The Cruel Prince - Holly Black (Folk of the Air #1)

Holly Black, as far as I'm concerned, is the Queen of Faerie, or at least of writing it.  Her book Tithe is one of my favorites in the paranormal and urban (or suburban, as Black calls it) fantasy genres.  Seeing her return to this world, in a different capacity, was a thrill, and waiting for this book to come in from the library was a form of torture.

Unlike Tithe and its sequels, which weave in and out of Faerie and the mortal world, The Cruel Prince takes place almost entirely in Faerie, in the High Court which has slowly been subsuming other Courts.  The main character is Jude, who saw her parents murdered by the redcap general Madoc when she was seven and spirited away, along with her sisters, to live in Madoc's home and be raised as one of the Faerie Gentry, though Jude is keenly aware that she is not and will never be fae herself.

This is a book of shades of gray.  No character here is wholly good or bad.  Jude's tangle of emotions form the core of the story, driving her to take risks that plunger her into the center of a dangerous and changing Court.  Her desire to be fae and to be better them, her love for Madoc and her hate for him, her longing to be one with her twin sister and to stand on her own, to stand out and to fit in--all of these are a swirl of conflict within her, and they drive her to become a spy and try to untangle the slowly-tightening web surrounding the changing of the High Court's ruler.  And while all of that is going on, she's enmeshed in another ongoing conflict, with Cardan, the youngest of the High Court's princes, who hates Jude and leads his merry band of followers on a campaign of all-out war against her, without ever letting her die.  And then there's Locke, who presents a reprieve and a dilemma all his own.

I love Black's writing.  She writes complicated teenage girls very, very well, and her depictions of Faerie continue to be marvelous.  It is beautiful and cruel, lush and dangerous, magical and menacing.  All of this is very apparent, and the world that it all contributes to is breathtaking.  There are also appearances from several familiar faces, though I found myself scouring my brain for some sign of a few of them--Kaye and Roiben are easy to place, of course, but I couldn't pin down Severin, who I think must be from The Darkest Part of the Forest, which I haven't yet read.  But while these familiar characters are a delight to see and important to the plot, Black doesn't let them take over the actual story, and it would have been very easy for that to happen.

The actual plot here isn't hard to puzzle out; all of the pieces are laid out for us, and it's fairly easy to see the conclusion before Jude herself reaches it.  Jude isn't stupid, she just allows herself to be blinded by her own desires--something that she herself admits when everything comes undone.  But she's also a budding master strategist, and while this one wasn't hard to puzzle out, I'm interested in seeing where her machinations go in the future books of this series.  Which we have to two years for.  Well, one for the second, but two for the third and final!  Aaaargh.  Well, at least I'll have The Darkest Part of the Forest to turn to, now, and I think I need to reread the dark and glowing jewel that is Tithe as well.

4.5 stars out of 5.

Spindle Fire - Lexa Hillyer (Spindle Fire #1)

Fairy tale retellings always intrigue me, and when I was looking for another book to add to an Amazon order so I could get free same-day shipping, I settled on Spindle Fire because it promised to be an intriguing retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story.  Featuring not one princess but two, and one of them a bastard trying to save her enchanted sister, with a wicked faerie lurking the background... Well, it had potential.

The story follows Isabelle, the bastard princess, and her younger, legitimate sister Aurora.  Isabelle is blind and Aurora is mute and has no sense of touch, those senses being taken from the girls by faeries when they were small.  When Aurora's fiance, the prince of the neighboring kingdom, is killed on his way to marry her, the kingdom is threatened with chaos and Isabelle is to be sent away.  So she runs away instead, and Aurora follows her, and in the process stumbles across a golden spinning wheel, where she pricks her finger and ends up in a dream world called Sommeil and apparently haunted by the long-thought-dead faerie Belcoeur.  Meanwhile, the faerie Malfleur, said to have killed her sister Belcoeur, raises troops to march against the kingdom.

The most intriguing thing here was that Isabelle is a blind heroine.  Aurora's muteness and lack of touch are interesting, but ultimately not used much because in Sommeil her tithes seem to be waived and her voice and sense of touch come back to her.  Since she spends most of the book in Sommeil, she doesn't really come across as "challenged" as she actually is in the real world.  Isabelle, on the other hand, spends the entire time in the real world, where her lack of sight is a huge disability.  She manages, but once she leaves the places that she already knows, it becomes infinitely harder.  And yet Hillyer manages to have a great sense of imagery, showing how Isabelle pictures the world through touch and smell and sound even without her sight.

