CBR Book 20: "The Prisoner's Throne" by Holly Black

Page count: 496 pages

Rating: 4 stars

CBR16 Sweet Books: Excited (this is one of my most anticipated releases in the first half of the year)

This book really doesn't stand alone. It is the second half of a duology that started with The Stolen Heir, which came out last year. If you haven't read that one, it's probably best to skip this review and return once you've caught up. 

Prince Oak, heir to the throne of Elfhame, finds himself a prisoner in the dungeons of Queen Suren (or Wren, as he prefers to call her), and knows that if he doesn't get himself out quickly, his temperamental sister Jude and her husband Cardan, the High Queen and King of Elfhame will react very badly indeed, and probably obliterate anyone standing in the way of their army on the way to retrieve Oak. 

There's also the pesky complication that Oak truly loves Suren/Wren and understands entirely why she feels betrayed by him, and like she can't trust him. Nevertheless, he wants to prove himself to her, and make sure she's not being taken advantage of by the wicked hag who has appointed herself Suren's chief advisor and clearly has some sort of very devious revenge plot against the royal family of Elfhame brewing. 

Can Oak escape Suren/Wren's dungeons, prevent a war, convince his beloved that he truly would like to spend the rest of his days with her (but he'd rather not have to be king of anything, please, how are they going to square that with her now being Queen of her own realm?) and prevent wicked forces from using Suren/Wren for their own ends, possibly destroying her in the process?

I love Holly Black. She has yet to write a book that I didn't at least enjoy. Are Suren/Wren and Oak's courtship and journey towards their eventual happy ending as twisted and at times exhausting as Jude and Cardan's in The Folk of the Air trilogy. Thankfully no, those two psychos are their own special brand of crazy (and I love them so), but that doesn't mean that their relationship doesn't face formidable challenges. 

The storytelling in this book was a bit messy, it's a rather convoluted plot, and I'm not sure it was a great idea to have this be single POV. I get that it's all about secrets and deceptions, and plot twists throughout, but I think both this and The Stolen Heir might have been better with dual POVs, this one in particular. 

Black's world-building is excellent and it's always a joy to see how her fertile imagination depicts the intricacies of the various Faerie kingdoms. Suren/Wren's wintery northern kingdom is a very different place to where Oak has grown up, and as someone from a Nordic country, it's fun to see references to more of the Norse fae. 

While we got a small cameo from Madoc in the previous book, but only mentions of Jude and Cardan, so it was great to get more of Oak's family this time around, to see Jude, Cardan, Taryn and even Oriana and Madoc in a different setting and situation than in the previous books. They deeply care for one another, but have such trouble expressing those feelings. There's rich potention for some really juicy group therapy sessions in the Greenbriar line, and among Madoc's three daughters. 

This book seems to end on a fairly closed note, but if Black wants to revisit her characters further, a novella from Jude and Cardan's possibly expedition to the Undersea realm could be a lot of fun. 

Judging a book by its cover: Like the cover for the previous book in the duology, this cover is dominated by white. There's a lot of icicles, considering Wren's wintery home, and the ring plays a prominent role in the story. I'm generally not as big a fan of these as the ones for the Folk of the Air trilogy about Cardan and Jude. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR15 Book 2: "The Stolen Heir" by Holly Black

Page count: 368 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Wren thought she was a normal human girl until the night when scary monsters out of a nightmare came and claimed she was in fact their daughter and had to come back to Faerie with them. Lord Jarel and Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth rip away her human glamour and make sure that Wren sees her human parents reject her faerie self (bluish skin, blue hair, mouth full of razor-sharp teeth) with horror and disgust. The cruel faeries, accompanied by the fearsome Stormhag threaten the lives of Wren's human family, and though only nine years old, Wren is forced to go with them to keep her loved ones safe. 

In the Court of Teeth, she is Queen Suren, but queen in name only. She is kept captive and tortured both physically and emotionally until she's barely a shell of her former self and an angry, vicious feral child. Her faery parents keep her literally chained and controlled with a magic bridle and their plan is to marry Suren to Prince Oak, heir to the Greenbriar Throne, and then have him (and probably Wren/Suren) murdered, so they can be High King and Queen. Their plan fails spectacularly, High Queen Jude publicly chops off the head of the giant serpent that used to be her husband and saves not only High King Cardan but increases his power and their joint hold on Elfhame. During the brief time of negotiations and attempted betrayals, Wren/Suren gets to know Prince Oak a bit better. He doesn't seem scared of her and treats her with kindness, but after the Battle of the Serpent, as it comes to be known, Suren is still forced back to the now disbanded Court of Teeth, with Jude having ordered that henceforth Lady Nore and Lord Jarel need to obey all of Suren's commands. Terrified and despondent that she couldn't find safety in the High Court, Wren basically nopes out and runs away to the human world, living homeless in the woods and trying to engage with Faerie as little as possible.

At nineteen, Wren survives by foraging for food in the woods, eating leftovers she finds in rubbish bins, or stealing food from the house of her un-family (what she has learned to call her human family), who she's unable to let go of. She can never forget the horrified reaction of her parents (even though she now knows they were spelled to react so badly) and she fears that they or her former sister would react just as badly if they saw her again. Nevertheless, she keeps creeping around their house, breaking in when they're asleep. Wren has discovered she has the power to dissolve spells and curses if she works hard enough, so she tends to try to save foolish humans from faerie curses when she's able.

Then one night, the Stormhag is coming for her, and to her surprise, the one who rescues her is none other than Prince Oak, all grown up and very formidable. He claims to need her help, as Lady Nore has reclaimed power in the North, now using dark magic to animate hideous creations from sticks, snow, and the body parts of the dead. She's clearly building an army and will be looking to Elfhame for revenge and conquest. As the deeply reluctant heir to the throne, Oak has spent his adolescence making himself into the perfect target for all the assassins coming for the royal family. He's taken it upon himself to stop Lady Nore and rescue his captured father, former Grand General Madoc. He needs Wren, as she is the only one with the power to control her mother. 

