“Well, even if the serpent bites off your head,” says Tatterfell, “the rest of you will still look good.”
“That’s the spirit,” I tell her.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing
Lately, I’ve been spending an above-average amount of time on Pinterest, checking out art for the various literary and television fandoms I follow. Inevitably, I end up going down some rabbit hole filled with gorgeous art depicting the faeries of Holly Black’s The Folk of the Air trilogy. I’ll be honest, I’m not really into faeries after giving up on A Court of Thorns and Roses after the first book.
Anyway, I’d had this trilogy on my “maybe someday I should check it out” list. I bought the ebook for The Cruel Prince to take with me on vacation. I never got around to reading it on vacation, but I did dive into it after waiting too long at a bus stop one morning.
The point of this long story is I really liked the first one. I like that it is told from the perspective of a mortal girl who is raised in the faerie realm, but still gets to visit the human world when she needs something or gets dragged along to pick out clothes at the mall by her older, half-sister.
Twins Jude and Taryn are raised in Faerie after their mother’s first husband (Madoc), and father of their older half-sister, murders their parents who were hidden away in the mortal world. Madoc then raises them as his own, teaching them the art of strategy and battle. Jude and Tareyn grow up alongside the faerie royals and their friends at court. While Tareyn does her best to fit in amongst “the folk”, Jude trains so she can defend herself in a world unsafe for her kind. Along the way, she becomes entangled in various plots for the faerie throne, although it is not clear whether or not she really wants power or simply wants more protection from faeries who are out to kill her. And then there’s the thing with Carden. I’ll get to that later.
The good: I appreciate that the main character and the heart and conflict of the story comes from the consequences of being of two worlds: the human world and the faerie world. The relationship with Jude’s father is great. The conflicted feelings Jude has as she tries to mold herself into the perfect warrior, meanwhile wondering if she will ever need to murder her father in battle the same way she watched him slaughter her parents. I also love how the books show the evolution of the relationships between the three sisters. They are protective and loving even as they betray one another.
The bad: I just don’t get all of the Carden love. He’s fine. He’s perfectly fine. I like that he’s smarter than anyone expected. That’s cool that the heroine didn’t get stuck with a dumb dumb but I really don’t care much about him at all. I also got tired of reading about how beautiful the folk are. To me, the most interesting ones were the blood-thirsty warrior Faeries Madoc and Grima Mog. They’re not sexy but they are some of the few who manage to not get murdered along the way.
I rounded up my rating from three and a half stars. This is a solid, fun, and fast read. The characters are imperfect but believable, and I think Vivi is the most irresponsible, loving, devil-on-my-shoulder older sibling I’ve seen in a long time.