And the hits keep coming and they don’t stop coming.
Jude has succeeded in her plans; her brother Oak, heir to the throne of Faerie is safe; Cardan sits on the throne in his stead, with Jude as the power behind the throne. If only Cardan wasn’t trying to thwart her at every turn, enemies weren’t behind every corner, someone close to her wasn’t planning to betray her, and Jude hadn’t accidentally caught the feels for Cardan. As the promised year of Cardan’s semi-obedience to the plan ticks ever closer to being up, can Jude keep a tight hold on the ever precarious house of cards?
Oh, I do love when series just keep getting better and better. Jude and Cardan’s flirting through snarky argumentative bantering is a delight; the slow burn Jude goes through with Cardan and his weaponized-irreverence is a joy to read. It’s also nice to have a situation where the woman is doing everything while the man sits around and it’s because of something other than weaponized incompetence.
They make you want to scream at the book too, mostly “just talk to each other!” or “therapy helps a lot of people!”, or “Being Alive from Company would probably be really beneficial to you two, take a listen!” Points for Cardan falling first with a healthy dose of an unhealthy love for Jude being the power top”. (Do I mean that the way it sounds? A little no, a little
Taryn and Locke, of course, continue in the vein of “will someone find them a short pier to take a very long walk off of?” That is the one thing I will ding Holly Black for; the fact that I think she means for Taryn to be slightly understandable and likable, and I just loathe her. Though with Jude being Jude, Taryn doing her thing and Vivienne doing what she does with Heather, I guess it’s just showing that Faerie can mess everyone’s morality up. And the introduction of Asha, Cardan’s mother, clears up a lot over why he is the way he is.
(Cardan or Jude any time at any point in this series)
It was nice to have the Ghost, the Bomb and the Roach fleshed out a little bit more in this one; though the situation towards the end with the Ghost..out of left field. The ending with Cardan and Jude?
(I will admit that I didn’t realize until I read the Wiki page on the series that where Heather comes from and Vivienne lives in the Mortal Realm is supposed to be Portland, Maine. Boy, did I apparently have the geographical area wrong where I thought this was set. So we’re talking moose in the wilderness, not “so what exit off the Parkway do you live at? IYKYK)
“The three of you have one solution to every problem. Murder. No key fits every lock.” Cardan gives us all a stern look, holding up a long-fingered hand with my stolen ruby ring still on one finger. “Someone tries to betray the High King, murder. Someone gives you a harsh look, murder. Someone disrespects you, murder. Someone ruins your laundry, murder.”
“He looks up at me with his night-colored eyes, beautiful and terrible all at once. “For a moment,” he says, “I wondered if it wasn’t you shooting bolts at me.”
I make a face at him. “And what made you decide it wasn’t?”
He grins up at me. “They missed.”
“Your ridiculous family might be surprised to find that not everything is solved by murder,” Locke calls after me.
“We would be surprised to find that,” I call back.”