While the thought of going back to the Court of Teeth and seeing Lady Nore again fills Wren with dread, she also can't allow the psychotic creature who claims to be her mother to succeed in her sinister, necromantic plans. Nor can she forget that she and Oak seemed to be friends for a very short while as children and that he's now grown into a very handsome, charming, and manipulative young man, who's clearly not going to hesitate to get her to agree, one way or the other. Bogdana, the Storm hag, catches up with them before they've gotten very far on their quest, and shocks Wren/Suren with the truth of her "birth". Faeries can't lie, and Wren, who's never exactly been happy in her own skin, comes to doubt herself further. 

She reluctantly accompanies Oak and his two companions. Tiernan is Oak's bodyguard (not that he gets to do much guarding, the way Oak throws himself headfirst into danger) and Hyacinthe, their prisoner, is a former soldier of Madoc's, now under a curse and able to give them information about the Ice Needle Citadel, as he served Lady Nore there for many years. Tiernan clearly doesn't trust Wren one bit, and Wren is only too aware that Oak has several hidden agendas and if his pleasant looks and manners are a deception, she could end up a captive in the Court of Teeth once more. Faeries can't directly lie, but as a result, they become very skilled at twisting the truth, and Oak, for all that he is only seventeen, has clearly been hardened by years of near-successful assassination attempts and interacting with two-faced courtiers. Desperate for love and belonging, Wren is all too aware that if she's not careful, she'll lose her heart to his honey-tongued words, and considering all the pain and loss she has suffered so far in her short life, she doesn't think she'll survive the pain of having her heart broken by the prince.

I've been eagerly anticipating the release of this book for months and months, since it first came to my attention that Holly Black was writing more from her dark and twisted Elfhame universe. Toxic and damaged as they are, Jude and Cardan shouldn't work as a couple, yet ended up doing after all and after such a feat, Black (whose writing I was already pretty enamored with) owns my eternal loyalty. Turns out, that shocking and brutal as the opening to The Cruel Prince is for Jude and her sisters, Wren/Suren has it SO much worse. Seriously, Jude and Cardan played mind games and tried to kill one another before they kind of reluctantly fell madly in love with each other, and both got some serious baggage growing up in Faerie. Neither of them had to face a fraction of the f*cked up sh*t Suren has to go through before she's even 12 and when you add to her torment some of the stuff she eventually suffers in this book - let's just say the girl has my metaphorical sword and I wan to eviscerate anyone who harms a blue hair on her head henceforth. 

In interviews, Black has said that this is the first part of a duology, and while Wren/Suren is our point of view character in this book, the next book is Oak's, and we're going to see a lot of the same events that we see in this one through his eyes instead. While all of the books in the Folk of the Air trilogy were sort of exhausting because Jude and Cardan are really extreme personalities and not necessarily pleasant people to spend time with, in this I loved Wren from the start, but was also very aware that there were clearly a whole lot of things under the surface, and people waiting to double-cross or manipulate and all sorts of twists and turns, and even when a lot of things became clear, it's obvious that there is so much more going on that we won't know about until the second book. Based on how this book ends, I cannot imagine that Oak's book won't also continue the story, because if Wren and Oak's relationship ends where this book left it, I may have to burn some things down. 

As of now, I've rated this book four stars, but which rating it's ultimately going to end up with very much depends on whether Black can deliver with the second part of the story (which based on her previous novels, I'm pretty sure she can). There is no release date for Oak's book on Holly Black's website and I don't even know if she's started writing it yet. So I guess I'll just have to pine listlessly until the next book comes out, hopefully early next year. 

Judging a book by its cover: Is it a cage? Is it Wren's hidden willow den in the woods? I love that the cover image easily evokes both images. I'm also guessing that since this cover is mostly white (some of the limited special editions are all black), Oak's book is going to be mostly black. Although based on the way he's described in this book, maybe the theme will be heavy on the gold instead. It'll be interesting to see in a year if my prediction holds true.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 93: "How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories" by Holly Black

Page count: 200 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Spoiler warning! Don't read this book, or review unless you've finished the entire trilogy of The Folk of the Air. The Cruel Prince is the place to start. 

This companion book, which I suspect would clock in at novella-length if you removed all the beautiful full-colour illustrations throughout by Rovina Cai, works as part prequel and part sequel to The Folk of the Air trilogy, as well as an alternate POV to several of the series' events, especially in The Cruel Prince, where Prince Cardan is possibly at his most loathsome.

In this book, told from Cardan's point of view, we see him and Jude as High King and Queen of Elfhame, riding to the mortal world to deal with a supernatural threat, while Cardan thinks back to several of the events in his life that brought him to such an unlikely place. We see him first as a feral, unwanted child in the palace stables, left to fend for himself and scramble for scraps, encountering a troll woman named Aslog and hearing her tell a story of a stone-hearted boy. This is only the first meeting between Cardan and Aslog, and with each encounter, the story is told, but changes subtly and takes on new meaning and moral. 

We also get to see how Cardan is given a place to live by his elder brother Balekin, and molded in his image, but at a terrible price. We find out how he and Nicasia, Princess of the Undersea become friends, and how they eventually join forces with the sadistic Valerian and wicked Locke, and terrorise all around them and give in to their worst excesses. Quite a lot of Cardan's antipathy and mistreatment of Jude is given some background, to explain some of why Cardan kept lashing out at the woman he would eventually fall for and marry.

