Two more Lodestar nominees that it's interesting to consider together.
The Cruel Prince, Holly Black, 3+/5. Hmm. This was a book that I probably would have really liked if I'd come to it much earlier in life, like in early high school. As it is, it kept running hard up against my strong imprinting with The Perilous Gard, which meant I wanted the faeries to act much less like mean girls in high school and much more like... well... inhuman beings with a different and inhuman culture which Our Heroes are having culture clash with, which was sort of given lip service in the book but which wasn't investigated at all. (Spinning Silver did this much better as well, and I kept having yearning feelings about how well Memory Called Empire did it.) I feel like a lot of my problems might have been alleviated if it hadn't been specifically ~Faerie~? It didn't really seem there was any reason why it had to be ~Faerie~.
It was a really emo book. It was so emo that my sister (who loves YA in general and has a much higher tolerance for emo than I do) thought it was too emo. It was Mercedes Lackey-levels of emo. Also,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ase, when she was not all that far along (we were reading it at around the same time), pinpointed one of the major secondary characters as fanon!Draco, and... she was not wrong.
The writing... had some weaknesses. I got really annoyed early on at all the infodumping, when the same information could have been conveyed more organically. It was a plot-oriented book, and sometimes the relationships seemed a little shoehorned in just to support the plot (e.g., the entire character of Taryn). There was essentially no character arc for any of the characters (though we learned more about some of the characters as the book went on, making them less one-dimensional, which I appreciated).
On the other hand, I quite enjoyed the plotting and thought the plotting was actually quite good, once I got used to the ~Faeries~ being not like I wanted them to be.
Tess of the Road - Rachel Hartman - 3+/5 - I had almost exactly the opposite reaction to this as I did to Cruel Prince. I thought in general the small-scale writing craft was much better: it didn't have the infodumping of CP (though perhaps too much flashback?), and the relationships and characters were much better drawn, it seemed to me, even when the character or relationship didn't get much screen time. Tess goes through a profound and interesting character arc, as does at least one other major character and at least one other minor character (off-screen).
Plot-wise and structure-wise it did seem to meander a lot -- the whole point of the book was clearly the character arc and not external plot arc, so it's not exactly a problem, but I think it could have been slightly more cohesive.
I did skim a lot of this, which was probably related to (a) having gotten a surfeit of YA lately, and (b) not having read the previous volumes, as there was a lot of worldbuilding I would probably have cared more about had I read those.
I will say of the two of these, I was more impressed by Hartman's writing and I'm more likely to check out more in the TotR sequence than sequels to CP (I will probably check out Seraphina at some point, at least); though Black's plotting is good enough that I'd probably be interested in reading a synopsis of any sequels to CP.
The Cruel Prince, Holly Black, 3+/5. Hmm. This was a book that I probably would have really liked if I'd come to it much earlier in life, like in early high school. As it is, it kept running hard up against my strong imprinting with The Perilous Gard, which meant I wanted the faeries to act much less like mean girls in high school and much more like... well... inhuman beings with a different and inhuman culture which Our Heroes are having culture clash with, which was sort of given lip service in the book but which wasn't investigated at all. (Spinning Silver did this much better as well, and I kept having yearning feelings about how well Memory Called Empire did it.) I feel like a lot of my problems might have been alleviated if it hadn't been specifically ~Faerie~? It didn't really seem there was any reason why it had to be ~Faerie~.
It was a really emo book. It was so emo that my sister (who loves YA in general and has a much higher tolerance for emo than I do) thought it was too emo. It was Mercedes Lackey-levels of emo. Also,
ase, when she was not all that far along (we were reading it at around the same time), pinpointed one of the major secondary characters as fanon!Draco, and... she was not wrong.The writing... had some weaknesses. I got really annoyed early on at all the infodumping, when the same information could have been conveyed more organically. It was a plot-oriented book, and sometimes the relationships seemed a little shoehorned in just to support the plot (e.g., the entire character of Taryn). There was essentially no character arc for any of the characters (though we learned more about some of the characters as the book went on, making them less one-dimensional, which I appreciated).
On the other hand, I quite enjoyed the plotting and thought the plotting was actually quite good, once I got used to the ~Faeries~ being not like I wanted them to be.
Tess of the Road - Rachel Hartman - 3+/5 - I had almost exactly the opposite reaction to this as I did to Cruel Prince. I thought in general the small-scale writing craft was much better: it didn't have the infodumping of CP (though perhaps too much flashback?), and the relationships and characters were much better drawn, it seemed to me, even when the character or relationship didn't get much screen time. Tess goes through a profound and interesting character arc, as does at least one other major character and at least one other minor character (off-screen).
Plot-wise and structure-wise it did seem to meander a lot -- the whole point of the book was clearly the character arc and not external plot arc, so it's not exactly a problem, but I think it could have been slightly more cohesive.
I did skim a lot of this, which was probably related to (a) having gotten a surfeit of YA lately, and (b) not having read the previous volumes, as there was a lot of worldbuilding I would probably have cared more about had I read those.
I will say of the two of these, I was more impressed by Hartman's writing and I'm more likely to check out more in the TotR sequence than sequels to CP (I will probably check out Seraphina at some point, at least); though Black's plotting is good enough that I'd probably be interested in reading a synopsis of any sequels to CP.
