Recently, I’ve really been thinking about the Folk of the Air series, or as it is more popularly known, The Cruel Prince series.

Written in 2018 by author Holly Black, The Cruel Prince follows the story of Jude Duarte, a 17-year-old mortal girl who lives in the land of Faerie. She lives here because her stepfather killed her mother when she was young and took Jude and her two sisters to live with him. Needless to say, it’s a bit of an awkward family dynamic. Jude grows up wishing for nothing more than to be one of the fae and struggles her whole upbringing with fitting in and proving herself to those around her. Her entire character arc in the first book actually ends up with her realizing that if she can not be better than the creatures around her, she will “become so much worse”. Jude’s other half in the book is our other main character Cardan. I say that he is her other half not because they are best friends, but because they’re so similar. That is one of the main things about this series that I love talking about. Jude and Cardan and their realtionship. I think that both of their characters are so well written and that their entire relationship is interesting because they’re the same person in different fonts. They both play mind games and try to best everyone and anyone. They both were not raised with love so they both have stranged and warped perceptions of what it is. They see it as a weakness becayse it was something that gave them a vulnerability that could be exploited, so when they fall for eachother, they mistake it for hatered. Eventually they come around to the idea that maybe love is not a weakness and maybe it is in fact strength. In the final book, it is even an act of love from Jude that saves Cardan in the last book. I just really think its amazing how these two characters who hate the idea of love, end up loving eachother. There is something sweet about the way that they swore off love and then they found eachother and decided that they would be the person that the other broke that oath of never loving for.