Book review – The Cruel Prince (Spoiler Free)

“If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse.”

• Title: The Cruel Prince
• Author: Holly Black
• Genre: Fantasy
• Pages: 370 pages
• Publication date: January 2, 2018

I found out about The Cruel Prince a while back. It was one of those books I put on my Goodreads to-read list, but I never had the opportunity to read it. Going in, I didn’t remember much about what it was going to be about, so most of it surprised me.

The book starts with murder. Jude’s mother used to be a human living among the fairies. She left after she decided that that life wasn’t for her. But after setting up her new human life, her past fairy lover murders her and her husband in front of their three kids.

Now, about ten years later, their parents’ murderer has raised Jude and her sisters. Jude wants to fit in no matter what since she lives there and might as well. But also because fairies hate humans and think of them as less because of their mortality. She sets out to deceive, fight, and win to find her place among them.

This story’s plot is one of the best I’ve read in a while. Almost all the relationships with Jude are as complex as her world is. It was interesting to see how she didn’t step out of line much at the beginning to how far she went. A few moments felt like she just happened to do things at the right time to spark her story, but that’s also the same with life, isn’t it?

The lack of Vivi and the concept of what Cardan became were meh though. I wanted to expand more on Vivi and Jude’s relationship. It was a unique twist on how she ended up different from her older sister. As for Cardan, I don’t want to spoil anything, but I felt like he was a direct copy of another YA character I’ve read before. Yes, he has some cool one liners, but his character is too familiar.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the book. I hope Cardan’s character expands into something more original later on in the series. But I’m more interested in Jude and Vivi’s stories and how they’ll turn out.

Score: 8.5/10
Average rating on Goodreads: 4.11/5