The Cruel Prince (Spoiler Free Book Review)
“Love is a noble cause. How can anything done in the service of a noble cause be wrong?”
I have to admit, I like routine. I like predictable plots, generic characters, and foreseeable romantic conquests. I like dominant, strong, male characters. I like knowing what the main character is going to do before they do it.
However, if you’re looking for a book like I just described, then The Cruel Prince is not for you.
The Cruel Prince is truly a modern book. The book has strong female leads, LGBTQ relationships, and realistic villains. It’s filled with common themes like power and corruption, love, alienation and belonging, courage and fear, family struggles, bravery, jealousy, friendship, and sisterhood. The author Holly Black took the main character Jude and transforms her throughout the book while also keeping her human qualities about her. Jude is a dominant and persuasive woman who works hard to get where she is and overall defies the common gender occupation role. She is a role model that I personally believe all girls can look up to.
“I am tired of caring,” I say. “Why should I?”
“Because they could kill you!”
“They better,” I say to her. “Because anything less than that isn’t going to work.”
I also cannot stress enough how awesome the villains in the novel are. The reason these villains are so good (or bad) is because of how Black didn’t take away their human qualities. They still love, care, cry, and even show compassion but at the same time they have something that stops them from doing the right thing. There is a part of them that they can’t fix because for one reason or another they strongly believe that that part of them is what makes up their entire lives and selves.
“He ruins things. That’s what he likes, to ruin things.”
Before I had read this book, I had thought that there was going to be a lot of romance and love. And yet, while there is some romance and some close romantic relationships, the story is really focused on Jude, her family, and her own personal power struggle. That being said, being the romance fanatic that I am, I still found that there was enough romance to keep me interested and overall, keep me reading.
In the end, I would highly recommend this book. The Faerie world is truly an enchanting place to read about and the royals within each court truly draw you in. This book is a must read for the 2019 year.
“And yet, I don’t regret it now. Having stepped off the edge, what I want to do is fall.”
