The Wicked King by Holly Black

Hello everyone!

Time for another review, this one is for a novel that I have been excited to read since January of 2018, so you couldn’t imagine my excitement when I received this novel for review!

I received this novel from Hachette Book Group Canada in return for an honest review. I’d like to thank them so much for providing me with an ARC for this incredible novel.

Let’s jump into the review shall we!

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Release Date: January 8th, 2019 
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Pages: 336 Pages
Genre: Fantasy and YA

Plot:
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.

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⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

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I found myself instantly becoming drawn into this novel from page one. This novel started off very close to where the previous novel left off, and it didn’t disappoint in terms of action, intrigue, politics and the sinister qualities that we fell in love with in the first novel.

I’d like to first just give a huge honorable mention to Holly Black for her incredibly atmospheric writing that truly makes this novel something that you will obsess over. I loved the lyrical aspects of her writing that meshed so well with the world of faerie, but I also adored how Holly Black was able to go from sensual scenes to incredibly gruesome scenes without effecting the readability of this novel.

Additionally, Holly Black brought back our favourite characters from the first novel without changing any of the things we loved about them, which made this new adventure so easy to get into. We see incredibly growth throughout the two novels for our characters, but the growth is slow and makes sense to the reader, which is something that I don’t see very often.

I can say with conviction that I truly love how Jude has grown into this badass woman from book one to book two. Obviously she was incredibly badass to begin with, but we get to see more of her trials and tribulations throughout this novel and we get to see how she deals with them and moves on from them. It’s really inspiring to see that not everything comes easy to her; she works hard and she has her failures, but she moves on from them and comes out the other end stronger than ever.

Caden is very sexy and loveable throughout this novel, but we also get to see more of a serious side to him which was a nice surprise. With the way things ended in the previous novel, the way he went about things in this novel could have gone many ways. I’m very glad that Holly decided to take his story the way she did, it was interesting and very true to who we’d gotten to know in book one.

The plot of this novel was absolute perfection, we got to see all of the repercussions of the actions from the ending of book one, which was something that I’m sure everyone was interesting in reading.

All in all, this novel was one that I’m very glad I was excited to read because Holly Black satisfied me in every way with it. If you read The Cruel Prince and loved it, you are going to love this novel.

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That concludes my review for The Wicked King by Holly Black!

Thank you so much for reading and don’t forget to follow my blog as well as my other social media sites!

Until next time,

Rimpy Toor