In Faerie, there are no fish sticks

[bloodygranuaile]

 This might be record time for me for finishing a book for BSpec book club. We haven't even voted on when the meeting is going to be! But we did decide at the end of the last book club that we were going to read Holly Black's The Cruel Prince, in part because I am behind on my Holly Black books, and so I borrowed Gillian's copy and during my 48 hours of being a shut-in this weekend, I devoured it. Somehow, each of Black's fairy books is better than the last.

 

The Cruel Prince takes place in the same Faerie universe as Tithe et al., and you can tell because Kaye and Roiben make a neat little cameo in it toward the end, but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

 

When Jude was seven, her half-Faerie half-sister's father turned up and murdered both of Jude's parents. Things only get more demented from there. Jude is fully human, as is her twin sister, Taryn; their older half-sister, Vivienne, is basically the only character in the book who's actually a good person, not to mention the only person with enough sense to never stop hating Madoc (her father, the redcap general in the High King's army) for murdering her human parents. Because fairies take vows and debts and responsibilities and stuff very seriously, Jude and Taryn, being Madoc's wife's children, are now his responsibility. So the three traumatized kiddos go off to Faerie to be raised in Madoc's household, where there are no therapists, only complex Faerie intrigue and plenty of anti-human sentiment.

 

Jude grows up to be in the running for Holly Black's most damaged protagonist, and she's had some pretty weird protagonists. Jude wants to be a knight for one of the six children of the High King. Actually, there's only two of the six children of the High King that she'd want to be a knight for; the rest are somewhere between "not a good fit" and "Jude's mortal enemies." That last one is Cardan, the youngest, who is in Jude's class level (more or less) at what passes for school, and he is extremely cruel and especially hates the two uppity human girls. His three best friends are also terrible, although they do turn out to be different kinds and levels of terrible in different ways. One of them is terrible enough that Jude winds up stabbing him twice, and it's extremely satisfying as a reader. 

 

In fact, this book is possibly the stabbiest YA book I've read in a while? It's practically a horror novel--Jude's driving motivation in life is basically to become even more dangerous than the fairies so that they can't hurt her anymore, and the fairies are incredibly dangerous. There is an enormous amount of bloodshed. There is an enormous amount of court intrigue, most of it ultimately coming back to who killed who, secretly or otherwise. The things that look like they're shaping up to be romance plotlines ultimately turn out to be intrigue plotlines, which means they are also basically all about murder, but sometimes about other ways of being terrible to each other. The vampires in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown look kind and well-adjusted compared to anyone at the Faerie court, including and especially the ones that seem OK for a while. Probably the most straightforward and well-adjusted character in the book is the Bomb, an explosions specialist who is a spy for the third-oldest prince. 

 

Anyway, I would like the sequel to be in my hands soon, so that I can find out just how badly Jude's audaciously dangerous plan to Save the Day for the next seven years turns out!