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When Jude is 7 years old her parents are murdered and she and her sisters stolen away to live in the High Court of Faerie by the true father of their oldest sibling. Faerie is a cruel and dangerous place at the best of times, especially for mortals, but by the time she is 17 Jude is determined to belong. But she is surrounded by enemies, and in particular Prince Cardan, the youngest and hardest of the High King’s sons. She will have to risk her life and form dangerous alliances to survive and find her place in the High Court.
Do you know that feeling you get when you are sure you are going to hate a book? This had come highly recommended, but it is a Young Adult (nothing wrong with the YA genre but I am an well-weathered adult and struggle to care about the things that bother teenagers), Hate to Love (a challenging subgenre because a. it is obvious from about page 3 who the future lovers are going to be and b. it can slip into encouraging and even idolising toxic masculine behaviour), Faerie (a setting that can too easily be underthought and, also, the love interest has a tail for goodness sakes – Furries can furry but it’s not my thing) romance. On top of this, the opening chapter (opening chapters are hard) is a bit clumsy – it’s hard to care about the deaths of characters we don’t know, I felt unclear from whose perspective we are seeing it, and its extreme violence was muffled by the maximum a YA novel will tolerate.
Happily, I couldn’t have been more wrong about this book. Black’s Faerie is interesting, chaotic, and obeys clear and consistent rules. Our be-tailed Prince is no two-dimensional love interest but fully four dimensional – breadth and depth, changing over time. This is true of all the characters, who consistently make interesting, individual, and flawed decisions that meant I was hooked from the second page of chapter 2.
Most of all, Jude is fabulous. She has the key characteristics of a YA heroine – worrying about boys and her relationships with her family – but she is courageous to the point of arrogance, ambitious to the point of brutal ruthlessness, and takes risks that are absolutely breath-taking. It is perfectly common for a YA heroine to be in a constant state of anxiety, but we are totally sold because Jude is in constant danger. The relationships between the key characters feel complex and real, and that between Jude and Prince Cardan works brilliantly in particular because of Jude’s flaws: in her arrogance it takes her a long time to understand why he behaves as he does and what is actually going on. Jude is, quite simply, one of the most fully realised heroines I have ever read.
There is another thing about this book that normally puts me off – it is the first in a series. Often this means an unsatisfying end to the first book, but Black avoids that brilliantly. I normally don’t have the time to read a full series so will stop at the first book whether it is good or not (my TBR pile is mountainous): the moment I finished the Cruel Prince, I downloaded the second and third book on my Kindle and stayed up all night to finish them.
If Young-Adult Hate-to-Love Faerie Romance is your thing, then you must read this – I strongly suspect it is the best of its kind. But for anybody who likes top quality writing, complex characters, razor sharp plots and the sort of constant sense of peril that normally belongs to thrillers: read these books. They’re brilliant.
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