkling to get this book. DO IT! It is so fantastic! I don’t want to say anything else about this book, because I think you should read it for yourselves and enjoy it the first time around. (I was so tempted to do a full spoiler discussion of this book because I love it so much, but it would be so long).

Thank you so much for reading!
-Ashley (book_tales)