I wanted to review these four books together because I felt that the trilogy was very continuous in tone, and the stories all follow closely from one another. As such, I suppose what I’m really reviewing is the story of the trilogy as a whole; I’m including The King of Elfhame because it has important context about Cardan’s character and his relationship with Jude that’s relevant to what I bring up about the trilogy.
My favorite aspect of the trilogy was the way it handled Jude’s relationships with Madoc, Taryn, and Vivi. It actively embraced the nuance in these relationships: the complex mixture of love and fear between Jude and Madoc, Taryn and Jude’s betrayals of one another, and Vivi’s love for her siblings despite her aversion to Faerie made for rich character dynamics that were explored to their fullest and resolved in a satisfying manner. Jude banishing Madoc to the human world surprised me; while I appreciated that she was punishing his bloodthirsty nature and ensuring he could never hurt anyone again, I wasn’t sure that living in the mortal world would teach Madoc anything. Of all the central Faerie characters in the story, he was the only one who never discriminated against mortals or ensorcelled them in any way – he didn’t need to learn to like mortals, he needed to unlearn his violent instincts, and the mortal world wouldn’t help him with that. This is not to say that I can think of a better ending for Madoc, but I wasn’t convinced that this punishment targeted his flaws satisfactorily.
The moment when Cardan broke the Blood Crown and was chosen as king by the people of Elfhame felt like it came out of nowhere, and I think this is because the worldbuilding didn’t support it satisfactorily: the trilogy is centered around Jude’s experience of Faerie, and from her perspective, the Court was a hostile place. Everyone there was bloodthirsty and cruel and/or playing political games. For this reason, I never got a sense of the identity of the people of Elfhame – there were individual leaders, but I never really felt like Elfhame had a national identity or character. Jude herself noticed that many of the faerie lords had no reason to like Cardan, so all the Faerie lords agreeing to follow Cardan after he broke The Blood Crown completely surprised me, as there was never any in-story justification for why they chose to follow him.
I also questioned the prophecy’s prediction that Cardan would be a “great ruler”. Jude often thought he seemed like a king of faerie, but only because of his charisma and magic. When it came to the minutia of ruling, Jude showed far more aptitude for it than Cardan did. Even though he became a more caring person by the end of the trilogy, his character development was largely focused on overcoming the trauma of his past, not learning how to rule. The only indication that he would be an exceptional ruler was his breaking of the Blood Crown, but since the story is told from Jude’s perspective, I found it hard to understand why he made this move, because I didn’t know how he felt about his people. Overall, I found the prediction that he would be a “great ruler” quite heavy-handed – I could tell that the author wanted me to think that he was a great person, but the story didn’t give me enough reason to believe it.
I thought the romance was the shakiest aspect of the trilogy. I would like to preface this section by saying that this analysis relies, in part, on my own definition of love, so I’d like to add a warning that this section may be overly subjective.
Until the end of The Queen of Nothing, I found Jude and Cardan’s relationship highly dysfunctional, but The Queen of Nothing tried to paint it as though they truly loved each other as early on as The Wicked King. My impression of their relationship throughout The Wicked King was that though they were both attracted to each other, Jude feared Cardan and didn’t understand him, while Cardan enjoyed being around Jude, but still resented her enough to enjoy hurting and humiliating her. They slowly grew closer over the course of the book, but Jude was still afraid of Cardan by the end, and Cardan, as he admitted in The Queen of Nothing, still felt a need to hurt her:
“’I didn’t think I could hurt you. And I never thought you would be afraid of me.’ ‘Did you like it?’ I ask. He looks away from me then, and I have my answer. Maybe he doesn’t want to admit to that impulse, but he has it.”
In The Queen of Nothing, they began with distrust and friction, but ended up in a healthy place. However, there were a lot of statements about their past that seemed to contradict their explicitly stated issues in The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King (or The King of Elfhame, in the sections that took place during the time of The Cruel Prince). First, there was Jude’s thought:
“You’ve loved him since before you were a prisoner of the Undersea. You loved him when you agreed to marry him.”