For anyone who possibly gave up on the series after the first book, Prince Cardan of Elfhame might seem utterly irredeemable. He certainly did a lot of very dark, cruel, and f**ked up things and treated Jude, her twin sister and others absolutely appallingly. Even before this story, which attempts to show some of Cardan's side of things, it became obvious over the course of the series that Cardan was very much a victim of his upbringing and circumstances, and while a prince, really had possibly even less control of his life and destiny than Jude did. It's also important to remember that none of the faeries in Holly Black's fantasy world are kind and nice and cannot be held to human morality standards. They are all wicked, manipulative and untrustworthy and most consider humans utterly beneath them. Ensorcelling humans and forcing them into months or even years of slavelike servitude is entirely common-place, and trickery and deceit are in their nature. It's not surprising that Cardan saw the human girls being raised to believe themselves equal in rank and stature to true-born faeries as an affront and an insult, especially as they seemed to have a proud father and a loving home, something Cardan himself had never known.

Considering Cardan's upbringing, it's rather remarkable that he is able to change as much as he does over the course of the trilogy. It's also important to remember that his nemesis, the woman he eventually falls for and marries, is Jude Duarte, a fierce, bitter and combative girl whose upbringing was at the hands of one of Elfhame's most ruthless generals. Her most abiding childhood memory is of her foster father slaying her actual parents and taking her sisters and her away from the only home they'd ever known. While Jude is raised in a loving home of sorts, she is always very aware of how different she and her twin Taryn are from the fae, and while Taryn does her best to conform and fit in, Jude, always aware of her vulnerability and how helpless she is compared to the faeries, works to make herself stronger, cleverer and utterly defiant of all of them. Cardan's cruelty only makes her more determined to become unbeatable. At one point in this book, Cardan thinks "Jude wouldn’t have made a mistake like this, he is dead certain. She would have been on guard from the moment she entered the woods. No, that isn’t right. Jude is on guard every hour of every day of her life." That sums her up rather nicely.

I really like a good fairy tale, and the way the story of the stone-hearted boy changes with each retelling here was very well-done. For all that they both start out as rather horrible, neither Jude nor Cardan are ever boring characters and it was nice to spend some more time with them. Cardan and Jude's love story over the course of the series is a true enemies to lovers story that few storytellers actually ever manage to pull off, and this book just made it all the more clear why I should re-read the whole trilogy soon, seeing how the relationship develops now that I know where they end up. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover, like the inside illustrations, is by Rovina Cai, who captures Cardan, Jude, and the other faery creatures wonderfully. I really like how this cover compliments the other three covers in the series, while also being different, because of the art style. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR11 Book 92: "The Queen of Nothing" by Holly Black

Page count: 300 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Spoiler warning! This is the third and final book in the Folk of the Air trilogy. Don't read this review if you haven't read the previous two book, it's impossible to review the story without mentioning events from earlier. If you want to start the series at the beginning (since the series is completed now), The Cruel Prince is the first book.

Official book description:
"He will be destruction of the crown and the ruination of the throne."

Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold onto. Jude learned this lesson when she released her control over the wicked king, Cardan, in exchange for immeasurable power.

Now as the exiled mortal Queen of Faerie, Jude is powerless and left reeling from Cardan’s betrayal. She bides her time determined to reclaim everything he took from her. Opportunity arrives in the form of her deceptive twin sister, Taryn, whose mortal life is in peril.

Jude must risk venturing back into the treacherous Faerie Court, and confront her lingering feelings for Cardan, if she wishes to save her sister. But Elfhame is not as she left it. War is brewing. As Jude slips deep within enemy lines she becomes ensnared in the conflict’s bloody politics.

And, when a dormant yet powerful curse is unleashed, panic spreads throughout the land, forcing her to choose between her ambition and her humanity…

Jude is going stir crazy exiled from the Faerie Realm and while she claims to hate Cardan for his actions and betrayal of her, she also can't stop thinking about him constantly. She spends most of her time hiring herself out to fae who are living in the human realm, and foolhardy as ever, nearly gets herself killed fighting an exiled faerie general. As she's patching up her wounds, her duplicitous twin sister Taryn comes to see her, confessing that she's now a widow, having killed the spiteful Locke and begging Jude to sneak into Faerie, and appear at the tribunal masquerading as Taryn. Jude is immune to faerie glamour and can lie to her heart's content. She can pretend to be Taryn and deny all wrong-doing, thus clearing her sister's name.

Of course, nothing is ever easy. When Jude shows up at the Faerie Court, dressed and made up as her sister, she might fool everyone else, but not the king himself, who would know his mortal bride whatever she wears. When they are alone in his chambers, Cardan tries to explain his plan and why he actually exiled Jude, but before he is able to set the record straight, Jude (as Taryn) is "rescued" by some of the stolen forces now loyal to her foster father Madoc and taken far away from the Court, to Madoc's rebel camp. Jude goes from the possible frying pan into the fire, surrounded by all sides by people loyal to the man bent on usurping Cardan, and as a result, Jude herself, from the Throne of Faerie.

Forced to keep impersonating her gentler, more lady-like sister in the presence of the people who raised them, Jude realises she needs to escape before her deception is discovered. If Madoc discovers that she is actually married to Cardan, he won't hesitate to use that as leverage in his attempts to usurp the throne. Of course, still angry at the way Jude once betrayed him to put Cardan on the throne in the first place, Madoc may not even wait to question Jude, but just kill her instantly. While plotting her escape, Cardan is once more never far from Jude's thoughts, she sure spends a whole lot of time obsessing over someone she claims to hate and despise.

This is by far the shortest volume of the trilogy, and I can't help but think that Holly Black may have hurried to finish it before it was entirely ready. Considering the deeply problematic and antagonistic relationship between Cardan and Jude in the first book, which certainly developed into something more interesting in the second, she really could have given the readers a bit more time with the characters actually together, selling Cardan's personal growth and literal change of heart towards the girl he tormented so cruelly for so long. I can absolutely believe that two people who hate each other intensely and with good reason can become passionate lovers (it's a popular trope for a reason), but it's nice when you get to see proof of the relationship changing, not just get it presented to you as a finished process. Cardan's declaration of love is really rather swoon-inducing, but I would still have liked some more time with him and Jude together and talking, not constantly separated by the plot, apparently having fallen for one another and forgiving and forgetting the past while pining for the other.

