Tuesday, March 5, 2019

ScifFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Wicked King by Holly Black



The Wicked King is the second book in Holly Black's YA Fae Fantasy trilogy, "The Folks of the Air", following "The Cruel Prince" (which I reviewed here on this blog).  I've come to really enjoy much of the Fae Fantasy genre (i.e. Seanan McGuire's October Daye series, Mishell Baker's the Arcadia Project, etc.) and really did enjoy The Cruel Prince as a dark oft-surprising YA take on the genre.  That book ended with its heroine, a human girl taken into Faerie by her dangerous stepfather, temporarily on top due to her scheming, but with everything very likely to collapse at a moment's notice if she's not careful.  It was a pretty satisfying way to end the book in a way that also made me desperately want the next installment.

The Wicked King IS that next installment, and it does follow up The Cruel Prince well, with its excellent characters continuing through a naturally shifty and surprising plot up till a satisfying yet again tantalizing ending which has me waiting for the conclusion.  At the same time, while the particulars of the story were well done and hardly predictable, the very format of the story in terms of flow was the same as in the first book, and the book doesn't really expand this world at all.  The result is that the book didn't really have much momentum for the first act until it's very end, making this book a slight step down in quality from its predecessor.

BONUS: This review will include a bonus review of Black's side novella/novelette The Lost Sisters, which features events taking place during The Cruel Prince from a different point of view.  It's too short to really merit it's own post, so I'm including the review here.

 More after the Jump - Warning: Spoilers for The Cruel Prince are inevitable:

-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Jude has surprised all of Faerie - manipulating the situation to defeat the plans of her own stepfather - the dangerous General Madoc - and to place upon the High Crown of the Land of Faerie none other than Cardan, the young prince known for being a reprobate...and for torturing Jude.  Now she serves as his Seneschal publicly - to the bewilderment of all - but secretly, known only to Cardan and her fellow spies of the Court of Shadows, she has bound him by an Oath to obey her commands for a year and a day.

But Jude needs Cardan to hold the throne for seven years so that her stepbrother Oak can grow up and take the throne himself, and Cardan is taking pleasure in making decisions - reckless and wild decisions that could get him and her killed - against her will...and certainly shows no sign of wanting to keep being under her thumb after the year and a day is up.  And so Jude begins to realize her stepfather was right when he once taught her that obtaining power was easy....compared to the struggle to keep it.

And forces certainly aren't happy to watch Jude try to reign Cardan in.  The powerful Undersea is reaching out to try and take power over the Land, and Jude and Cardan stand in their way.  Madoc certainly hasn't forgiven Jude's betrayal and hasn't given up his schemes to obtain power.  And her twin sister Taryn - now betrothed to Locke, the Fae who tricked Jude into love previously - seems to want some connection that Jude can't quite accept.

And then there's the feelings that Jude has been having for Cardan, and he for her, which she can't quite admit, because they have the potential to destroy everything altogether....
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Like its predecessor, The Wicked King is written entirely from the first person perspective of Jude, and she remains an excellent and really well written character.  As before she's a guile heroine, trying to find her way using her smarts, her ability to scheme and manipulate, and occasionally her skill with a sword (but not usually due to the weaker physical abilities of a human) to try and maintain control for the purpose she tells herself she wants, to put Oak eventually on the throne.  But to do that, she has to deal with forces that outright hate her, forces that scheme possibly as well as her, and forces that she has feelings for despite knowing those feelings could get her killed.  It's an impossible predicament, and as you might expect in a second book, Jude doesn't always quite come out on top, but her scheming and ability to pull off what she does remains excellent to read.  And Black makes Jude's feelings and very being so real that as a reader I cared so much about her, that I was tense when she was, and really was riding on whether Jude would be able to succeed.

The other characters aren't quite as strong, but Madoc and Cardan are excellent secondary characters - Madoc as Jude's opposite and clear real rival and Cardan as the potential antagonist/potential love-interest that's done really damn well.  Readers who aren't new to the genre will have expected a Jude/Cardan romance to blossom eventually, and we get the steps of that here, but Black makes the relationship work really damn well despite how it began and takes it in some crazy surprising directions.  Really the plot as a whole surprises for the most part, but always in a good way, with every twist being clearly setup before hand in retrospect -with the exception perhaps of the one in the ending, but that's done so damn well I expect to find that surprise justified by the third book whenver it comes out.

My main issue with The Wicked King was the book followed very closely the structure of its predecessor - a roughly 20 chapter first act followed by a 10 chapter second act after a major event occurs changing the status quo.  The book is significantly shorter than The Cruel Prince but doesn't feature practically any new worldbuilding, we're back to playing in the same world as the first book with the same characters and agendas in play, with only a few new characters, and they don't really change much.  The result is that the first 10-15 chapters felt kind of slow and hard to get into for me as events were clearly destined to occur and change everything but just weren't happening yet.  Once those events happen, the book speeds up tremendously and becomes practically impossible to put down, culminating with a surprising but satisfying ending that again made me really want the next book, but I expect a second book to do a bit more at first now that the world was originally set up by the prior book, and that's why I think this isn't quite as good as the predecessor, which felt a bit more fresh.

So yeah, this series remains an excellent Fae Fantasy, for both young adult readers and older readers, and I definitely recommend it, even if this book is a minor step down.

Bonus Review: The Lost Sisters: The Lost Sisters is a novella (well I think it's technically novelette length) that is basically a letter/apology from Taryn (the twin sister of the series' heroine) over the events of The Cruel Prince, explaining how and why they happened from her own point of view.  And it's...fine, I guess, explaining quite well how Taryn is just as infuriated as Jude about being picked on for her humanity in Faerie, but that private anger is only made worse by Jude not trying to bear it alongside her instead of challenging it.  All the same, it's kind of a weird read after The Wicked King, because I'm not sure Taryn's behavior in that book really follows the personality revealed here.  It's a fun extra but nothing more.
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