"The Cruel Prince" by Holly Black

The Cruel Prince is the first book in a highly over-hyped YA fantasy trilogy (the third and final book is scheduled to come out this month). I finally decided to check it out as I prefer to read all the books in a trilogy close together so the information is fresh in my mind.

I must say that I wanted to like this book much more than I actually ended up enjoying it. It did not blow me away in any sense of the word. I think my main problem with The Cruel Prince is that the world is not well developed. We basically get a handful of characters (many of them very young) which does not match up well with the epic proportions of the political machinations they engage in. This flaw is not anything new. Lots of YA books have similar premises. However, I think I was holding the bar a bit higher for The Cruel Prince simply because of all the wonderful reviews that I've seen.

Our main character Jude is a human girl who as a child was carried away into the Faerie world along with her twin sister Taryn and half-sister Vivi. She lives in the house of her mother's first husband who is a powerful general in the High King's army. When we are first introduced to Jude, she is portrayed as a feisty but powerless girl who struggles to survive among the Faerie gentry children she is forced to go to school with. Jude, however, is extremely ambitious and craves control and power. She gets tangled up in court intrigues and ends playing a critical role in the Faerie coup d'etat.

Many of the reviews I read focused heavily on the romance in the book. However, there is close to zero romance in this novel. Prince Cardan certainly occupies Jude's thoughts (mostly as the hateful bully she would love to run through with her sword), but he is barely present in the story until the very last few chapters. In fact, the only reason I gave this book a neutral rating (2.5 stars) is because I ended up really enjoying the plotting and the intrigue in the last quarter of the book. We also finally get a glimpse of chemistry between Jude and Cardan at that point.

So overall, I will continue with the series. But I would really like to see the world built up a bit more. It is just too simplistic and barely populated for my taste. I would prefer to see more magic, more mythology, more complexity to the social structure, and a wider lens on the world as a whole.