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Welcome to Dayle Loves This, wherein I recommend books, TV, and movies (and maybe other things) that rocked my world.
If they don’t rock your world, that’s okay. We all have reader/watcher cookies as well as triggers. If you have questions, ask. And please make your own suggestions, and discuss!
Holly Black has that rare ability to write characters and worlds in such a way that they’re real. As in, I believe they’re real. I’m not reading a story; I’m immersed in this place and…well, maybe not friends with the people, but experiencing things with them, rather than about them. I can believe they exist.
It’s hard to describe.
I read The Cruel Prince, the first book in the trilogy, and loved it. When the second book came out, I reread the first book. When the third book came out, I reread the first two. Just talking about them here makes me want to go back and read them again, dammit.
The premise—which is made clear in the first chapter and is basically in the blurb, so it’s not really a spoiler—is that our heroine, Jude, was a normal seven-year-old until a general from Faerie murders her parents to get to his daughter, Jude’s older sister (half-sister, it turns out; Mom was intimate with the general before she turned her back on Faerie and married her human husband.
The general sweeps Jude and her twin up, too, in some weird sense of honor.
Faeries don’t have the same concept of honor as we do. Black makes that very clear; they are an alien species in many ways. Being immortal apparently does that to a person.
Of course I want to be like them. They’re beautiful as blades forged in some divine fire. They will live forever.
And Cardan is even more beautiful than the rest. I hate him more than all the others. I hate him so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe.
Cardan is wicked and cruel (hence the title of the first book, The Cruel Prince), and Jude wants to belong to Faerie even though she’s mortal. She’ll stand up to the mean pranks that almost kill her, pretend they don’t affect her. She’ll align herself with horrible creatures. And that makes her…fascinating.
I could go on, but I won’t, because I don’t want to give too much away. If you want to be sucked into another world that’s magical and dangerous and so blindingly beautiful you almost can’t look at it, read these books.