Other than that, the book wasn't as intriguing as I thought it would be.  Some of the plotting and world-building definitely seems confused; like, is this supposed to be our world, or not?  There were indications in both directions.  And what's up with Malfleur and Belcoeur?  Because some people say that Mafleur is evil but she says that she saved everyone from Belcoeur who didn't really seem to be doing anything...?  There's a big info-dump chapter near the end of the book that I thought would straighten this out, but ultimately it didn't.  And as for breaking the curse...what a cop-out that actually was, and I feel like it actually removes a lot of the promise of the second book because now all that's left is dealing with Malfleur, and military conflicts are typically less interesting than twisty curses.

Overall, this was an okay book.  It's marketed as young adult but I feel like it's more middle-grade in reading level; there are a few parts that trend more YA, but as a whole it doesn't have a YA feel to it.  With that and the other confused aspects of it, I'm not really sure I'm intrigued to read the second book when it comes out.

2 stars out of 5.

Chasing Cats - Erin Bedford (The Underground #2)

Last year, I read Bedford's first book, Chasing Rabbits, as part of an indie-author feature I ran for a short time.  I ultimately ended the feature without really saying anything about it because I was just being disappointed too much.  There is some amazing indie work out there--one of my favorite authors, Intisar Khanani, is indie--but so many times something that's highly rated isn't actually good because it's people supporting an author just for being indie.  Yes, there's a lot of crap in traditional publishing that's highly rated, too--I am well aware.  However, it's normally easier to spot from a distance, as opposed to indie, where my experience has been overwhelmingly to see things that have a neat concept, but aren't actually well-executed.  That said, I had picked up Chasing Cats a while ago while it was on sale (I think this might have involved pre-ordering it) and found myself in the mood for something involving sexy fae over the weekend, so I dug through my dusty Kindle archives and found it.

Let me put it out there right away: I think this was an improvement over Chasing Rabbits.  Much of this has to come from the fact that, apart from a tiny, tiny part of the book, none of it takes place in the Underground/Wonderland.  The main character, Kat, is trying to come to terms with both her newly-revealed identity as a faerie princess reincarnated as a human and with the magical powers that come with that status, as well as with the fae beings who keep popping up in her house without ever bothering to knock.  Included among them?  Dorian, her former fae fiance and the UnSeelie prince, and Chess, aka the Chesire Cat, who, let me remind you, is a fae guy with ears and a grope-prone tail and a love for tight and/or revealing clothing.  While the third book in the series is clearly headed back to Wonderland, I have higher hopes for it after this, because Bedford seems to have edged a bit away from equating every single thing in the traditional Wonderland story something fae.  It's a bit hard to say, because this is mostly set in our human world, but I have hope based on how this one went.

That said, there's second-book syndrome here.  While Kat worries about finding herself, she has a few short magic lessons until she's told to "just do it," essentially, and does (because magic works like that?) and flirts with Chess.  That's about it.  There's a bit going on in the background, the repercussions of things that Kat did in the first book, but they're all happening in the background rather than in Kat's direct line of vision and action.  Aside from her self-discovery bend, she deals with her bitchy boss and her bitchy mother(s) and her bitchy sister.  Seriously, why is every woman other than Kat a bitch here?  It makes me side-eye female authors when all of their female characters other than the heroine are one-dimensional bitches.  Additionally, she continues to use the threat of rape as a motivating trope.  Sigh.  The Big Betrayal also doesn't ring true to me from how it's written here, but maybe it follows through more in the third book?

And, again, this book needs more editing.  There are misused words--conscious instead of conscience immediately springs to memory, though there were more--and missing words and a dearth of proper comma use and just some overall very awkward sentence structure.

But I still enjoyed this more than Chasing Rabbits.  CR felt like it was trying too hard.  This one might have felt a bit like it wasn't trying hard enough, but I think it was an improvement.  Bedford can also write a pretty good makeout scene, though Kat having her tongue down the throat of every fae male she encounters at some point (and vice versa) also got a little old.  I get it.  Pheromones.  And no, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Kat as a woman enjoying getting some--her lectures to Alice on this point were humorous--but I felt there could have been a more productive use of page time here.  And apparently there's going to be a fae/human war?  Where did that come from?  There was no indication of this, it feels like an attempt to escalate the drama but there's no way that it's actually tied in.  Oi, I'm whining again, aren't I?  Sigh.

Okay, so, basically, what I'm trying to say is, this book has its issues.  Definitely.  I think it needs polishing and refining and all sorts of stuff.  But I also think that it was better than its predecessor, and I think that if Bedford actually stays away from the Wonderland tropes (hard, maybe, because of how this got started, but doable) this could be a better series than it started off as.

3 stars out of 5.