In The Wicked King, Jude feared and distrusted Cardan. Before she was taken by the Undersea, Jude was still commanding him, indicating that she still didn’t respect his autonomy. I don’t deny that she was attracted to him or was growing to like him better, but she didn’t truly love him, because she was still fearful, mistrustful, and somewhat vindictive towards him. Another statement that rings hollow is:
“I hate that he loves you.’ ‘He hated it, too,’ I say with a laugh that sounds more brittle than I’d like. Nicasia fixes me with a long look. ‘No, he didn’t.’”
The King of Elfhame directly contradicts the idea that Cardan didn’t hate that he loved Jude:
“But every night, Jude haunted him. The coils of her hair. The calluses on her fingers. An absent bite of her lip…It disgusted him that he couldn’t stop.”
“Jude, Cardan thought, hating even the shape of her name. Jude.”
Even taking into account that Cardan may not have been honest with himself about how he really felt about Jude, the story makes it clear that he was disgusted and horrified by his attraction to her. Nicasia’s statement that he didn’t hate loving her directly contradicts his disgust in these lines. These inaccuracies are minor details, but the issue with them is that they attempt to retroactively smooth over the problems in Jude and Cardan’s early relationship. The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King acknowledged Jude’s fear and Cardan’s disgust about his liking for her, and that was important, because their relationship was dysfunctional and characterizing it otherwise would be problematic. Glossing over these issues takes away from the earlier stories’ awareness of them and dulls the impact of their resolution in The Queen of Nothing. Overall, I came away with the impression that Jude and Cardan’s relationship would never have worked out in real life – people like Cardan rarely change their stripes so completely, and the underlying fear and resentment between them would have a great negative impact on their relationship.
In general, I thought that the writing did a lot of telling, rather than showing. There were many moments when the story told me something that it could have shown in a more interesting way, or when I could pick up on a thematic connection, but the story insisted on stating it to make it more obvious. For example, in The Queen of Nothing:
“He was always a symbol of everything about Elfhame that I couldn’t have, everything that would never want me. And telling him this feels a little like throwing off a heavy weight, except that weight is supposed to be my armor, and without it, I am afraid I am going to be entirely exposed.”
Over the course of the trilogy, it had become clear that Cardan represented the unattainable parts of Elfhame to Jude, and that much of her hatred and antagonism towards him was a form of protection. But saying it explicitly took some of the impact of it away – it was already obvious, so there was no need to do so. In this way, I felt that the heavy-handedness of the writing made the story’s tone feel more juvenile than it could have felt if it were told more subtly. There were also moments where, in my opinion, this heavy-handedness took away from the quality of the story; for example, in the first chapters of The Cruel Prince, Jude recounted three times when she was tormented by faeries for being mortal:
“But maybe knowing a few relevant details about my past will make more sense of why I’m the way I am. How fear seeped into my marrow. How I learned to pretend it away. So here are three things I should have told you about myself before, but didn’t”
“Here’s why I don’t like these stories: They highlight that I am vulnerable. No matter how careful I am, eventually I’ll make another misstep. I am weak. I am fragile. I am mortal. I hate that most of all. Even if, by some miracle, I could be better than them, I will never be one of them.”
All of Jude’s behavior throughout the trilogy points to her fear and her desire to be like the Folk. The moments she recounts in the chapter would have been more impactful if they had been revealed gradually throughout the story; for example, during the incident with the faerie fruit or when Valerian tried to kill her. This would have gotten the idea across in a more subtle way, allowing the reader to empathize deeply with Jude while elevating the tone. There were many other moments like this throughout the trilogy where Jude’s feelings were obvious, but the story insisted on overexplaining them. The general lack of subtlety in the narrative voice took away from the weight of the story for me, because such overexplanations show that the author doesn’t trust the reader to know what is happening, which make the story’s tone more juvenile.
I’ve focused a lot on the negative aspects of the trilogy and The King of Elfhame in this review, but that is mainly because there is not much I can say about their positive attributes. Despite my critiques, I think the trilogy was very cohesively-written and had an engaging plot and very interesting character dynamics.
Overall Rating: 3.75/5 stars