Book Log: Lodestones
Jun. 9th, 2019 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseI wasn't going to do a rachelmanija style One Book One Post thing this month, but I may need to, in order to really have at my feelings about the Lodestone nominees.
The Cruel Prince (Holly Black) (2018): Fantasy. Human woman married a faerie guy, got pregnant. faked her death, and ran back to the mortal world with her human lover. Some years later, faerie guy finds out where she is, delivers a return-or-die ultimatum. This quickly ends in the messy deaths of the human woman and her human now-husband. Faerie guy takes his daughter and her full-human half-sisters, twin girls, back to faerie. Fast forward a couple of years, and the story starts.
The oldest daughter is half-fae but hates her dad for brutally murdering her "real" family. One of the younger twin girls has assimilated pretty well, plus or minus the vulnerabilities of being human in Faerie, and one is sort of assimilated plus or minus some plans to get power over all these faerie types who 1.) give her grief for being human, 2.) are faeries and terrible and she wants to climb the ladder so she can have power over these people. Yes I did have slight feelings of Baru Comorant while reading parts of this novel.
The Cruel Prince is part one of a trilogy, and also has all this stuff about being brought to a foreign country as a high-class ward floating through the narrative, but not really addressed by the narrative, I think. So I have feelings about Cruel Prince, but not necessarily the sort of feelings that end "and I really want to read the next one." No, I want to read the last five chapters of the last novel in the series and extrapolate.
Why the mixed feelings?
First, the primary characters didn't draw me in. They haven't achieved peak Gatsby self-centered perspective, but they edge in that direction. Protagonist Jude Duarte, her twin sister Taryn, and older half-sister Vivienne are teenagers who have access to material wealth, but negotiate very rocky community and family / foster-family relationships. It's a tricky thing to pull off in a way I find compelling and The Cruel Prince doesn't manage it. I go back and forth on whether the protags feel like teenagers; sometimes they're convincingly short-sighted, but I didn't quite slip into believing the ages on the tin.
Second, there's the youngest son of the faerie king, the cruel prince of the title. He's one of those woobie boys who are terrible on the outside but suffering from feelings and terrible family on the inside, cough fanon!Draco cough. Spoilt woobie princelings are Not My Thing.
I did appreciate the final heel-turn plot twist where Jude, having previously put spoilt princeling Cardan in a position to swear obedience to her for a year and a day, uses that magical obedience to make him the new faerie king. It's a position he doesn't want and other people don't want him to have it, but the other options are, by and large, even worse.
I've also got strong feelings about a novel with a female protagonist being named after the obnoxious guy character. Ahem.
I also feel there's some things to be said about the Duarte girls as immigrants - however involuntary - to a land that will forever treat the full-human girls as Others. And the cultural mish-mash as the girls negotiate the experience of being Fae-raised mortals, both in the mortal world and in faerie. Maybe it's coming in the second and third novels of the trilogy, but seriously: last five chapters. Life is too short for slogging through nominally "fun" reading.
rachelmanija style One Book One Post thing this month, but I may need to, in order to really have at my feelings about the Lodestone nominees. The Cruel Prince (Holly Black) (2018): Fantasy. Human woman married a faerie guy, got pregnant. faked her death, and ran back to the mortal world with her human lover. Some years later, faerie guy finds out where she is, delivers a return-or-die ultimatum. This quickly ends in the messy deaths of the human woman and her human now-husband. Faerie guy takes his daughter and her full-human half-sisters, twin girls, back to faerie. Fast forward a couple of years, and the story starts.
The oldest daughter is half-fae but hates her dad for brutally murdering her "real" family. One of the younger twin girls has assimilated pretty well, plus or minus the vulnerabilities of being human in Faerie, and one is sort of assimilated plus or minus some plans to get power over all these faerie types who 1.) give her grief for being human, 2.) are faeries and terrible and she wants to climb the ladder so she can have power over these people. Yes I did have slight feelings of Baru Comorant while reading parts of this novel.
The Cruel Prince is part one of a trilogy, and also has all this stuff about being brought to a foreign country as a high-class ward floating through the narrative, but not really addressed by the narrative, I think. So I have feelings about Cruel Prince, but not necessarily the sort of feelings that end "and I really want to read the next one." No, I want to read the last five chapters of the last novel in the series and extrapolate.
Why the mixed feelings?
First, the primary characters didn't draw me in. They haven't achieved peak Gatsby self-centered perspective, but they edge in that direction. Protagonist Jude Duarte, her twin sister Taryn, and older half-sister Vivienne are teenagers who have access to material wealth, but negotiate very rocky community and family / foster-family relationships. It's a tricky thing to pull off in a way I find compelling and The Cruel Prince doesn't manage it. I go back and forth on whether the protags feel like teenagers; sometimes they're convincingly short-sighted, but I didn't quite slip into believing the ages on the tin.
Second, there's the youngest son of the faerie king, the cruel prince of the title. He's one of those woobie boys who are terrible on the outside but suffering from feelings and terrible family on the inside, cough fanon!Draco cough. Spoilt woobie princelings are Not My Thing.
I did appreciate the final heel-turn plot twist where Jude, having previously put spoilt princeling Cardan in a position to swear obedience to her for a year and a day, uses that magical obedience to make him the new faerie king. It's a position he doesn't want and other people don't want him to have it, but the other options are, by and large, even worse.
I've also got strong feelings about a novel with a female protagonist being named after the obnoxious guy character. Ahem.
I also feel there's some things to be said about the Duarte girls as immigrants - however involuntary - to a land that will forever treat the full-human girls as Others. And the cultural mish-mash as the girls negotiate the experience of being Fae-raised mortals, both in the mortal world and in faerie. Maybe it's coming in the second and third novels of the trilogy, but seriously: last five chapters. Life is too short for slogging through nominally "fun" reading.