Review: The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air #2) by Holly Black
10:00
Series: The Folk of the Air #2
Author: Holly Black
Published January 8th 2019 by Hot Key Books
Goodreads Synopsis
You must be strong enough to strike and strike and strike again without tiring.
The first lesson is to make yourself strong.
After the jaw-dropping revelation that Oak is the heir to Faerie, Jude must keep her younger brother safe. To do so, she has bound the wicked king, Cardan, to her, and made herself the power behind the throne. Navigating the constantly shifting political alliances of Faerie would be difficult enough if Cardan were easy to control. But he does everything in his power to humiliate and undermine her even as his fascination with her remains undiminished.
When it becomes all too clear that someone close to Jude means to betray her, threatening her own life and the lives of everyone she loves, Jude must uncover the traitor and fight her own complicated feelings for Cardan to maintain control as a mortal in a Faerie world.
Goodreads
Review
After the way that The Cruel Prince ended, I knew that I needed to go straight into The Wicked King, and so I did. Now that Cardan is king, and Jude his puppet master, she has a year in order to make it safe for her step-brother Oak to return and reclaim his throne, while watching the sword that is hanging above her head, ready to fall at any point. Basically everyone in Faerie is out to get her, and Cardan has made it more than obvious that he is just counting down the days until their bargain is up. As if that wasn't enough, Jude is estranged from Madoc, her foster father who organised the assassinations at the coronation, and the Queen of the Undersea, Orlagh, (and Nicisia's mother) is ready to break the treaty with the land, because she had an agreement with Balekin, and isn't happy with Cardan being king.
This book was so good! Jude has really come into her own, and the fact that she is basically the ruler, with Cardan being the puppet for her to master, she fully embraces her powerful side. She uses the old spy network, the Court of Shadows, from the previous book, and Bomb and Roach's input in the plot this time around is so useful! If she is the public side of things, they are the private, feeding her with all the information she needs to keep one step ahead of all of the plot against her and Cardan. The chemistry and banter between Jude and Cardan was off the page fantastic in this book, with there being both aggravating and swoony moments when I wanted to scream/squeal at what was happening. They are definitely the OTP of this series, and I truly understand now why I used to see so much fan art for these books, before there was the stop put to it, that is. Taryn, as a character, I still don't like, not really, but I understand her a little bit more, that she is doing what she could to survive, just in very different ways.
Unlike in book 1, I never found there to be a lull in the plot, nor was it slow to get into. We were thrown into the deep end right from the beginning, and if I hadn't had to sleep, or go to work, I would've spent all day reading this until it was done as everything needed to be known, and I was dying for more because of just how much was happening in this tale. And, if I had thought that the ending of The Cruel Prince was bad, then this one takes the biscuit!
Dates Read:
January 15-16, 2020Rating
4 Stars
0 comments