A Court of Mist and Fury - Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses #2)

Wow.  What to say about this book?  Well, let me put it this way: I think Maas has a knack for frustrating first books that she turns around in the sequels.  While I wasn't disappointed with A Court of Thorns and Roses, the first book in this trilogy, I was frustrated with a couple of aspects of it.  First, it was based off a fairy tale, you know, with a supposed "happily ever after," but it was pretty clearly set up to introduced a love triangle in the second book.  Second, Tamlin, Feyre's love interest, was...kind of a controlling bastard.  A very sexy controlling bastard who I let get away with a lot of things because he was cursed, and who really knows how much of all that stuff was the curse, anyway?

Well, let me say this: I should not have let Tamlin off the hook.  He is a royal ass in this book, and you can really see how those controlling behaviors were not just part of the curse, but something inherent in his character.  Not cool.  That makes the whole "love triangle" thing much less of an issue, because it's not actually a love triangle: it's Feyre walking away from an abusive relationship and finding one that's better for her, which is a really interesting dynamic and one that I don't think gets seen a lot in young adult books (though, honestly, this is not young adult; it's marketed as such, but there's some pretty darn adult content in here) let alone fantasy books.  Feyre's feelings on the matter also seem realistic; she blames herself, for a myriad of things, including being interested in someone new so soon after walking away from Tamlin, and for her actions Under the Mountain, though she only did it to save herself and the rest of Prythian.

The other main plot, besides the romance (With Rhysand, who totally grew on me; I get it now, guys, I get it, and that slow burn--ahhhhhh!) deals with the threat pressing down on Prythian in the wake of Amarantha's defeat.  The King of Hybern clearly wants Prythian, and possibly everything else, and Rhysand and Feyre, along with the rest of Rhysand's inner circle, are trying to find a way to stop him.  This book takes us to both of Rhysand's courts and to the Summer Court, and there is some beautiful imagery involved in both.  Feyre is also coming to terms with her new fae-ness, including a startling array of abilities that seem to stem from being "created" by all seven High Lords like she was.  She is, apparently, one of three fae who were "created," though I can't figure out why the other two don't have this same range of abilities, because wouldn't they have to be created in the same way?  Maybe this will come more to light in the third book.  It's definitely hinted that the third created person will have to come into play, given the dynamics there... We'll see.  I'm very intrigued, and think Maas will probably tie this up pretty well.  Maybe.  But the romance and the adventure here hold each other up, and while I was originally frustrated that Maas was subverting the very tales she'd based the first book on, that has since grown on me--the idea that there's another side to the story, and maybe it's even better than the side we know.

That said, this book got off to a bad start.  It's basically Feyre whining about planning a wedding and having a lot of sex with Tamlin.  After the wonderful start of A Court of Thorns and Roses, where Feyre kills the faerie wolf that kicks off the whole chain of events, it was a very weak and frustrating start.  In fact, I almost didn't read this book because of how bad the start was.  Did it get better?  Yes.  Definitely.  But it was a really rough beginning, and while I think the rest of the book ultimately made up for it, those first several chapters were a real struggle to get through, especially because they featured so much of Feyre just submitting to Tamlin's abusive behavior.  It was hard to read, and I put the book down for several weeks before returning to it because of that.  It also features some typical Maas stamps that I really wish she would diversify upon: the blond, kick-butt heroine who loves to read (Feyre learns to read in record time here) and to listen to music and who gains magical powers from pretty much nowhere.  Honestly, it would take only a few nudges to push her entirely into Celaena/Aelin territory, so I hope that Maas manages to keep them unique...but I fear they edge closer together all the time.

It's pretty clear that Maas has grown a lot as a writer from her first book, Throne of Glass, and from when she began writing A Court of Thorns and Roses, which was substantially before A Court of Mist and Fury came out.  In that time, it seems that she's gotten a real knack for plot twists and building up both characters and worlds, and I think that really shows here.  I loved ACOTAR when I read it, but in retrospect it had some issues.  I think ACOMAF resolved a lot of those while having very few of its own (in the large scale), and the third (and final) book in the series has a lot going for it.  I just hope it lives up to that potential.

5 stars out of 5.

Foul is Fair - Jeffrey Cook and Katherine Perkins (Fair Folk Chronicles #1)

Guys, I believe that I'm actually legally obliged to say this: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.  (How exciting is that?  No one's ever given me something to review before!)

Now that that's out of the way, let's begin.  Foul is Fair is a book about a high school student with ADHD (or some variant) who quickly turns out to be a faerie princess and needs to rescue her father the Unseelie King before the seasons change on Halloween.  If she doesn't, everything is going to go very, very wrong in Faerie and on Earth.  And so Megan (our heroine) sets off with her friend Lani (who is a half-faerie, just like Megan is; both have faerie fathers and human mothers), the pixie Ashling, and the crow Count to rescue her father and save two worlds.

