#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.