This is actually an assignment for my written expression class, not just me going “HOW ABOUT I REVIEW BOOKS NOW”, but admittedly, I’m jumping on the occasion to ramble a great deal about The Cruel Prince by Holly Black. Reblogging fanarts wasn’t enough. I need to tell the world how much I love Jude Duarte and how I would die for her.
(Yes this is an assignment, but we’re forbidden from making it academically boring, and we need to use a style that fits the target audience for our review. So here I am, swearing and shitposting, because we’re on tumblr dot com, and that’s my blog \o/)
This review is made for shits and giggles and it’s pretty personal, don’t take it too seriously. There are spoilers in there, but I’m mainly trying not to give out too much, in case anyone who hasn’t read it yet feels like giving it a chance after my stupid review (as long as you don’t mind spoilers).
Given that it’s a book I really loved, I actually recommend it only to people very close to me because I’m afraid of recommending it to everyone and getting negative feedback...
Oh well. At least I hope that review will make you laugh!
This review thus contains spoilers, gifs, John Mulaney reaction pics, and an obvious Terry Pratchett reference because I couldn’t discreetly slide that Death likes cats as I intended to.
Enjoy!
(To my teacher: 880 WORDS MAX WAS NOT ENOUGH SO THE ACTUAL REVIEW STARTS AFTER THE CUT, THAT WAS JUST AN INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH WHICH DOESN’T COUNT
Edit: apparently it was between 600 and 800 but in assignments you can always go 10% over or under the word count so I hope really hard that’s the case here too, because I definitely took 800+10% of 800 as my word count.)
First disclaimer: if you haven’t been disappointed repeatedly by Young Adult fiction, you might not fully understand my screams of unbridled triumph upon reading that book. Second disclaimer: there are a thousand words to talk about fairies. I’ll switch between them all.
The Cruel Prince is the first novel of Holly Black’s series the Folk of the Air. The blurb sells unsuspecting heterosexuals a typical YA story where the heroine hates the love interest while secretly lusting on him, because he’s a dark and edgy guy supposed to be her enemy but three pages in and he’s already in love. I got fooled too.
Needless to say, it skyrocketed above my expectations.
To sum it up quickly, TCP is about Jude Duarte, whose parents were killed by a fae and who was brought up by said fae in Faerie land ever since. Growing up, she’s always had to be extremely careful to survive, as Faerie land is dangerous for humans and feys are cruel. To fight back against her worst bully, Prince Cardan, she becomes a spy for another prince. Meanwhile, a new fairy monarch is going to be chosen, and Jude ends up at the center of a coup that threatens the stability of Faerie land.
The worldbuilding is one gorgeous piece of art. It exploits fairy lore and legends, presents faes that are as cruel as beautiful, and takes you into a dark but bewitching world, with messed up values and morally grey characters. Black’s poetic yet strong writing style fits the setting and managed to make the first person point of view enjoyable. After a few chapters, I was hooked. I was pleasantly surprised by how the story unfolded, the importance put on the main character and her development rather than on a half-assed romance too typical of many YA novels that gets me yeeting my book across the room. TCP is about relationships of power and court intrigues, about the blurry line of good and bad, about being taken in something bigger than yourself and having to fight and make physical and moral sacrifices to keep up.
The romance enters vaguely in the second part of the novel, with a well-done enemies-to-lovers trope and a slowburn worthy of a 200k words AO3 fanfiction. The author handles well their relationship and its slow development: two characters who hate each other and would want it to remain that way, but start developing affection for each other despite it all.
A YA novel which makes me root for the main couple and uses sexual tension between them in a way even my ace-spec ass can understand? A miracle.
The first person point of view doesn’t make Jude bland like some kind of Bella Swan. Jude is complex and nuanced, and has a well-built psychology that just makes me want to marry her.
Black seems to like heroines with swords, but unlike in the Spiderwick Chronicles, Jude actually stabs people with her sword. She’s like the love child of Tiffany Achings, Mallory Grace, Kaz Brekker, and Ellana Caldin. (Mainly Tiffany.) Like in the Wee Free Men, once in Faerie Land, Jude needs to remain angry in order not to crumble under fear - and this, in particular, motivates a lot of her actions. Jude craves power and strength to stop living in fear. She lets her morals turn grey because of that and the environment she was raised in. She’s neither evil nor cruel; but she’s also ruthless and ready to do what it takes to succeed.
She’s hardcore, she mithridatises herself, is well-versed in sword fighting and military strategy, stabs her enemies, makes out with Cardan at knife-point, poisons her adoptive dad, and manages to snatch control of the throne without anyone knowing she’s pulling the strings.
But she’s obviously not gotten through Faerie land unscathed, although she doesn’t dwell on it. The impact of her grey-moralled decisions on her is shown and well-handled. Black sprinkled Jude with a fistful of hypervigilance, adrenaline addiction, lack of self-preservation and difficulty to bond with people and express her feelings, which really smells like trauma. Another discrete trait, but which makes her extremely relatable, is that whenever someone shows her kindness, whether it’s her parents’ murderer or her nemesis Cardan, she starts appreciating them and is conflicted about it. Then she copes with a good old “it be like that sometimes”.
