The Cruel Prince - Holly Black
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.
Alright, lambs. It's been awhile since I have put something in the DID NOT FINISH category but I'm doing it. I got to page 204 out of 370 and decided I have wasted enough of my life on this book. This book is easily the lamest faerie book I have ever read. Let this be a lesson to us all to not buy into the hype of a book. Just because a bunch of 16 year olds' are raving about it doesn't make it great, it (at best) makes it mediocre.
The magical elements of this book aren't even thought through well enough (A faerie can only glamour a mortal, but not each other, how lame is that? Totally a useless tool.), the cruel prince himself (Cardan) and then mortal (Jude) supposed "romance"? No. No, absolutely not, not even by a tiny long shot.
Also? I don't picture Cardan like everyone else, my first vision of him resembles King Joffrey from Game of Thrones, he certainly behaves like it. I also don't like Jude whatsoever. Honestly, if I was a faerie, I'd probably try to murder her as well. She's got this cocky attitude and doesn't respect that she is, in fact, lesser than a faerie when you're in their world. All of the things that make us human make us completely useless and powerless against them in every way. You can fight all you want but they have more tools in their arsenal than you do. The kicker for me is that even by half way through the book I expected to read about this supposed romance, have more of a plot aside from Jude wanting to best Prince Cardan the most, but nothing. At what point in the book do you decide you're done with world building and you're going to give us a reason to continue reading? I know it's the first in a series so there's some buildup that needs to happen but this was just too much. I felt like the author was going off on tangents but wasn't confident enough to let one of them be the main plot of this book so she'd back track and start somewhere else.
Let's put it this way, I've been more excited about self published books with terrible editing than I am for this one. This also marks one of the incredibly few times where I won't pick up book two because I feel guilty. In fact, this book is worthy of a donate pile or even (I know, it's harsh) a trash pile. That's how much I didn't like the first 200 pages of this book.
1 comment:
Yeah, I try to be wary of glowing reviews. I tend to be one of the last people to read books that everyone is raving about because I can't keep up with it all! But that ends up being good because you'll eventually see less glowy reviews, or the enthusiasm wears off. haha Sorry you didn't finish this one though, especially since you bought it! Do you have a Half-Price books you can try and sell it at?
-Lauren
www.shootingstarsmag.net
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