The Cruel Prince

[alaterdate]

So, I did end up reading The Cruel Prince by Holly Black. And I just gotta ask: who was this book for? I know genres like "Young Adult" are pretty much fake and for marketing, but I don't think putting middle grade writing and a smattering of violence & making out and calling it YA should be a thing. The whiplash from contemporary banality to attempted murder and back was also jarring (kind of like the jumps in These Witches Don't Burn. Is this a thing?!)

This book has the kind of writing that reminds me how much I hate first person. I let it go at first because "hey, it's young adult", but it often read like a bad movie's voice over narration.

I would have quit and maybe not have even finished the book, if I weren't giving it free passes for genre & my desire to see why it was compared to The Winter Prince in that one tweet. There's like a 7% overlap and I'm being generous.

I did not start to enjoy this book even a smidge until 273 pages in of 374. And then, there were only exactly 43 glorious pages until I went back to not caring. This tiny, tiny, chunk of pages finally had interesting conflict and stakes. They pretty much came out of nowhere, but they were of a nature that I enjoy. So I lived deliciously for 5 minutes. These points were over almost as soon as they began and do not really ever come back enough to have mattered.....

Everything else was predictable and juvenile. School bullies, trips to the mall, oh watch out this guy is tryna murder youu~, school again. Ok. Also bullying someone to near murder, because you like like them. Jfc. Also the dude practically liked her for no reason. WHAT WAS THE REASON????? (Hilariously there is a part where she finds a piece of paper on which he wrote her name a bunch of times like a 12 year old.)
There was no character progression either, unless you count some shocking complete change of character for the love interest in the second half. Was that even the same dude? What the hell, man?? It was like the author forgot these characters were supposed to make out and then said "whoop, better make the dude likeable for some reason, let's change his entire personality that'll redeem this." Enemies to new personality who dis?
The main character, Jude, kept repeating the same things over and over again instead of the reader actually seeing it in the text. If you say it enough times it starts to sound true, yes, but this is a book, where is the story? Show me what is true. The characters were so inconsistent, changing on a dime just to advance the "plot". Not to mention, this girl did hardly anything yet somehow managed to gain the trust of influential/proactive people. Hmm, wack. She also never faces a real character making decision, one that would steer her to the ending. A missed opportunity for her to actually have consequences that would spawn her thoughts that she might be on the wrong path. A lot of the twists felt forced too, but who cares about the plot. Bleghhhhhhhh. Also, near complete lack of world building. A map at the front of your book does not make a world.

This book was not about fairies. This book was about people the author called "fairies."

No one needs to know that my hopes were dashed. No one needs to know I ever had any hope at all.

Comments

[queenlua]

uncertain if this is what you meant by "who is this book for", but—i've been kind of surprised at the level of violence/sex/drugs/rock 'n' roll that flies under the YA banner these days. i think i first noticed the change when reading a Stiefvater novel, where like, a central thing in the book is this one drawn-out sequence where dudes are straight-up mixing sleeping pills and alcohol to get crazy dreams in this obscure part of the forest where kids go parking / have sex / etc and i was like WOAH. scholastic PUBLISHES this??? how the times have CHANGED

(not that i mind it terribly. like you alluded, YA is kind of a fake category anyway)

[alaterdate]

That's exactly what I meant. Thank you for catching that! (I definitely could have explained my meaning more.) I've noticed the ramp up in mature topics/depictions in YA too. I was extra shocked at this book because it starts with issues like bullying and a strained relationship between sisters, then the MC is drugged/hypnotized into undressing and crawling around in the dirt and almost smothered. I'm surprised there were no near explicit sex scenes after that.

I realize that books are a media where children can start to explore mature themes and they don't really have age ratings, but it was so jarring in this book. There's kinda always been murder in YA books, but the sadism is throwing me for a loop.

I've also seen books where the characters are clearly not nor act like teens, but were aged down to be marketed as YA. I guess the age of the character is what makes something a "Young Adult" book 🤷‍♂️

[queenlua]

i think the age of the character is probably the only consistent thing that makes something YA nowadays, fwiw.

and i guess i don't see it as a bad thing—i mean, before the 1970s, there wasn't really a YA category at all, right? you'd read all the children's books, and then you'd move on to the vast swaths of All The Other Literature, usually when you were like ten or so. (that was still true through like, the 80s or 90s or so—if you look at, e.g. Mercedes Lackey's biggest books, they'd all get published as YA nowadays, because the heroes were in their late teens, but they were absolutely in the adult section on their publication date, because they obviously weren't meant for kiddos either.) so tl;dr it's pretty jarring compared to like, the Judy Blume books i remember being on the shelves as a kid, but i sort of wonder if this isn't to some extent just a reversal of a trend rather than a totally new thing.

/ramble, sorry, i'm chatterboxy today :P

[alaterdate]

The entire labeling system seems to be what's off. And also stifling, as stories that are not clearly one genre have the hardest time being published, if at all, because it's too hard to market them.

The term YA for books is probably the thing I have the most problem with. Children are going to move from the children's books to all the other books, but there's this supposed buffer zone of YA. Which is too broad in itself. So a kid might pick up something that's closer to middle-grade or jump all the way to something with abusive fairy men marking their mates and fucking in the sky. It's just too broad to supposedly be a middle-ground. But something I do like about books is that you don't really know what you're going to get and that's how you find things you didn't already know you liked (or disliked). So that scenario could always have happened, but the question is: how easily compared between pre-YA Genre and now?? Perhaps it's a double-edged sword. But it makes me wish that authors who are not really writing their books for kids (YA), but for adults who still like to read the "YA genre" weren't being marketed in a way that seems child friendly. (Though kids can handle more than hand-wringers imagine.) That's why I still can't decide if I'm a fan of the term "New Adult" that never took off in marketing, even though it really would have just been adult books with YA tropes like schools and first loves, but not be marketed as being for teens. Teens are gonna read fucked up shit though anyway, I know I did lol. So does it matter? I dunno, I just don't like the term I guess. It makes me think I'm going to read something light then smacks me with it's sadistic little paragraphs.

No need to apologize! You have great thoughts I love to hear them :^)

[pseudo_tsuga]

Enemies to new personality who dis?
lmaoooooooooooo



the last quoted bit is so perfect and cutting


(this is kentsarrow from tumblr btw, I'm trying to actually dw, uh, six months later)

[alaterdate]

Hello! O/ Good to see you here!

I'm glad you enjoyed one of my signature erratic book reviews lol. That is the only line I highlighted in the entire book, it was so fitting. I wanted to like it because I liked the book it was compared to, but yeesh 😬