The Cruel Prince ~ Holly Black
The Cruel Prince has been on my TBR for a long time. I was given the paperback for Christmas so I finally got around to reading it. I honestly don’t see what the hype was about.
The Cruel Prince starts in the mortal world where an assassin murders Jude’s parents. He then takes Jude and her sisters, one of which is his half-faerie daughter, to live with him in the royal court. Jude and her twin, Tarryn, are mocked continuously for being mortal in the faerie world. As a teenager, Jude is determined to prove that she is worthy to belong. One of the biggest problems she faces is a cruel faerie who loves to humiliate her, Prince Cardan.
I found many problems with this book. Firstly, although I was enjoying the world-building, I found it very slow, almost glacial to start with. It took me until chapter twenty (out of thirty) to really find the unputdownable aspect that so many people have raved about.
The second problem I had was that as the book was titled The Cruel Prince, I very much expected Cardan to be the love interest and was bracing myself for that most of the book. The romance in this is very lacklustre and at the end of the book, Jude had become such a despicable character that she deserved whatever toxic relationship she could have with Cardan.
That brings me to the third problem, Jude is an unlikable character. In the beginning, I think I was sympathetic to her being raised by her parents’ murderer and in a world where she very much didn’t belong and I wanted her to succeed, but the closer she got to achieving her goal the more I disliked her. She was annoying, manipulative, cruel and selfish.
Despite what I’ve said already, I didn’t hate this book. I actually enjoyed the world Holly Black built and it was unusual to have such unlikeable characters without the plot falling apart. Even though I disliked Jude’s characterisation, especially, near the end, I found the last ten chapters hard to put down. I was left wanting to know what was going to happen next.
I honestly don’t think I’ll enjoy the sequel and yet, I’ll be reading at some point anyway. Looking back on it, I don’t know if The Cruel Prince really was as bad as I thought (although all my points still stand), but was hyped as this amazing book that had earned Holly Black the title ‘queen of faeries’ and that was not what I read. I think the hype may have ruined this book for me. Overall, I give it a very generous three stars.
C🌙