The curse that complicates matters is pretty cool, but may have been solved a little bit too quickly and easily. This book is nearly a hundred pages shorter than the first book in the series, and as someone who really loves Holly Black's twisted visions of faerieland and the dark romances she creates, I could have done with a standard length novel as the conclusion this series. 

Judging a book by its cover: I think all the books in this trilogy have had fitting and gorgeous covers, but this final one is my favourite of the lot. All the elements on the cover fit perfectly (can't really explain why without spoiling important parts of the plot) and the use of the various colours and items to draw the eyes - this is one of my favourite covers of the year.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR11 Book 22: "The Wicked King" by Holly Black

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Spoiler warning! You really don't want to start this book without having read the first book in the series, The Cruel Prince. It's also pretty much impossible for me to review this book without spoiling parts of the first book, so if you're not caught up, skip this review until you are. Seriously, even the book summary from Goodreads is pretty revealing. Look away now or suffer the consequences.

You must be strong enough to strike and strike and strike again without tiring.
The first lesson is to make yourself strong.

After the jaw-dropping revelation that Oak is the heir to Faerie, Jude must keep her younger brother safe. To do so, she has bound the wicked king, Cardan, to her, and made herself the power behind the throne. Navigating the constantly shifting political alliances of Faerie would be difficult enough if Cardan were easy to control. But he does everything in his power to humiliate and undermine her even as his fascination with her remains undiminished.

When it becomes all too clear that someone close to Jude means to betray her, threatening her own life and the lives of everyone she loves, Jude must uncover the traitor and fight her own complicated feelings for Cardan to maintain control as a mortal in a Faerie world.

Welcome back to another instalment of Malin tries her best to review something she read literally months ago. Luckily for me, Holly Black's writing is vivid enough to stick in my memory. By now, I will read anything Ms. Black writes and this dark, twisted, complicated series is just getting better and better.

Our Jude is learning that she should probably have been careful what she wished for. Having outsmarted not only her ruthless foster father (the man who also murdered her parents, then raised her and her twin as his own), the faerie general, but all the other power hungry fey, Jude is the Court Seneschal and King Cardan's right hand woman. In fact, unbeknownst to anybody but the two of them, he's unable to refuse any of her direct commands and she's pretty much having to rule Faerie, all the while trying to fend of real and imagined threats to the crown and her own position.

While being a powerless human on the outskirts of court life, Jude is now forced to wrangle the spiteful and unwilling king, his council and figure out how to keep the kingdom safe until her younger brother Oak is old enough to rule in his own right. Her foster father isn't speaking to her anymore, she detests the man her sister is marrying, despite all their animosity in public, she finds herself ever more attracted to King Cardan, with the terrifying possibility that he may return the attraction. There is more than one faction threatening war, most notably the Undersea kingdoms, who are not happy with the way things are being run under Jude's "administration".

The first book started slow and spent a lot of time on build up. This book throws you straight into the action, starting about six months after Jude's audacious coup at the end of the last one. I had very few expectations as to where the story would take me, but still ended up surprised on more than one occasion. While Cardan was pretty much awful all the way through The Cruel Prince, Jude (and the readers) spend a lot more time alone with him in this book and we come to understand more about his lonely upbringing at the Court and the factors that may have made him the man he's become. Despite myself, I cannot help but be won over by the strange chemistry between them, and hope against hope that there is some sort of happy ending for Jude and her twisted faerie prince.

I also very rarely do mental casting when I read, but throughout the book, the only one I could picture as "playing" Cardan was Hale Appleman from The Magicians. Both in looks and demeanour, he just screamed Cardan to me, and as he's probably one of the most interesting characters on the show, the mental casting didn't hurt my further enjoyment of the book in the slightest. Do I have any mental casting for anyone else in the story? Nope.

Holly Black really likes to put her protagonists through the wringer, but it's almost ridiculous the horrible things she has Jude suffer both in the first book and this one. For those of you who don't like cliffhanger endings, you may want to wait until November, when the final book in the trilogy comes out, because once again, the ending of this book is a doozy. I cannot wait to see where the story goes next.

Judging a book by its cover: On the previous cover, the crown is up a tree, here it is sinking down into the blue water, with sinister shadows lurking at the bottom. The title of the book is also almost submerged. It's a striking cover that fits well with the story inside, but I don't want to say too much about it because it would ruin some of the surprises.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 4: "The Cruel Prince" by Holly Black

Page count: 384 pages
Audio book length: 12hrs 36mins
Rating: 4 stars

When Jude was seven years old, her life and those of her sisters, were irrevocably changed. Lord Madoc, the Faerie King's general, showed up on their doorstep, intent on claiming back his long-lost heir and Jude and Taryn's parents were murdered as a result. Madoc took them and his daughter Vivienne to Elfhame, where they were all raised as part of his household.

Most humans in Elfhame are servants (or even slaves) be-glamoured not to realise that they're trapped in a magical realm. That Madoc has demanded that Jude and Taryn be raised alongside the children of the Fae, and treated as his own kin, is highly unusual. Vivi, his actual daughter, still does her best to provoke and oppose her father and scoff at Faerie traditions as much as she can. The twins, on the other hand, always so very aware of their otherness, do their best to fit in and adapt. Ten years after the death of their parents, Jude is wanting to fight in the trials to prove herself worthy to become a knight, while Taryn wants to find a faerie lord to marry. Vivi, on the other hand, keeps sneaking off to the mortal realm and has a human girlfriend who she's keeping secret from Madoc and her stepmother.

