When she was seven years old, Jude and her two sisters were stolen away from the mortal world by a faerie man who murdered their human parents. Now at seventeen, Jude just wants to secure a place in the Court of Faerie and prove that she is worthy of respect and belonging. But that is proving to be difficult, especially after she becomes deeply wrapped up in the trickery and scheming of the Court. With trouble coming from all directions, Jude must align herself with the very faeries who might betray her.
So I went into The Cruel Prince with super high expectations. Ever since BookExpo last year I have been hearing so much hype for Black’s latest novel. Usually I’m wary of hype like this, but a huge amount of bloggers/reviewers I trust simply raved about The Cruel Prince. It has incredible heaps of praise piled on it so I expected nothing short of marvelous. Was it? Well…let’s get into that.
FYI: This is NOT a spoiler-free review. Additionally, I will be talking about some of the more intense/graphic moments of the novel, including bullying, repressing traumatic emotions, and suicide.
“Nice things don’t happen in storybooks,” Tayrn says. “Or when they do happen, something bad happens next. Because otherwise the story would be boring, and no one would read it.”
One of the strongest aspects of The Cruel Prince is Black’s more lyrical writing. It’s sharp and glittery, full of lovely descriptions of the world and its characters. There are a handful of sentence structure errors and misplaced modifiers, but overall I really enjoyed Black’s writing style here! It felt much more mature than in did in the last book of hers I read, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown.
Despite solid descriptive writing, what wasn’t so great about the text is that Black skims over scenes too quickly at times. For instance, near the beginning of the book there is a big tournament that takes place. Jude makes a big deal about being a part of the event and getting to show off her fighting skills. But the big fight scenes there are hardly more than a couple of paragraphs! We as the reader are supposed to get a look at how epic Jude’s skills are but the most intense description of the fight we get is “I play as viciously as possible.” Jude swings a sword, bumps some shoulders- and the fight is over.
Additionally, the pacing of the book felt off, like a pebble stuck in a boot. You want to keep going faster, but are held back by strange bumps here and there. In reference to the pacing and climactic moments, The Cruel Prince reminded me of Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake. Both books have a lot of build up and backstory in the beginning, and unfortunately it isn’t always satisfying to read about. But then the ending comes and HERE COMES THE ACTION and suddenly everything is happening very fast, with an ending that just begs you to read more.
The Cruel Prince is 370 pages long. It wasn’t until right before Part II, which begins on page 247, that I felt thoroughly engaged in the events of the book. My thoughts on the book up until page 247 were basically, “Meh. It’s cool? But not great.” The last third of the book is way better than the first parts, and is where I believe the best parts of the story are. There are about three major plot twists in Part II that were totally captivating, but I can’t help but wish we had a little more of that earlier.
Alright, moving from that, let’s talk about my favorite part of the novel: Jude.
Jude is a very interesting and unusual protagonist. In many stories I’ve read with a main 
character who lives among people not like herself, there is often a thread of thought the character has along the lines of “I must prove that I am a good person/prove that mortals are good” etc. But Jude doesn’t try to be “good”. She is aware that something inside of her is different than others and doesn’t try to act perfectly. Embracing her darker self, Jude proclaims that she will become formidable despite her past and those horrible things (like her parents death and being so cruelly bullied) that threaten to drag her down.
“Instead of being afraid, I will become something to fear.”
Jude is pretty rough around the edges but that’s what makes her fascinating to read about. She’s scrappy, persistent, and recklessly fearless. When Jude’s twin, Tayrn, tells Jude she should worry because Cardan and Co. might try to kill her, Jude replies, “They better. Because anything less than that isn’t going to work.”
And they do try to kill her. At one nail-biting moment, bad guy and local faerie bully Valerian attempts to magically control Jude and force her to throw herself out of the window of a tower. He torments her, saying, “You’re nothing. If you [humans] couldn’t lie to yourselves, you’d cut your own throats to end your misery.”
There is also a scene where Jude is magicked into behaving orders, and her tormentors force her to strip to her underwear and crawl around on her knees. This combined with the tower scene and all the other bullying Jude has received makes her, understandably, uneasy. She represses her emotions and ignores her pain.
“[…] I have been trying to feel nothing about what happened. I am afraid that if I begin to feel, I won’t be able to bear it. I am afraid that the emotion will be like a wave sucking me under.”
Intent on survival, Jude will act in whatever way she she’s fit to carve her way forwards, and this makes her an altogether fascinating character. Jude is even told, “You’ve had to turn yourself into something else, and you’ve done it. Sometimes, when I look at you, I’m not sure if you’d even know how to be human anymore.” I think it’s going to be very compelling to find out how Black decides to develop Jude, especially mentally.
However I was disappointed to see that later in the book, moments like the underwear scene were sort of brushed under the rug in regards to Cardan. I sense a romance brewing between Cardan and Jude, and at this point I’m not about that. At all. After Jude captures Cardan, they form sort of an alliance, and I began to get the sense that these two were going to be end game.
“Cardan tucks my arm firmly through his before striding into the entryway, and I feel a rush of warmth as I match his step. I can’t afford to be less than ruthlessly honest with myself. Against my better judgement, despite the fact that he’s terrible, Cardan is also fun.”
Listen. If Black wants to write Jude and Cardan into a romance, that’s fine. There is potential (again, POTENTIAL) for it to become something good. But right now, it’s not. Cardan bullied Jude and her family both physically and mentally, and unless that gets talked about between them or something, I’m not getting behind their relationship. There is also the fact that Cardan himself has suffered physical abuse from his brother, and I honestly hope that doesn’t become the “excuse” for his being so horrible. Cardan is heavily romanticized in The Cruel Prince and it’s a little uncomfortable. Their relationship is one of hatred, torment, and using each other for personal gain, and that all needs to come out in to open before we see any “happily ever after”s.
Left with one tantalizing and promising epilogue, The Cruel Prince ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. There are a lot of ways this story could go astoundingly well…but equally as many ways it could flop, too. Jude sums this up well when she says, “I step out of my second life the same way I stepped out of my first, holding too few things and with great uncertainty about what will happen next.”
Final Rating: 3.75/5 stars
A lot of The Cruel Prince was fun to read, especially once the action started in Part II. But then again, a lot of it wasn’t. I felt like I was slogging through chunks at the beginning. At this point I do plan on reading the next book in the trilogy, The Wicked King. If Black shifts her pacing around and brings more action to the beginning of the novel, and works on developing her other characters besides Jude, then that will be one helluva novel! I will await the sequel, if not anxiously, then at least with a deep interest to find out what happens to Jude.
Until next time,
Deborah xx
thedeborahembury.wordpress.com 