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yeah im over it *dies one thousand deaths*

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tiktok nurses need to see this i think

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they should invent a girlfriend that's for me

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The Cruel Prince By Holly Black 4.5/5 stars

Disclaimer: listened to audiobook

Novel trigger warnings: kidnapping, murder/violence, sexual/emotional/physical abuse, suicide

Jude is seven when her parents are murdered, and she and her sisters are taken to the world of faerie. In the ten years since, she has come to embrace the world and longs to belong there properly. She and her twin sister are hated by many for their morality, and none more than Prince Cardan. But while Taryn learns to the ways of courtly etiquette, Jude learns to fight. When political upheaval shakes the world of faerie, Jude finds herself at the centre of it, sword in hand and learning her own capacity for weaving webs and shedding blood.

This novel was everything I wanted it to be. It is dark, it is intriguing, and above all else it is clever. The story is real because Black doesn’t shy away from the fact that everyone is capable of cruelty and deception and no one should be trusted. In fact, that is the driving force in the novel, Jude’s fight and search for a moral answer with less than moral means. People have described this as the ultimate Slytherin novel, and I have to say that the label fits pretty well. If you like you like stories of flawed characters, ingenious cruelty, complex worlds and tantalizing magic this is the book for you.  

Jude is a complex character filled with conflicting emotions and ideas, which we can see are both a product of circumstance and her upbringing by Madoc. Jude’s main cause of action is her lack of identity, a place to belong. Initially she wishes to be knight of the high king’s court, she is a trained and skilled fighter taught by the general himself since childhood in the games of war. But Jude also knows she can never be like the rest of the court because she is human. But she has grown up in the faire world and when she does visit the human world she knows she no longer belongs there either. Jude fights for a place to belong and is afraid the entire time, but she does it anyway.

Prince Cardan is a character I really did hate for like eighty percent of the book, but he is also one of my favourite characters. Usually when there’s an absolute asshole character I can still find to love them, because they’re the worst, and by the end Cardan had fallen into this category for me but it took quite a while. He is an absolute snobbish asshole and cruel, but he’s also a victim of a lifetime of abuse and neglect. He became cruel because it was necessary to survive. As the youngest prince of an old king his entire life was at a court of political intrigue filled with deceptions and power games. Cardan is the cruel prince, but is only one of many, his brothers just as deserving of the title. We see Cardan wear many masks, dance word games better than Jude could imagine, be clever and ambitious in only his desire to escape the court in which he has grown up in as a pawn. He is an absolute trainwreck with absolutely no self-preservation (getting wasted at the most important royal events in centuries, drinking wine and playing cards with his captors, writing his crush’s name over and over again on a piece of paper and leaving it out in the open, very flawed with not intention on working on any of them, super sarcastic for someone who can’t 1) lie and 2) is about to start crying most of the time) but in a way that makes you love him despite all his flaws.

A key part of this novel is family. Madoc stresses this to Jude more than once, and it a prevalent theme throughout. Madoc is also one of the most interesting and compelling characters in the novel to me, a morally grey and ambiguous character that is both capable of loving children that are not his by blood, and great violence. Oriana is just as interesting, coming off for the majority of the novel as cold and dismissive, seeing Jude and Taryn as weak and foolish for their mortality. However, she turns out to be very important and her motives explained. As much as family is a strength of The Cruel Prince, it is also an area I was somewhat disappointed in. The relationship between Jude and her sisters seemed underdeveloped. As someone who also has two sisters, who I see as my best friends, I wish Black had explored the love and power in sisterhood more.

Another aspect of the novel I didn’t love was that of the main “romance” between Jude and Cardan. I don’t enjoy romance storylines where the evil (in this case cruel) handsome boy turns out to just have had a crush on girl who seems below him. It doesn’t dismiss the years of bullying and abuse Jude experienced, the hate she felt. I think as a whole Jude does deal with the realization of Cardan’s feelings in a realistic way for her character, still not trusting him fully, seeing the cruel sneer he’s still capable of. The end of the novel also highlights that they are not friends, they are not lovers, they aren’t even allies – he is vowed to her service for the time being and after her deception he doesn’t promise for anything to be easy after that.