While many of the Faerie youths that Jude and Taryn are educated alongside are happy to mostly ignore them, there are others who don't like humans, and resent that the twins are given such elevated status. They take extra pleasure in torturing them and making their lives difficult. Chief among these are Cardan, the High King's youngest son, and his little band of hangers-on. When Cardan discovers that Jude wants to compete in the Knight trials, he steps up his harassment. He wants Jude to promise to bow out, and she only becomes more determined to defy him. As Taryn just wants to be left in peace, she keeps trying to persuade her sister to bow to the prince, to no avail. The sisters start growing apart.

Madoc has no intention of allowing Jude to become a knight, he says she's not ruthless enough. So when Jude gets an offer from one of the older of the High King's sons, an offer that can help keep her safe from Cardan and some of his more ruthless allies, she accepts, even if it might put her in danger of a different kind. Then there's an announcement that the High King will step down, and cede the throne to one of his heirs. Will this trigger a power struggle among the King's children?

The first Holly Black book I ever read was Tithe, back in 2010. While my absolute favourite of her books is about vampires, Ms Black has written about faeries a number of times, and they are not the pretty and romantic kind, but rather the dark, dangerous, yet oh so seductive ones that humans should stay far away from, but rarely can. So when I heard that her new series was also going to be about the Fae, I was excited.

When I say that these are not your nice, delicate sort of faeries, that's no joke. Even in the prologue of the book, defenceless children see their parents brutally struck down and then they are abducted by their parents' murderer. Some of the stuff that Cardan and his cronies put Jude through in the book was genuinely difficult to read about and while Prince Cardan is eventually given just a little bit of depth and backstory to make you understand both his strange hatred of Jude and his malicious cruelty (probably because he's clearly going to become a much more central character in the sequel), most of his friends seem to be just sadistic creeps.

There's also several descriptions of the very callous treatment the majority of faeries have for humans in general. While under the current High King, there are rules about making bargains with mortals before they can be lured away to Elfheim, it's also made clear that this was not always the case, and there are many who would love to go back to the old ways, where humans could be easily lured away and exploited, until they waste away for lack of rest and proper nourishment. Humans are playthings to most of the Fae, and it's really only the high position that Madoc has at court and his power that means he can demand that his faithless human wife's offspring be raised as his own flesh and blood.

While I liked Jude a lot, I would have loved a bit more characterisation of her two sisters. While as someone who is extremely averse to conflict myself, you'd think I'd sympathise with Taryn, she comes across as almost too cowardly and willing to submit, and Vivi's chief trait seems to be sullen defiance. I hope we get more insight into both characters in the sequels, as I the stubborn and headstrong loner protagonist, without friends or support of any kind get a bit boring after a while. To be fair, Jude does find herself some interesting allies as the plot progresses, but it would be sad if she becomes entirely estranged with her actual sisters.

This is not really a romantic book (unlike several of Black's previous novels), but there are absolutely hints of possible romantic interests in the books to come. The main story in this book is Jude's desperate struggle to amass enough power and influence for herself that she can survive in Elfheim without being harassed, while having to deal with increasing amounts of complicated intrigue along the way. She's certainly in a very different position at the end of the book than at the beginning, with all manner of interesting implications for the books to come.

Judging a book by its cover: There's a Barnes & Noble exclusive cover for this book, where the background is black, rather than white, and I think that one looks a lot more striking. It's not that I mind the white, but black and gold seems so much more dramatic, and there is a fair amount of drama in this book. They could also have put a more elaborate crown in the picture, the one described in the book is quite a lot more intricate than the one pictured here.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 94: "Black Heart" by Holly Black

Page count: 304 pages
Rating: 4 stars

This is book 3 of a trilogy. This review, and even the book summary, is likely to contain spoilers for previous books in the series. Skip this until you're caught up.

In the third and final volume of Holly Black's Curse Worker trilogy, Cassel has forced his older brother Barron into working for the Feds, and he's loving every minute of it, as he's able to use his memory working to get a whole load of cool fringe benefits. Cassel can't be officially recruited by them yet, as he's not 18, but the deal is that once he's finished his final year of school, he'll come work for them too. Now he's mainly using his practise missions to spy on Lila, the girl he loves and who pretty much hates him after the emotion work his mother forced on her wore off. Lila Zacharov is following in her father's footsteps, having quit school and become a gangster in training.

Having not seen or heard from his mother in a while, Cassel discovers that Lila's father has her under house arrest for stealing and fencing his most prized possession, the resurrection diamond, a stone believed to have belonged to Rasputin, and whose owner can never be killed. He's been wearing a fake for years, but would like the original returned, and Cassel has no choice but to agree to try to locate it. Anything to be nearer to Lila, who lives in the same flat where his mother is now imprisoned.

The Feds need Cassel's help in neutralising a senator, who after emotion work was performed on him by a number of individuals, including Cassel's mother, has become dangerously unstable. He keeps proposing mandatory testing of all citizens, wanting those who are proven to be workers fired from their jobs, and in some extreme cases, imprisoned. As the government also employs magically gifted workers, it's very much in their interest that the sentator is taken out of the equation. They want Cassel to change him into a dog, who they can keep contained. Every instinct Cassel has says this is a trap, and his brother's snooping confirms it.

There is also a fairly boring subplot involving a school friend of Cassel's, hiring him and his roommate Sam to help her retrieve some photographs she's being blackmailed for. I thought the whole plot dragged quite a bit. It felt like it, as well as the extensive relationship drama between Sam and his girlfriend Daneca had been inserted mainly as padding, because Cassel's two main story lines - his doomed love for Lila and his moral quandary about transforming the senator, weren't enough to fill out the book.

