The Wicked King

The Wicked King

By Holly Black

After the jaw-dropping revelation that Oak is the heir to Faerie, Jude must keep her younger brother safe. To do so, she has bound the wicked king, Cardan, to her, and made herself the power behind the throne. Navigating the constantly shifting political alliances of Faerie would be difficult enough if Cardan were easy to control. But he does everything in his power to humiliate and undermine her even as his fascination with her remains undiminished.

When it becomes all too clear that someone close to Jude means to betray her, threatening her own life and the lives of everyone she loves, Jude must uncover the traitor and fight her own complicated feelings for Cardan to maintain control as a mortal in a Faerie world.

I think this second book vastly improved upon the first.  It took out everything I didn't enjoy about the first book - the murky motivations, the lengthy character list, the lack of direction - and streamlined everything and put this story in MOTION.

The first book suffered from too-much-setup-ishness.  After reading The Wicked King, it's almost like this was the book she started with, and then went back and tried to fill in the blanks with Cruel Prince.  In Cruel Prince, I could never figure out why Jude even wanted to stay in Faerie - her parents had been murdered, she was cruelly humiliated and out-classed in faerie talents, her oldest sister was hell-bent on leaving.  There just didn't seem to be anything there for her, and her unwillingness to leave even as she complained over and over again of the horrible way she was treated was legit confusing. Plus, there were about five too many plots and machinations.  It never really gelled until the last few chapters when Jude decides to get her little brother on the throne as safely as possible.

So Wicked King really deals with all that head-on: Jude has a simple, clear, and logical goal: Keep Cardan on the straight and narrow until she can figure out how to get a long term plan in place for Oak, and everything else follows from that.

Even the relationship between Jude and Cardan feels more natural (well, as natural as a mortal teenager and faerie prince with a tail can be, I suppose).   I appreciated him starting to self-actualize (shout out to Lilly Moscovitz!) and scheme a little scheme himself by the end of the book.  It definitely is tropey to have Jude and Cardan assume the other isn't as into them, even as they deliberately push each other away, but the warm 'n' fuzzies it generates is why these are tropes in the first place.

The other thing I enjoyed much more about Wicked King is that the time spent with various characters feels more balanced: we spend a lot of time with Cardan and develop that relationship, we get away from Lorne and Jude's sister, who is in this baffling semi-abusive relationship and intent on marrying this guy even though she doesn't seem to like anything about him. For real, if you have to ask your sister to ask the king to keep a lid on your fiance's partying, CALL THE WEDDING OFF. Like, there is literally nothing appealing about Lorne, so his chick-magnetism is doubly crazy.

All in all, I'm looking forward to the third book, and I'm even considering re-reading the first in light of my warmer attitude about the second.  See, this is why I put a moratorium on starting series that weren't finished last year, and it was very refreshing, and then you get a couple of books as gifts and you wind up knee-deep in cliff-hanging sequels.

11: A Book With An Item Of Clothing Or Accessory On The Cover