The Cruel Prince Review – Top 1 Fae Fantasy Enemies to Lovers Romance

Check out my reviews for other books in the series:

• Book Review: The Lost Sisters by Holly Black
• Queen of Nothing – A Blissful Book Review

About The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

Series: The Folk of the Air #1

Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult, Romance, Fae, Magic, Fairies

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Purchase on Amazon

Of course I want to be like them. They’re beautiful as blades forged in some divine fire. They will live forever.

And Cardan is even more beautiful than the rest. I hate him more than all the others. I hate him so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe.

Jude was seven years old when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants nothing more than to belong there, despite her mortality. But many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King.

To win a place at the Court, she must defy him–and face the consequences.

In doing so, she becomes embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, discovering her own capacity for bloodshed. But as civil war threatens to drown the Courts of Faerie in violence, Jude will need to risk her life in a dangerous alliance to save her sisters, and Faerie itself.

The Cruel Prince Review

Holy crap.

Holy crap.

Have you been hesitant to start this book because, despite the hype and not-too-bad reviews, the few less-pleasant reviews are still making you doubt?

Have you still not read it because you’re afraid that you would not like this book and up wasting money on the book again?

Well, take it from me, who didn’t read this book for months until now…

…and I absolutely loved it.

Again, I can totally see how and why people would dislike this book. I myself could’ve very easily disliked this book because this hate-love relationship between Cardan and Jude did not follow the “standard-hate-love relationship formula”. But no one is more shocked than me to still see how it worked, and I much enjoyed it nevertheless.

I like to go into books blind, and it’s no different for this The Cruel Prince Review. I know enough, this book has a prince and a potential hate-love relationship. That’s it. So imagine my surprise when this book actually has a decent mystery and revelations within its story. Characters who we thought are going to be very important (or very villain-ly for the series) ended up just being a pawn in a bigger, hidden game. There were so many surprises and deaths that I actually was pretty surprised by (I see other people acknowledging it in Amazon’s The Cruel Prince Review).

I also want to thank this book to follow my favorite rule in hate-love relationships: have them kind of realize their attraction and didn’t-hate-each-other-as-much-as-they-thought at the end of the first book, and only have them truly acknowledge their attraction and become couple by the end of the second book. Another reason I gave it 5/5 in my The Cruel Prince Review.

I think it’s because of how fantasy the Faerie kingdom is, that the fact that it’s just right there, smack in the middle of our modern world feels…kind of off. It’s not big enough for me to be able to label it as a legitimate flaw in the author’s writing or the story itself in The Cruel Prince Review, just something I can’t help but notice.

Another thing I feel is really important to talk about in this The Cruel Prince Review (that I actually don’t see a lot of other reviews mentioning) is how much Jude reminded me of Adelina from The Young Elites series. This fact absolutely terrifies me, because…well…we all know how The Midnight Star ended *sob*.

But this book gave me a really heavy protagonist-villain vibe from Jude’s character, which caught me off guard in a very pleasant way because it made Jude more than just another YA fantasy heroine. This is also commonly mentioned in other people’s The Cruel Prince Review.

It’s also not just Jude. I mentioned it before, but this book definitely (and successfully) tricked us into misinterpreting certain characters as the main villain of the series or some ultra-important characters, but for them to die and leave me just like, “Oh, never mind”. Another plus one point for The Cruel Prince Review. Then as the book approach to the end (I wouldn’t be specific because I don’t want to spoil), that’s when you start to see the signs that characters that you rooted for and loved could very likely become a very, very big problem in the sequels (which is really stressful, but at least it’s good writing).

Cardan though again had the typical standard issue “tragic backstory worthy of a sympathizable villain”. Again, I wouldn’t be specific, but his “treatment and past” I have seen in literally 5 different YA book series, so I think it counts as a bit of a cliche.

I am devasted that I have to wait 6 more months for this book, and it has been a long time since I’ve been so miserable because I have to wait for a book.

Making the end of The Cruel Prince Review, I would recommend this book to people who like/love:

• Hate love relationships
• Fantasy (faes, magic mixed with royalty)
• The love interest is a jerk
• The love interest is a prince
• A heroine that kind of acts like a villain
• This book has twins by the way

About the Author

Holly Black is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of over thirty fantasy novels for kids and teens. She has been a finalist for an Eisner Award and the Lodestar Award, and the recipient of the Mythopoeic Award, a Nebula, and a Newbery Honor. Her books have been translated into 32 languages worldwide and adapted for film. She currently lives in New England with her husband and son in a house with a secret library.