A definite highlight of this novel is the worldbuilding. Black is able to weave a magical and tangible world of fey where as much as things seem impossible, the human world is undeniable and necessary for their survival as well.

As a whole, I loved this book. The Cruel Prince reminded me why I love YA fantasy and delivered it in a dark twisted way that I had been longing for. The novel wrapped up well, completing the main conflict and still left plenty of questions and anticipation for the next installment of the series.

Final note: I also loved how Vivienne was bisexual and found how Black put something to the effect that in the world of faerie “liking girls was the least likely thing Madoc would be mad about”.

#The Cruel Prince #Holly Black #the folk of the air #YA Fantasy #YA fiction #Faerie #Fantasy #Fiction #political intrigue #Magic

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Bound By Blood By Becky Allen – 4/5 stars

Disclaimer: listened to audiobook

Novel trigger warnings: sexual/physical abuse, slavery

Jae and her twin brother Tal are slaves, bound to serve every order given silently, in a world where water is disappearing. When Jae gains magical abilities, which have been lost to the world for generations, she frees herself from the curse. However, with the Well running out of water, there will soon be no point if she cannot find it and the missing water. With the help of Lord Elan, a son of the ruling family, Jae and her brother must fight and search for the Well and water, uncovering lies and magic that change everything.

This novel did a lot of things really well, and yet I still wanted a bit more from it. The prose is simple and power, easy to read/listen to. This lends itself to a main theme of the novel, which is power and privilege. Various characters are born with power/privilege and taught certain things, others are born without and forced to accept life. Throughout the novel, we see the positions of characters change, power be given, and power be stripped, creating growth, and understanding each time. The characters are well rounded, their motivations realistic and understandable, their pain plausible. They mess up, they learn, they try again, and they don’t give up.

Jae, our PoC main character is resilient, tough, and angry. She has a right to be, her whole life as a slave and being forced to follow whatever order she is given. Jae is not perfect. She is selfish, wanting to save only a few people who are important to her, so filled with rage and resentment she is willing to let everyone else in the world die of thirst than let someone she loves to die.

But Jae is largely a product of her surroundings. She must watch those around her, the other closests, be forced to work hard with not enough water and endure various forms of abuse from those in power (physical, sexual). All of this seemed very realistic and reminiscent of slavery in the United States, and the author did not try to hide any of the complexities of relationships formed between other slaves or between slaves and the ruling class – specifically between Jae’s brother Tal and the girl who runs the estate who does genuinely care for him.

The setting of this novel also was absolutely fantastic. I have only read a handful of desert fantasy novels and this one really stood out to me. The description of the heat, the sand, the wind, and the relief and gratefulness of water had me reaching for my water bottle the whole time. The setting also made the water politics seem very frighteningly realistic.

The magic in this novel was also a highlight of it. It was wonderfully written, and the reader learns about it along with Jae. The unexplained is understandable because she doesn’t know or understand it yet either. It is also simply interesting, drawing new lines and limits that I haven’t really seen in fantasy before.

Overall, this novel was enjoyable and didactic but not in a way that took away from the story at all. In fact, I think Bound By Blood would be a great introductory novel for YA readers into the topics of slavery, power and privilege, environmental politics, and all the way them intersect. Allen is able to craft a novel of subtle shifts, realistic in the ways people interact and both the cruelties and hopefulness they are capable of. I will keep my eye open for the second book in this duology, intrigued and compelled by both the story Bound by Blood presented and the questions it left unanswered.

#Bound By Blood #Becky Allen #bound by blood and sand series #YA Fantasy #YA Fiction #Magic #Review #book review #desert fantas #PoC #PoC MC