What I really like about this whole series is that it's mostly a contemporary fiction series, with just a slight magical twist. The various worker powers are interesting to me, as are the implications of what such powers and the fear of them would do to a society. The books explore prejudice, fear and discrimination in an interesting way, and there is a tremendous range of morality in the various characters. There is very little right or wrong, just a whole lot of grey areas. Cassel isn't a very nice person, and has a lot of bad stuff in his past and present, but he keeps trying to protect the people he cares about and protect them as best he can. Sometimes he has to break the law to do that, but he doesn't want to become worse than he already is. He's killed people, but only because his brothers used him and made him forget it. He's caused a lot of pain to people he cares about, especially Lila, and so desperately wants to make up for it.

I found Barron's slight redemptive arc in this last book both promising and with the reveal of the picture on his phone, and what Cassel did with it, a bit heart-breaking. Barron has clearly been a sociopathic dick for much of the books, but you do get the sense that the brothers love each other despite all that. Their relationship with each other, and their mother, is very dysfunctional. I like their grandfather though, he's a nice guy, for all that he's been a mob assassin for much of his life.

I liked Cassel's solution to the dilemma he faced, and the tension in the aftermath, where his smart-arse ways were suddenly not enough to get him out of a bind. It was nice to see that the trust he'd learned to put in others over the course of the series paid off and that by the end of the series, things were seeming to look up for him. I said in my review for Red Glove that this would make an interesting TV show - a sort of paranormal Sopranos for young adults. Cast it with hot young things and it would probably do really well on the CW.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 93: "Red Glove" by Holly Black

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 4 stars

This is the second book in a trilogy, and as such not the best place to start. This review will contain some spoilers for book one, because it's impossible to write about this book without talking about things that were revealed in the first one. So if you are new to these Holly Black books, go find White Cat - that's where to begin the trilogy.

Cassel Sharpe lives in a world where a select percentage of the population have certain gifts. People who, if they touch your skin with theirs, can alter your luck or prospects, manipulate or delete your memories, alter or change your emotions, break your bones or heal your illnesses. Some can even kill. In the United States, there is heavy legislation against what is known as such curse working. Everyone has to wear gloves, because you never know who might be a curse worker, manipulating you in some way. Because curse working is mainly seen as a bad thing (despite the fact that the majority of workers mainly use their powers to bring good luck or can heal the sick and injured), those who discover they are gifted with such powers keep it very secret, or go on to join organised crime, because all the major crime bosses are curse workers.

On the flip side of having a cool superpower, there is the blowback. Every time a worker uses his or her abilities, they get a reaction. Physical workers who use their powers to hurt or heal get sick themselves, emotion workers get very emotionally unstable, death workers actually lose body parts and memory workers lose their own memories. 

Cassel believed he was the only one in his family of grifters and curse workers not gifted. His mother can completely change people's emotions, his older brother Phillip could break people's bones, his middle brother Barron can completely rewrite or delete people's memories and his grandfather is a death worker. Cassel himself is one of the rarest of workers, he can transform items or people, alter their appearances or even change them into animals or inanimate objects. His mother and brothers wanted to keep him unaware of his gifts until he got older, so his brother Barron started changing his memories, making him think he was just a regular human. Over the course of the first book, Cassel discovers that his brothers kept rewriting his memories, using his transformation abilities for their own ends.

After Phillip and Barrons tried to move up in the world by trying to assassinate Zacharov, the local curse worker crime boss, Cassel made a deal that saved their lives, but led to the death of Zacharov's nephew Anton. Because of all the blowback from his memory cursing, Barron's memory is a bit like Swiss cheese, and he has to surround himself with photographs, notebooks, post-it notes and note cards to remind himself of who he is and what his memories are. Cassel has used his forgery skills to make Barron believe they don't hate each other, and go for pizza every fortnight. Their mother is out of jail, and to "thank" Cassel, manipulated Lila, Zacharov's only daughter, into being madly in love with him. Now the girl Cassel has always loved and feels horrible about betraying (I don't want to reveal how, as it's very spoilery) is attending his school, watching him like a love-sick puppy and he can't touch her, as she's effectively given a really long-lasting roofie.

To add to Cassel's difficulties, he is approached by Federal agents who tell him his brother Phillip has been murdered. The security footage show a hooded woman entering his building, wearing long red gloves. They believe Phillip's death may be the last in a string of disappearances connected to the Zacharov crime family, and want Cassel's help in solving the crimes. Looking at the pictures of the missing men, Cassel is worried he knows exactly what happened to them. Cassel is pretty much stuck between a rock and a hard place. He doesn't really want to actively work for Zacharov, but can't exactly turn around and work for the government either, as that would be seen as a betrayal of everything he comes from, and could lead to the death of Barron, his mother and likely Cassel himself.

Luckily, over the course of the first book, Cassel discovered he has friends he can really confide in and trust. His roommate Sam, who is a special effects wizard and Sam's girlfriend Daneca, who is very passionate about protecting worker rights, helped him prevent his brothers' misguided assassination attempt of Zacharov. They are now his most important allies. Cassel's grandfather is also firmly on his side, with no illusions about his various family members, but as he's been part of the Zacharov crime family and lost four fingers because of death curses he's performed in the line of duty, so Cassel doesn't feel he can tell him the full truth. He needs to use all the tricks he's learned as a grifter to hold both sides off until he figures out how he can work out what is best for himself.

I first read White Cat, the first book in the series about five years ago, and it didn't really make much of an impact on me. Then one of my friends read the whole series and rated them so highly, saying he actually wanted to see a paranormal TV series based on them, and I figured I really should give them another try. When re-reading the first book, I liked it better this time and many of the problems I had with Cassel as a protagonist come from the fact that he's such a introverted loner. Once he starts opening up and making friends, he becomes a lot more relatable and I cared more about what happened to him. Which is good, because there is a more engaging plot in the first book than in this one. I was still interested in seeing where the story was going and how Cassel was going to play both sides against each other. My friend is right, this would make a very cool TV show.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 9: "The Darkest Part of the Forest" by Holly Black

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 4 stars

In the little town of Fairfold, people know that faeries are real. You need to be careful and not call too much attention to yourself, like the tourists frequently do, or the faeries may play dangerous or even deadly pranks on you. One of the things that lures tourists to Fairfold is the glass coffin, deep in the woods. In it, there is a horned boy, sleeping eternally. He is a thing of otherworldy beauty with the tips of his ears sharp as knives. He's been sleeping there for generations, undisturbed by gawkers, tourists, partying teenagers or those desperate to try to break the coffin. Bad things tend to happen to those who try to break the coffin by force.

