content warnings: violence, murder, gore, non-graphic self-harm, child neglect
representation: gay main character, black main and side characters, interracial main relationship, mlm side character, m/m main relationship


“Her tragedy, if she had one, was to be as normal and average as any child ever born.”


I think it's time to accept that Holly Black might just not be an author who works for me. I read The Cruel Prince last year and gave that a 2.5/5, but I still had hope that I would enjoy this one because, after reading the descriptions for all of Holly Black's books, this is the one that appealed to me the most. Suffice to say, I was disappointed.

This is a stand-alone urban(?) fantasy book about Hazel and Ben, siblings very close in age who live in Fairfold, a town that is known to have fae living nearby. The town is quite the tourist attraction due to it having a faerie boy in a glass coffin in the woods who has been there as long as anybody can remember. As children, Hazel and Ben both became infatuated with the boy, and now, as teenagers, the boy has woken up.

Despite, as a whole, never really hating the reading experience of this, I can't even really talk about what I did and didn't like the way that I did with The Cruel Prince because this entire book just felt very meh to me.

This is an unfortunate case of concept being far better than execution. The general plot is already interesting, but the smaller plot elements that come into play later are even more fascinating.

Spoiler

In particular, that of Hazel being the Alderking's knight when she's asleep. I would have much rather read that book tbh.

I think the biggest thing that tanked this book for me is that everything felt very undeveloped.

While I didn't hate any of the characters and none of them actively annoyed me, they all just felt very... there, if that makes sense. None of them seemed to have any interests aside from a random name-drop (with the exception of Ben's skill with music, but that wasn't even an organic interest). Their personalities also felt very cardboard-cutout to me, Hazel in particular.

And with undeveloped characters tends to come undeveloped relationships. Ben and Hazel's relationship felt very organic, but they were the only ones. Ben and Jack are best friends but that more seemed like a plot convenience so Jack and Hazel had a way to know each other before the events of the book; Leonie is supposedly Hazel's best friend but she shows up, I kid you not, a total of two times in extremely short scenes throughout the entirety of the book. The romances were even worse. Both had absolutely no development and I felt no chemistry whatsoever between either couple.

The writing was also... not great. The book is riddled with info-dumps, from Hazel spending an entire chapter reflecting on something from her childhood to different faerie characters giving long stories about their history that conveniently factor into the plot. Aside from info dumps, there's also a lot of telling and not showing, especially when it came to characters' emotions, which is a massive pet peeve of mine.

There are also multiple POVs in this book, which would be fine if that had have happened sometime before a third of the way through the book. I'm not joking; the book was in Hazel's perspective for over a hundred pages before it changed to someone else (Jack's or Ben's, I don't remember). Not only that, but the POV changes felt so inorganic; the only reason we got Jack POV was for more info dumps and the only reason we got Ben's was to attempt to build up his and Severin's relationship.

When I started this review, I actually had this at a 2.5/5, but as I've been writing this I've realised that there wasn't really anything about this that I liked. I don't understand the hype around Holly Black, because the two books of hers that I've read are two of her most popular and they were both incredibly underwhelming.

Edit bc I forgot something: I also wish that more had been done with the fact that Hazel and Ben's parents were extremely neglectful. The book definitely knew that they weren't good parents (mostly in the moment when Jack says “You talk about your childhood like it was just wild, bohemian fun, but I remember how much it wasn't fun for you”), but at the same time it more felt like they were neglectful because it was convenient to the plot and no other reason.