Children born of fairy stock (The Cruel Prince by Holly Black sync read post)

[hamsterwoman]

ikel89 and hopefully cyanshadow, and anyone else who wishes to join us, are embarking on a sync read of Holly Black's The Cruel Prince . Wicked fairies and larcenous teens (probably) and complicated family relationships (almost certainly) galore!

Come join, or if you've already read it, comment along as we progress through the book.

Comments

Re: through chapter 10 / 25% -- continued

[hamsterwoman]

- End of chapter 10, with Jude choosing to commit herself to Dain, is a nice stopping point for my morning commute. This definitely seems like it will end well! (And I do find it interesting that a) the book is called The Cruel Prince and there are several princes, of course, and when Jude assumes the servant's "prince" refers to Carden, she ends up being wrong and it's actually Dain (hm....), and b) Dain tells her (truthfully, of course) "I will never be cruel to you for the sake of delighting in it" -- which is fair enough, but also VERY different from never being cruel to her at all, or being cruel in general.

- A couple of things that made me raise my eyebrows as potential worldbuilding/POV glitches: Jude knows to say "Our dad is really conservative" when Heather asks why she hasn't met Vivi's family yet. Now, she could've picked that up from magazines, but it seems at odds with her claim that she doesn't really know how the mortal world works. And a little later, she mentions about tournament bouts with "live steel", which... would it be steel, though? There is some metafilter discussion re: whether steel acts the same way as iron when it comes to faeries, but I thought in Holly Black's world it did? Anyway, I think it's just a turn of phrase and they do avoid steel (things are made of wood that would normally be metal, Madoc's horse is shod in silver, etc.) but it's a careless sort of phrase for a narrator who learned swordplay in a Faerie court, IMO...

- Huh, Faerie/mortal menstruation differences is definitely not a thing I have encountered before in a fantasy novel. ...thanks?

Quotes:

- "talk about what we remembered from home [...] until all our memories were polished smooth and false"

- "There are so few children in Faerie that I've never seen one of us twinned. Is it like being doubled or more like being divided in half?"

- "Vivi is often selfish, but she's so cheerful about it and so encouraging of cheerful selfishness in others that it's easy to have fun with her" (That's actually a really good description of a 'friendly' faerie.)

- "I'm playing dress-up in ignorance. I no more can guess the assumptions that go with glittering sneakers than a child in a dragon costume knows what real dragons would make of the color of her scales."