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** spoiler alert ** Man, this book was... weird af.

tl;dr: This was a rushed, poorly thought out, and emotionally empty conclusion. Then again, that seems to be the theme for endings in 2019, so maybe Holly Black is just staying on trend.

The pacing was abysmal. It felt like Holly was checking items off of a list because she needed to get everything from point A to point B. Character development was pretty much nonexistent. The riddles were laughably obvious and Jude just seemed like an idiot. Cardan was suddenly soft and sweet out of nowhere, as was Nicasia.

This book committed some of the ultimate sins for me, though, one of which is keeping your couple apart for flimsy as hell reasons. I wanted to see how Cardan and Jude would rule together and either improve one another as rulers/people or drag one another down. I wanted to see how they dealt with the court and their enemies as rulers, and I wanted to see them struggle with those things together. Instead, the two spend like... maybe 50 pages as rulers together and Cardan is barely a factor.

The snake plot twist was stupid and came out of nowhere. As soon as I read the prophecy about Cardan dying, I guessed at the solution, but thought, "No, Holly wouldn't go for something that boring and obvious" and yet, there it was. The ending was unsatisfactory, so much of the development between characters was skipped, and Jude felt like a completely different character, and not in the "what a satisfying arc" way.

I've been reading Holly's faerie books since obsessing over the Modern Faerie Tales as a teenager, and one thing I'm noticing more and more is how rote they're becoming. Faeries are cruel and capricious because they are, except when we're supposed to like them. They're awful and terrifying even if there's no motivation for it, but the love interests are nice to our heroines because they're supposed to be sexy love interests.

With Cardan and Jude, I thought we were stepping away from that somewhat, but once again most of Faerie just consists of terribly cruel background characters who are cruel just to be cruel, except for the faeries that are bffs with our protag (like Vivi and Oak). Cardan, who started out as a really fascinating character, imo, and Jude, who was believably cruel because it was her only way to survive, got blunted down with almost all of their flaws removed with no real build up. The faerie masses are still horrific for no real reason. We're never given any real motivations for Asha, Locke, any of Cardan's friends or siblings, Oriana, etc. We learn almost nothing about Jude's parents. Shit, the fucking smith had more motivation than half of the other prominent side characters.

I think a huge issue here comes from two similar sources: In these books, the human world seems so mind-numbingly boring, and Elfhame is like an honest to God nightmare. I have no idea why Jude would want to stay in Elfhame when she's sure to be miserable for all the same reasons she was. There's no way her subjects have just magically accepted a mortal and she'll never face a billion assassination attempts. On the other hand, there's nothing for her in the human world, so ???? I think the idea Holly was going for was that Jude belonged in Elfhame now, and that she was going to carve out her own sort of happiness, but she didn't stick the landing.

The Modern Faerie Tales handled that aspect so much better imo, as did Holly's stand alone. To be honest, I think her books are becoming worse and worse about nuance for her faerie realm.