Ben and Hazel's parents are artists, and their mother was one of the Fairfold residents who may have called a bit too much attention to herself. Having gifted a faerie woman with a painting, her eldest child, Ben, was gifted, or possibly cursed, with the ability to play faerie music. Whether he wanted to or not, he would be compelled to play, and so well that he could enchant others with it. Hazel, still in the womb, was granted no such favours, and being the perfectly normal child in a family of distracted and dedicated artists can be a curse all on its own.

Seeing early how dangerous the faeries could be, Hazel took it upon herself to fight the worst of them, appointing herself a knight, with her brother the enchanted bard who assists her. Though only children, Ben and Hazel risked their lives to avenge tourists and Fairfold residents alike, until Ben was given a scholarship to a prestigious music academy and the family had to move away for a few years. When they weren't playing at being heroes, the two would spend hours around the glass coffin, spinning tales about the enchanted prince who slept there, telling him all their heart's desires.

Now they are both in high school, barely speaking, despite the closeness they once shared. Hazel wakes up one morning, having dragged mud and glass splinters through her bedroom window. The coffin in the wood is empty and the sleeping boy has disappeared. There is danger lurking in the dark of the forest. Can Ben and Hazel unite once more to fight it?

The sibling relationships depicted in this story felt very real to me, and there are several that are important. Hazel and Ben are close in age and due to the frequent forgetfulness and neglect of their artistic parents, they have to rely on and take care of each other, because they can't rely on their parents to always do so. Great love and sacrifice caused the rift, lack of communication and wall of lies that is between them at the start of the book and Black slowly reveals how their erstwhile closeness ended up in near estrangement. Both infatuated with the "enchanted prince" in the forest, they are shaken when he suddenly wakes up. The object of their fantasies has suddenly become a real person, who they have to relate to in a completely different way.

There are the brothers Carter and Jack, similar enough to be twins, yet only Carter is actually human. Jack is Carter's changeling, who Carter's mother insisted on keeping after she tricked his faerie mother into giving her own baby back. They look very similar, but as they get older, it's quite clear that Jack isn't like his brother or their high school friends. He has another family as well, and while he loves his human family, he is torn between two worlds. Jack is Ben's best friend, but has secretly loved Hazel for as long as he can remember. Restless, flirty Hazel who kisses all the boys, and never seems to wants anything permanent with anyone. But the evening before the sleeping boy is awoken, she kisses Jack. Could he finally convince her to actually notice him?

Finally, there is Severin, the awoken prince and his sister Sorrow, whose sibling relationship forms an important core to the dangers facing Fairfold. Tragic events led to Severin being imprisoned in the glass coffin, whilst his sister became completely consumed by her own grief. Now their father wants his children back under his control, and he isn't afraid to use underhanded methods to achieve it.

This book is also great in terms of diversity. While Jack may be a faerie who fits into the European/Celtic mythology, he is the changeling of an American child, and as such is as dark-skinned and dark-haired as the rest of his human family. Ben is openly gay and his love for Severin is both inspiring and heart-breaking at times.

Hazel is not always easy to like, but no one can fault her for being extremely brave. Sometimes to the point of insanity. She's a girl with many secrets, even from herself, it becomes obvious fairly soon. Hazel lives a double life so complex that even she's not completely aware of all the aspects of it. Having grown up in the gifted Ben's shadow, she's so determined to make something of herself, even if it means risking her life fighting dangerous faeries. She loves her brother and would do anything for him, but also believes herself to be the reason he no longer practises music and won't speak to her anymore.

Ben adores his brave little sister and forced himself to fight along side her when she appointed herself a knight. He was terrified that she would get hurt and was so relieved when he got a scholarship that could take their family away from Fairfield, where Hazel kept risking herself to protect others. But his musical abilities are both terrible and beautiful and the things he can make music do scares him, to the point where he chose to break his own hand in order to give up the music. Now he knows Hazel is keeping important things from him, not just the reason she's suddenly acting so strange around Jack. Could she really be the one who woke the sleeping prince in the forest? And if so, will the enchanted prince prefer her to Ben?

Holly Black's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, a wonderful vampire story, was one of my favourite books of 2013. If there weren't so many other shiny books constantly grabbing my attention, I would re-read it right now. Holly Black first came to my attention with her Modern Faerie Tales, where she also wrote extremely engaging YA paranormal/urban fantasy featuring faeries of the not so friendly persuasion. So when I first heard about this book, back in the middle of 2013, I was very excited. It didn't disappoint. It didn't grab hold of me, making me unable to think about anything else until I finished the book, which was the case with The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, but it did entertain and intrigue me and it once again reminds me that I still haven't completed her Curse Workers series, which can help pass the time until her next, hopefully awesome book, is out.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR5 Book 116. "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown" by Holly Black

Page count: 440 pages
Rating: 5 stars

Tana wakes up after a high school party to find that while she was passed out in the bathtub, the other party-goers in the house were brutally slaughtered by vampires. As she's dealing with the shock and trying to find her things (you don't want to escape a house of carnage in your bare feet if you don't have to), she discovers that there are survivors - her douchy ex-boyfriend Aidan, and a dark haired boy she's never seen before. Both are tied up in a back bedroom where the windows have been covered, most likely left as a snack for later. When trying to untie Aidan, he lunges for her, and Tana has to face the fact that Aidan is turning Cold.