Also, kudos to Black for how she wrote Cardan, the love interest. He first appears as an arrogant, overconfident prince, and turns out to have a tragic backstory and an abusive brother, but he literally Mario jumps over the usual YA novel tropes. First because Black doesn’t use his tragic backstory to justify his bully attitude. Second because he’s actually a terrible fighter who doesn’t want to kill anyone, spends most of his time drunk, and is unable to accept and cope with him having the hots for Jude.
All in all, TCP is a beautifully written, enchanting book that uses some typical YA novel tropes in the best of ways, with three-dimensional characters, interesting conflicts, and a well-crafted plot, that enthralls you from the beginning to the end. Definitely a favorite.
(And lastly, thanks to Black for including a wlw couple and fairies who definitely aren’t heterosexual. Another great surprise.)
Word count: 879 words
(Last time I checked. I seemingly love to make minor edits when I’m about to post stuff but right now I can’t remember for shit if I’ve done some or not.)
Wild Beauty by Anna Marie McLemore recently recieved this starred review in Booklist!
The Nomeolvides women can sprout starflowers from their fingertips and bloom tulips from barren soil in their sleep. They know what it means to wearily wander the land as las hijas del aire--children of the air; they also know what it means to be hunted as brujas--witches. For the past century, the Nomeolvides women have used their magic to tend the vengeful grounds of La Pradera, magnificent gardens at the outskirts of town, and they've been safe. However, those they fall in love with are not. And the youngest generation of Nomeolvideses--Estrella, Dalia, Azalea, Gloria, and Calla--is deeply smitten with one Bay Briar. But when the girls make a pact to protect Bay, the land spawns something stranger than ever before: a boy bearing scars, toy horses, and a past perhaps as painful as their own. No one does magical realism quite like McLemore (When the Moon Was Ours, 2016), and this third novel, laced with slow-burning suspense, folklore, and romance, and spun together with exquisite, luxuriant prose, proves it. This is not only a powerful exploration of truth and family (the ones we're born into and the ones we choose) but also gender identity, sexuality (all five Nomeolvides girls are bisexual, with "hearts . . . no more reckless or easily won than any other heart"), and love itself. Sheer magic: fierce, bright, and blazing with possibility.
Gr 9 Up. For Grace, moving in with yet another of her mom's boyfriends wouldn't be so bad, but living with the one who previously made her life miserable? That's the last straw. Grace is looking for escape from the confines of her small-town life in her mother's chaotic shadow, and she finds it late at night talking to Eva. So when Grace's mom starts to horn in on Eva's own grief, Grace has to untangle her long-held feelings for her mom from her new feelings for Eva. Blake offers a painful glimpse of life with a narcissistic, alcoholic parent and a sensitive look at the complexities of grief and a growing relationship between two young women. Grace and Eva's immediate attraction and slow-building romance are well drawn, as is the way that Grace's mom's chaos intrudes on everything. Also deftly handled are the characters' multiple views of Grace's situation, all conveyed while still emphasizing Grace's perspective, which is so narrowly focused that she isn't able to pick up on the genuine concern of others. Grace is also confident in her bisexuality, and the text is clear that her more intense feelings for Eva are not due to a discovery that she is really a lesbian--a common trope that dismisses bisexuality. Eva is black, and her racial identity and how it affects her integration into both the worlds of ballet and a small New England town are less developed themes.
119: the number of words dedicated to bisexuality in the Church of England statement Issues in Human Sexuality. The words state that bisexuality inevitably leads to unfaithfulness, and prescribe celibacy, abstinence, heterosexual marriage or counselling ‘to achieve inner healing’.
Part of what makes it so genuine is that it is biographical. In “Barriers to Love,” psychotherapist Marina Peralta uses her own life story to address the question of bisexual identity.
The first is a title I recently rediscovered via The Book Smugglers. I’d seen it on galley sites, but passed over it. It’s getting quite a bit of attention, though (click on the title to see synopsis on their website):
The Cold Between, by Elizabeth Bonesteel
This one comes from Fantasy Literature. In their review the novel is framed as a mystery, with science fiction elements. It takes place in a domed city in Antarctica, some time in the 1950s, and it seems the main characters are of hispanic origins. Anyone who’s read the Los Nefilim stories of T. Frohock might be particularly interested in this novel. I might also throw this at fans of utopia stories or scifi noir.
Our Lady of the Ice, by Cassandra Rose Clarke.
Last, Jen Williams rounds out her Copper Promise trilogy. List at Over the Effing Rainbow describes it as epic fantasy with great characters and lots of spectacle. I’ve been seeing rave reviews over the entire trilogy, so it’s definitely worth checking out.
The Silver Tide, by Jen Williams
That’s all for the March edition of What’s Next. Check back in April and I’ll throw more books at you.
I labeled this work “bisexual”, because Martin, our Riker-esque character, is authentically bi, and even though we don’t see any girl parts in this novel, I didn’t want to mislabel him as gay and be responsible for bi-erasure. I can’t even express how thankful I am of authentic bisexual characters in gay fiction. Yes, they do exist.
