For the last month or so I had been stuck in a bit of a reading rut, where everything I read was okay or sometimes even better than okay, but not quite as good as I had been hoping. I am very pleased to report that with this book, that curse has been broken, because boy did I love this book.
Jude is the daughter of two mortals who had met in Faerieland and escaped to the mortal world together. She, her twin sister Taryn, and their older half-sister Vivienne are brought back to Faerieland by Vivienne's father, Madoc, who kills both of their parents. Madoc raises his former wife's children along with Vivienne, even though they aren't his and aren't Faerie. Because he's the general for one of the sons of the Faerie King and a very high ranking warrior, Jude and Taryn are raised along with the elite of the Court of Faerie. This does not go particularly well for either Jude or Taryn, as one might expect.
One of the things I love about this book is that instead of the now-standard YA girl character who's an average jane thrust into the middle of intrigue she's ill-equipped to deal with and doesn't want to deal with, Jude is determined to find her role and shape her life in whatever ways she can. She's a mortal, which means she's vulnerable in ways that Vivi and other faeries aren't: she's susceptible to glamours and faerie fruits and the like. But she spends all of her time trying to figure out how she can be effective, in both very openly confrontational ways and in secrecy.
She's incredibly confrontational at school with the cool faerie folk, especially the youngest prince of the Court, Cardan. He and his friends are the perfect supernatural version of every popular high school clique, and one of the ways this book works so well is by blending the standard tropes of being the odd girl out who fights back against the cool kids but also wishes that she had their power with all of the magic intrigue of the Faerie Court. And there is plenty of intrigue! The other aspect of this book that I loved is how many classic tropes and storylines it works with that zig when you expect them to zag. It's not that everything is a shock reveal; in fact, most of the plot points feel very consistent with the world that's built. But the specifics--how the characters get there, or who knows what when, or the explanations for why characters behave in certain ways--all feel genuinely fresh and interesting. The end of the book feels perfect for where the first book of a trilogy should end, and it's both not a cliffhanger and also left me totally unsure of what would happen in book 2. It's just a really satisfying, extremely well written YA faerie romp, that happens to have a couple of my favorite tropes in it, and I'm very much looking forward to the next one.
Grade: A
Jude is the daughter of two mortals who had met in Faerieland and escaped to the mortal world together. She, her twin sister Taryn, and their older half-sister Vivienne are brought back to Faerieland by Vivienne's father, Madoc, who kills both of their parents. Madoc raises his former wife's children along with Vivienne, even though they aren't his and aren't Faerie. Because he's the general for one of the sons of the Faerie King and a very high ranking warrior, Jude and Taryn are raised along with the elite of the Court of Faerie. This does not go particularly well for either Jude or Taryn, as one might expect.
One of the things I love about this book is that instead of the now-standard YA girl character who's an average jane thrust into the middle of intrigue she's ill-equipped to deal with and doesn't want to deal with, Jude is determined to find her role and shape her life in whatever ways she can. She's a mortal, which means she's vulnerable in ways that Vivi and other faeries aren't: she's susceptible to glamours and faerie fruits and the like. But she spends all of her time trying to figure out how she can be effective, in both very openly confrontational ways and in secrecy.
She's incredibly confrontational at school with the cool faerie folk, especially the youngest prince of the Court, Cardan. He and his friends are the perfect supernatural version of every popular high school clique, and one of the ways this book works so well is by blending the standard tropes of being the odd girl out who fights back against the cool kids but also wishes that she had their power with all of the magic intrigue of the Faerie Court. And there is plenty of intrigue! The other aspect of this book that I loved is how many classic tropes and storylines it works with that zig when you expect them to zag. It's not that everything is a shock reveal; in fact, most of the plot points feel very consistent with the world that's built. But the specifics--how the characters get there, or who knows what when, or the explanations for why characters behave in certain ways--all feel genuinely fresh and interesting. The end of the book feels perfect for where the first book of a trilogy should end, and it's both not a cliffhanger and also left me totally unsure of what would happen in book 2. It's just a really satisfying, extremely well written YA faerie romp, that happens to have a couple of my favorite tropes in it, and I'm very much looking forward to the next one.
Grade: A
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