Now, let me get one thing straight right away: Megan's family are not "bad guys."  The description of the book says that "if Megan's getting the terminology straight, it sounds like her family aren't even supposed to be the good guys."  Whether Megan's family is actually bad is never really a serious question to be considered, because as soon as it comes up, it's easily put to rest.  Megan's family is not bad.  Faeries are not bad in general, just different.  That one kind of rubbed me the wrong way, a little, because faeries traditionally come in two varieties, and those are evil and more evil.  Well "evil" might be the wrong word.  "Chaotic" might be more on point, and that faeries love chaos is brought up here (and the definitions do eventually get a little more complicated).  But when it's hinted that the heroine might be more of an antiheroine...well, that's what I expect.  Megan's not an antiheroine.  She's much too "sweetness and light" for that.  It didn't make me dislike her, or lower her in my esteem, but it did leave me feeling rather lackluster towards her.  There's a reason for this, and that reason is one word: Tithe.  Tithe is a book by Holly Black about a girl who turns out to be a changeling faerie and quickly becomes entangled in faerie politics.  That heroine, Kaye, is much more ambiguous in her morals and actions and I think that makes her a more compelling character than Megan.  There are a lot of similarities between Tithe and Foul is Fair, and the main thing that came to my mind, again and again, while reading FiF was that it's Tithe, but meant for a younger audience.  You see, Tithe is marketed at young adults, but I think it really reads more as a new adult fantasy, or maybe even a light adult one.  Foul is Fair shares many of the same central plot points but has younger, lighter main characters and adds in a quest for good measure--and lacks the romantic subplot, too.  Again, this isn't a bad thing, but it means that if you've read other books in the genre, Foul is Fair is going to come off as very, very similar.  I think that's just a problem with the genre, not necessarily with the writing.  If you're going to write faeries, you're (generally) going to have to stick to certain tropes, or people will cry foul that you're "not doing it right."  (Hahaha.  Cry foul.  Like the title.  Get it?  I'm so funny.)  It also has this weird humor element that was also present in Eternal Vows, which made it sometimes feel like a parody more than a serious story.

One thing I did really like about this was that the authors (Are they both authors?  I'm not actually sure.  Books with more than one name on the cover confuse me.) include supernatural mythologies that aren't necessarily British or Irish.  Lani, for example, is a half-menehune, which I gather is a type of Hawaiian supernatural being that really likes to build things.  Mythologies like gods and titans are also tied in, though they aren't present; they're explained as being "sealed away," though how faeries bested gods I'm not really sure.  That was a bit unclear.  But it does work to explain why some "supernatural" things are present and others aren't: in this world, they're all real, they're just not all there.  And of course, trying to include everything would have probably just resulted in a hot mess.

I'm also probably a weird person, because my favorite character in this wasn't even a main character and was definitely a bad character--as bad you can get in this one, at least.  Peadar.  Peadar is a redcap.  He, at one point, tries to kill Megan.  He'd probably like to kill Megan (and company) at other points, too.  I loved him.  Not because I wanted him to kill Megan, but because he came off as the most faerie-like faerie in the whole book to me.  H'es not evil, per say, but what he's built to do is not what we humans would define as good.  He's willing to work with others, for the right price, but there's a general menace about him that I absolutely loved.  I wish he'd had more page time or that other characters had the same lurking menace about them.  That's what I look for when humans (or even partial humans, or faeries who didn't know they were faeries) get involved with faeries, because those intruders are so terribly, terribly out of their league.  With Megan and company, everything just seemed very...easy.  I mean, objectively it's not easy to get an enchanted sword from a bunch of iron golems, but it still seemed easy.  They got a little beat up, sure.  Someone dislocated an arm at one point.  Another person got slashed by a golem and another got burned by iron.  But it still had the feeling of it being easier than it should have been.  Again, maybe this is just because of the age group the book is aimed at.  Maybe I'm too old for these types of stories now.  But everyone they encountered seemed to want to help in one way or another, at some point in time.  Some of these people had ulterior motives, but none of them were really that menacing, and we never really had to fear that things wouldn't turn out right.

So, what did I think overall?  I liked it.  It was a light read, a fast one (it only clocked about three hours total, though I split that up over several sessions due to other stuff going on) and it was well-written, without a lot of glaring mistakes or plot holes.  But it did lack the dark edge that I absolutely crave in faerie stories, and everything came across as just a little bit too easy to me.  I will reiterate: this may be because I'm not in the target audience.  This comes across as a book aimed at the younger end of the young adult spectrum, and I don't quite fit there anymore.  So yes, it was good.  Terribly memorable to me?  Not really.  If I was going to pick up something like this again, I'd probably reach for Tithe before this one.  But it certainly wasn't bad.

A solid 3 stars--with a note that Cook also authors a steampunk series, which might be more up my alley.  I have the first book of that, and am looking forward to it.