The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

For more detail on how I rate my books, there I made a blog post about it :)

Ok so, I'll jump straight into this review mostly because I have no idea how too write introduction paragraphs :)

Reading this book, we get no context on what's happening and we kind of just jump straight into the story. There was a lot of world building so the "plot" moved really slowly. There is no big plot in the first book, just a bunch of sub plots that seem irrelevant but they make more sense in the next book. I haven't figured out if I liked that because some subplots seemed unnatural and just really random. The first book very much felt like it was setting up the next ones.

The writing style and pacing is very unique. Jude's self reflections were pretty interesting and her emotions were very relatable even though the situations are definitely not. The pacing was really slow sometimes and then it moved really fast other times. Things would happen and Holly Black would just casually mention them and I would want so much more detail but I would never get it. This was annoying because I wanted to know what happened but it kept the suspense and mystery.

I also didn't really know where the plot would go. I accidentally got too excited and saw some spoilers on Pinterest but other than that I didn't know what the big climax or battle would be.

Overall, this is a really interesting story. I'm reading the second book right now and it's definitely better than the first. This is a fantasy and usually the first book is just a set up so I expected the slow beginning going into it. Will report back when I finish the second book so stay tuned :)

⭐⭐⭐.9/5