The Cruel Prince, The Wicked King, and The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air series) by Holly Black

Amy   

fantasy, young adult, action/suspence

The Cruel Prince is one of those novels that requires a big leap of faith to believe the premise.  And I REALLY had a hard time accepting Jude’s situation.  She was spirited away to Faerie when her half-sister’s Faerie father murdered Jude’s parents. She is raised by this murderer and lives in constant fear as a human living in Faerie. However, at the point in the story where the action starts, she has the ability to return to the human world at any time. Yet, she refuses to escape and flee to a safer life simply because it is now “the unknown” whereas Faerie feels like home because she’s lived there ten years.  She has nothing enjoyable about her current life except swordplay and fighting (because it makes her feel like she has some power) and has no one for whom to stay except her siblings, and only one of them actually treats her well. Personally, her misguided choices were hard for me to swallow.  The power she DOES have—to LEAVE Faerie—is, apparently, not sufficient. I had to accept that Jude has the sort of personality that is willing to do anything to gain some small amount of control over her life to the point that she almost has a self-harming desire. She gets off on conflict and refuses to back down or admit defeat. 

However, when I was able to force myself to accept Jude and her world, I was actually quite intrigued by this dark story.  Jude is willing to put in the work to make herself stronger and more educated in an effort to reach her ultimate goal of having more protection from harm and more power. Ya gotta like an empowered young woman. And there were several fun twists in the story.  Unfortunately, most of the characters are pretty flat.  So, I am quite torn about how to rate this novel.  I don’t like the framework of Holly Black's story but I like the telling of it. I’m interested by a few of the characters but not most of them. I’m not sure how to reconcile. The ending was really climactic and compelling.  I want to read the next sequel and see where it goes. I guess I’ll go with slightly above average rating because I am hungry for more despite the flaws. 

The audiobook narrator was Caitlyn Kelly.  I thought she did a great job with some different voices and with the voice acting.  However, the production of this audiobook was error-riddled.  There were several times when it sounded like she inserted some phrases after the fact into the ongoing file.  And, her voice was often different between chapters.  I recognize that it is hard to sound exactly the same throughout an entire novel.  Yet, I haven’t noticed this problem as much with other narrators as I did with her and it distracted me from the story.  I will give her a B+.

Amy   

As with the first novel, all the convoluted politics along with Jude’s nonsensical desire to stay in Faerie is difficult to digest in The Wicked King.  And then, I got the ending I expected.  But then it twisted after that making me want to read the next in the series! Alas, I’ll have to wait until the third novel comes out in 2020.

Not much else to say except that Caitlyn Kelly’s narration did not have the production errors that were evident in the first novel. So, I can give her a higher grade and will go with A- because I enjoy her voice acting.

Also, cool cover art!

Amy    

A good ending to a good trilogy. As with the prior two installments, I enjoyed most of The Queen of Nothing. I was happy with the ending and the various characters' maneuvers. But there isn't much more to be said about it than was said about the other novels in the series. If you like a strong, teenage, female protagonist who doesn't always make logical choices but has a lot of gusto, and you enjoy fairy tales and stories of kingdoms, I recommend it.