The Cruel Prince Book Review! (+Blog/Me Updates!) 🥀

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Hello <3~

I think it's fair to say that its been a hot minute since I've posted- and by hot minute a I mean a hot couple of months 😬

It's all good though, I have a perfectly good reason, and that is, (other than watching Coachella live streams on yt) my bookstagram!

Blog posts are quite long and they are time-consuming for me to create, but I still love creating them. It's just easier for me to update my instagram rather than update my blog, so I've been focusing mainly on setting up my booksta, and it's been going super great so far! I'm really really proud of how well it's been doing :)

Check it out! @saphsbookblog

I love instagram, but it's great to be back to blogging <3

Also, what do you guys think of the new blog theme? Personally, I love how fresh and new it feels, but let me know what you think too!

Anyway, greetings aside, welcome to another book review!

I've posted a lot of quick book reviews on my insta, but it's been a while since I've done a full length blog post, so here we are. The inspiration for this review was - if you couldn't tell from the title - The Cruel Prince by Holly Black.

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I remember starting- or a better way to put it- trying to start reading it, and then getting caught up in work and library holds and kinda pushing it to the side for a bit. Before I could actually read it though, my library said it was overdue and I had to return it 😬

We love transparent, no filter book reviews in which I continuously expose myself! ✋

Anyway, with new motivation, I got the book again and started to read. It felt different from when I first tried reading it, and I enjoyed it a lot more.

The beginning was very shocking and surprisingly violent for an introduction to the story, a few pages in an two murders had already occurred.

I think I was a little confused at the start, probably because of this fast paced violence. But it also shows you how careless faeries are of mortal lives in the book, and how little a human life means to them. It was still quite shocking though, and makes you go 'woah, what just happened?'

Something I really liked about The Cruel Prince is the complexity of the characters, each and every character has many different sides to them, and it's difficult to categorize them into Good and Evil, Hero and Villain. Especially with the cruel prince himself, Cardan. (For those of you who read the book, Madoc as well.)

This art of Cardan is absolutely amazing

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how cool the names are? Like Cardan is an incredibly attractive male lead name, same with Madoc and Valerian. (Even though I despise Valerian himself, his name is pretty cool I'll admit.) I also liked the main character's name, Jude, even though my friends seem to have some opinions about that one.

I also like the effort the author put into showing Jude's internal conflict and declining mental health as she faces horrifying things like bullying, manipulation, and murder. Jude's relationship with her sisters, and the character development of her sisters was also really well portrayed!

Aaand now here's where I talk about the plot, usually where things tend to go downhill. This book got some negative reviews because people called the first half of it boring, and hard to get through, but I...didn't really face any of that..?

In fact, I don't think it was that boring at all, I love reading this book and I don't really remember being "bored" at the beginning, maybe somewhere nearing the middle or end , but not really. Maybe it's just because of my newfound motivation to read, or sudden inspiration to get The Cruel Prince again.

A place where I feel that some readers might get a little lost in the plot is the politics portion of it. You know fantasy realms, with their kingdoms and rulers, and their rebellions, war threats, and general chaos in the politics region. This book had alllll of that, but slightly increased because of an upcoming coronation.

Eldred Greenbriar, former king

I'm sure we know how it goes from there. A coronation? A competition for the Crown between
siblings? A brother willing to kill his siblings for the Crown? The brother somehow gets poison in his possesion? Talk about political disarray.

That was slightly too much sarcasm but you know what I mean.

It got a bit confusing here because of all the mystery and secret plots happening in the background, and all the bloodshed and killing happening in the foreground. The politics in this book have A LOT of plot twists, which kept me reading till the end, but to be honest, I had to re-read some portions because I was confused about what was happening. It went something like 'But I thought the mean older brother guy wanted to poison the sea queen lady??? Not the other mean older brother guy?? And where the heck did this lady come from??? She poisoned someone too??? Hold up HE'S A BLONDE?'

I genuinely did not expect Dain to be a blonde but here we are

I'm gonna try not to spoil too much but I was absolutely taken aback when 6 deaths happened over the span of 2 pages. That was...that was a journey. A very shocking, thrilling journey that almost made me want to throw the book across the room. The author had the audacity to kill half the characters over the span of a few pages, chill sis! Slow down!

I loved it.

Might be too much gore for some readers though, so a trigger warning. There's also more than one instance of suicide, so another trigger warning. Basically, if you don't like reading about murder, homicide, and more killing then I don't suggest this book for you. There's a bit of slave labor and cruel punishments as well. Not as bad as it sounds, but just thought people should know :)

To be honest, there wasn't that much romance either, nothing really to be worried about or to be censored I think, but enough to satisfy readers. There was some LGBTQ+ representation, which we love! Also, get ready, this is an ✨ enemies to lovers✨ trope. Yay!

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Overall, I really enjoyed getting back into reading fantasy with this book, it reminded me a bit of Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas, and it was completely new and unique in its own way. The plot kept me reading and it was very fun to follow, and the map at the start is GORGEOUS! (Posted a pic of it on my insta!) I also loved the world-building <3

Ending off with some beautiful Cardan and Jude fanart because The Cruel Prince fandom has the best fanart by far.