In this world, there were always vampires, but they were few and kept themselves hidden. Until one day, a single individual decided to just feed a little off his victims instead of killing them, starting an epidemic that soon spread world wide. When bitten, but not killed, by a vampire, the victim turns Cold. They start to hunger for human blood, and once they drink it, they transform fully into vampires. If they manage to lock themselves away and avoid the temptation to drink the blood for 88 days, they're cured of the infection, but barely anyone ever has the strength to manage it. As a result, to stop the spread of vampirism, there are walled off cities around America, where vampires and the ones who are turning Cold are confined. In the Coldtowns there are celebrity vampires, and live streams of their glamorous parties and all over America there are people who worship and dream of becoming just like them.

Tana knows that vampires may be beautiful, but also that they are deadly and that those infected by them are overcome by an obsession for blood, to the point where they don't care who they have to hurt to get it. When she was ten, her mother was infected. Tana's father locked her in the basement, determined to keep her isolated until she was cured, but little Tana was unable to resist her mother's desperate pleas and reassurances that she wouldn't hurt anyone. She was tricked into opening the door, and as a result, has physical and deep emotional scars to show for it. She doesn't want to abandon Aidan or the mysterious other boy, and risks her own life to get them both to the nearest Coldtown. There is also the possibility that Tana herself is infected, and to keep her best friend, her sister and her father safe, she needs to leave them behind to an uncertain fate.

I love Holly Black's books about faeries. Now she's written an amazing book about vampires. It's the closest thing to an anti-Twilight I've read since Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In). Not that sparkly vampires, or the spoofing thereof is in any way done in this book. This book made me think of Robin McKinley's Sunshine (one of my favourite vampire books of all time), Anne Rice's early Vampire Chronicles and Lie to Me, that absolutely awesome episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2 where a bunch of vampire groupies dress up in velvet and capes and want to join the "children of the night". Yet it also does its own thing completely.

The story of Tana, Aidan and Gavriel (the mysterious third survivor) is told in short, action-packed chapters that often end on a cliffhanger. Every other chapter fills in the back story, about Tana's past, before and after her mother was turned, about Pearl - her little sister, Pauline - her best friend (they have such a great friendship), her messed up relationship with Aidan, and how she came to be the person we meet in the first chapter. There are also the occasional chapter where the POV changes to Pearl, who has to deal with Tana disappearing, and some that give the back story on Gavriel. These chapters are the reason I'm deducting half a star, as Tana is such a great character that I didn't want any other focus to the book but her, and everything that took away from my time with her, be it in the very tense, dangerous and scary present, or her mostly grim and character building past, made me annoyed.

There is no love triangle in this book, although as is almost always the case in a good vampire story, there is a minor romantic subplot. Vampires have always been sexy and erotic, and while the vampires in this story are all decidedly scary and blood sucking monsters, it's not surprising that Tana, with her dark past and complex survivors' guilt would be attracted to someone openly monstrous. She clearly has a history of bad boys, Aidan really has very few redeeming features, and the fact that Tana risks her own life more than once to get him to a Coldtown is one of the reasons why she's such a great heroine.

I always find it so much harder to write about books I love than ones I feel perfectly indifferent about. The world building in the story, with the Coldtowns, and the vampire reality shows, and the groupie cultures that have sprung forth due to social media are all fascinating, as is the idea that by great strength of will, and basically going "cold turkey", you can cure yourself of the infection. While I adored Tana and want to be her best friend (even though she already has one), the other characters in the story are also great, and multi-faceted, and even though some of them are clearly TSTL when it comes to their romanticised delusions about vampires, you still feel bad for them when they have their eyes opened brutally.

There is a creeping tension throughout the book, from the first chapter and all the way through the story. This is a proper horror story, with a lot of grisly details, and quite a lot of death along the way. At least one of the characters is a merciless and quite mad vampire, but you can't help but like him anyway, and I was completely swept up in the romance between him and Tana. I've read a lot of vampire books before now, and it was great to catch the subtle references that Black has clearly put in. While this is a YA book about a teenage girl and some vampires, don't let the publishing trends of the last few years put you off. This has a very capable, smart, brave and resourceful heroine, who doesn't wait around for anyone to save her. Tana rescues others, as well as herself. For anyone who enjoyed McKinley's Sunshine, this should be a MUST READ book. I think I might even like this better, as Sunshine has always cried out for a sequel, whilst this works beautifully as a stand alone novel with a very promising end. If you ever enjoyed a vampire story, give this book a chance.

CBR 2 Book 64: "White Cat" by Holly Black

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry
Page count: 320 pages
Page count: 3.5 stars
Date begun: June 28th, 2010
Date finished: June 29th, 2010

Cassel comes from a long line of curse workers, but is the only one in his family who cannot work a curse. Curse working is basically magic, and it has been outlawed for a long time, meaning that the people with such abilities, are not allowed to use them. Most curse workers are mobsters or con artists, and Cassel's family is no different. As the only one not able to curse, Cassel has had to make himself better at conning instead. He is haunted by memories of his best friend Lila, who he killed three years ago, and whose murder his family helped him cover up. Recently, he keeps having strange dreams and waking up in strange places, having sleepwalked, and his school is threatening to expell him. His brothers and sister-in-law are behaving strangely, and his grandfather refuses to tell him anything. Then there is the white cat, which appears both in his dreams and in the backyard of his old house. Cassel needs to figure out what is going on, and fast.

Having read Holly Black's Modern Tales of Faerie - Tithe, Valiant and Ironside, of which I really like two and absolutely adore Valiant, I was very excited to try Holly Black's new series. I'm not entirely sure what I think of it. It's good when authors try new things, but I'm not sure the male POV in this book worked entirely for me, it seemed unconvincing in parts. I thought parts of the narrative dragged, and was not exactly surprised by what Cassel discovers as part of his investigations, either. But I didn't hate it, and will probably check out the later entries in her Curse Workers series, in the hope that the sequels get better.