The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air, 2)

I've been waiting for this book since I finished the first one waaaaay back when that one first came out. I stayed up all night reading, and oh, it was delicious. I have bags under my eyes and I don't even care; it was well worth the few hours of sleep I missed out on.******************************************************SEMI SPOILERS***************************************************************I knew where this book was going from the first few pages. Knowing the end-game didn't make the journey getting there any less exciting, though, and for that I'm grateful. Sometimes (a lot of the time) knowing the end of something makes it totally boring and not worth finishing, but there are so many twists and betrayals and schemes going on between all the players of Elfhame that we hardly know where to look half the time, let alone look at the stuff not being explicitly shoved in our faces. So, that being said, here's the gist.The Wicked King picks up almost exactly where The Cruel Prince let off, right in the middle of it all, exactly where Jude had been angling to be. She's now the power behind the throne, the true ruler of Elfhame, which Cardan takes every opportunity to point out. She spends a lot of the book fighting to keep a step ahead of everyone else, because as Madoc warned her when she was little, attaining power and holding on to it are two different things. I find the relationship between Jude and nearly every character in the book intriguing, but perhaps her relationship with Madoc most intriguing of all. This is the guy who murdered her parents (book 1) and spirited her away to faerie and raised her as his daughter (to the best of his ability, which, let's face it, wasn't great), who tried to use her as a pawn and ended up being played. Now he's watching all her angles and looking for a way to wrest the power she stole from him back. There are few things more interesting than a mentor and pupil going head to head over a live game of chess to see who comes out the winner. At least to me, it's one of my favorite plot points.When Jude is not grappling with all the problems that arise (a tentative war, being kidnapped, betrayal, betrayal, betrayal, finding a way to keep her hold on all the power she's accumulated) she's semi-struggling with her feelings for Cardan. Mostly she's struggling to figure out how to prevent her growing feelings for him from causing her to lose her power over him. She's on a precarious ledge, this girl, and she's juggling too many pieces.And Cardan. I love this boy-king. I'd read an entire series dedicated to him, if we were so allowed that joy. I won't get into all the plot points involving him because they really are entertaining and enjoyable to witness for yourself, but let's just say he really starts coming into his own. As much fun as he is verbally sparing with Jude and as tortured as he is fighting his attraction to her and as a twisted as he is thanks to his brother and his upbringing, he is at his most intriguing and formidable when he starts acting like the royal he actually is. Even being earnest and honest and trying so hard to be good in a world that doesn't value good, he really is a power to be reckoned with when he puts his mind to it, and it is sexy as hell. Who doesn't love power plays, right?Vivi still sucks; what she did to Heather was cruel, perhaps even more so because she didn't intend it that way.Taryn still sucks; I have no idea why Jude doesn't just ignore her or banish her.Oak is still adorable.Locke deserves to be banished to the Undersea and Nicasia's bed for eternity. Nicasia needs to get over Cardan and realize that he's just not that into her.**********************************************************SPOILER*******************************************************************At the end of the book, Jude is banished from Elfhame. Then she spends time sitting on her sister's couch mopping about how she got played. BUT SHE LITERALLY HAS THE ANSWER SHE NEEDS IN HER FREAKING HAND. Cardan spent the entirety of this book dropping not so subtle remarks about Jude being the true ruler of Elfhame, telling her he trusted her, trying to get her to trust him, and basically having her back, and she's freaking pouting in the mortal world that her now-husband kicked her to the curb. Except did he really? He said until the crown pardons her she was exiled to the mortal world. Well, hello girl, you were the one running faerie from the get-go and you just got crowned Queen by marrying the object of your desire. He gave her the tool she needed to lift her banishment five pages before he banished her. She could have pronounced her time served right there on the beach in front of Orlagh and gone about her business running things with no unnecessary maybe-drama. He even "smiles at her oddly" and doesn't deny that she is in fact Queen of Faerie. If I were Cardan I would be very disappointed in my new bride for being so damn dense in that moment. This is the one thing that irritated me about this book, and I'm glad it happened in the last few pages, and super mad it happened in the last few pages lol. Jude is supposed to be so smart and clever she out maneuvered some of the biggest players in Elfhame to gain the position as Queen of Shadows and then she just accepts the fact that she's banished? Why?***********************************************************SPOILER END*************************************************************Overall, I loved this book. It's going to be heartache waiting for the next one.

(Side note: Holly Black is an amazing author and I expect amazing things from her. The baseline for this book is pretty high and a lot of my criticisms are very small, nitpicky things. In general, I’d highly recommend reading this. Incredible writing, character development, world-building, and creativity are taken for granted in this review, so I won’t discuss it further)This novel was a pretty solid follow-up to the first book, but I have to say that I think it suffers slightly from second-book syndrome. Part of what drew me into this series from the start was the complexity of the world-building and the politics. While still present in this book, it seemed a little stagnant and drawn-out. Since the plot of the first book was largely character-driven, it was important that they had understandable, if slightly muddled, reason for their actions. I would have liked to have seen more of the plotting and intrigue that made the first book so devious. Unfortunately, this time it seemed as though Black got a little lost when trying to describe the juxtaposition of cruelty and tenderness of the emotions her characters were feeling (There is no doubt that Black can write, though. The emotions, while a little foreign and unrelatable, were described with lovely, unexpected turns of phrases). While it was incredibly commendable as a romance, it wasn’t what I wanted to see from the book. I fell in love with Jude because she’s a stone-cold badass, and I didn’t expect for her to get lost in her feelings the way she did after that power move at the end of the last book. (WHAT IS UP WITH HOLLY BLACK AND CLIFF-HANGERS???) I wanted to keep seeing Jude evolve from her choices, but she just reverts back to pre-Locke stages of book one. And because there was such an emphasis on the romance, I feel like the integrity of the plot suffered a little bit; the story meandered and dragged in places that seemed unnecessary.Also in Holly Black fashion, the end of the book completely shattered my expectations and makes the previous paragraph a little less important in the grand scheme of things. Although it was a five-star ending for sure, I wish the whole book had been filled with as much cleverness and strange goings-on as the last fifty pages or so. I understand that much of the book was spent sowing the seeds necessary for the ending, but I feel as if it could have been executed in a more exciting way.Once again, this series has been set up for something epic. I have no idea how Black is going to turn this around, but she did a pretty good job of it last time so I definitely have high expectations for the next book.