The Cruel Prince

The Cruel Prince is Holly Black's 2018 YA-fantasy novel, the first book of the Folk of the Air trilogy and one of the canonical contemporary YA-and-adult romantasy titles of the past decade. The structural premise is Jude Duarte, a twenty-one-year-old human who at seven was taken with her older sister Vivienne and her twin Taryn from the family home in Maine — after their human parents were killed by their fae stepfather, Madoc, the High King's military strategist — to be raised in the High Court of Faerie's Insmoor. Jude has lived among the fae for thirteen years and is now navigating the structurally impossible position of a mortal at a court that explicitly does not consider her a person. The novel runs across the months around the Faerie coronation crisis, with Jude entering Madoc's military training program in pursuit of a knighthood and being relentlessly tormented by Prince Cardan and his bond-brothers in the process.

Black's structural method is the close-first-person Jude narration across the entire novel, with the Faerie-court texture rendered in the kind of patient YA-fantasy register Black has been refining across her career. The Cardan-and-Jude central romance arc is the structural emotional engine of the trilogy and operates as the canonical contemporary YA enemies-to-lovers romantasy template. The novel's structural argument (that the operational mechanics of the Faerie-court politics provide a useful structural mirror for the operational mechanics of contemporary YA-and-adult social hierarchies that the genre has been working through for thirty years) is made through the texture of the court politics rather than through any direct argument. The trilogy continues across The Wicked King (2019) and The Queen of Nothing (2019); the spinoff novella How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (2020) and the duology The Stolen Heir (2023) and The Prisoner's Throne (2024) extend the broader Folk of the Air universe.

Recommended for YA-romantasy readers, for fans of A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, and the broader BookTok-era romantasy market. Read The Wicked King and The Queen of Nothing next. The Caitlin Kelly audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.