The Wicked King by Holly Black is the second book in The Folk of the Air series. This review will be spoiler free for The Wicked King, but will contain spoilers for The Cruel Prince.

Jude knew making Cardan king of Faerie was the only way to keep her brother safe, but Cardan couldn’t be trusted. By tying herself to the wicked king, Jude became the real ruler of Faerie, only no one can find out. 

She can’t trust anyone as the tides change. Faerie is on the verge of a civil war and Jude must find a way to prevent the destruction. 

In an effort to protect herself and those she loves, Jude is intent on discovering who is going to betray her, but her feelings are getting in the way. Is Jude strong enough to withstand the attacks or will she fall prey to the traps planted for her?

Oh. My. God. What just happened?

I have so many feelings right now that I don’t even know how to process them. I am kicking myself for not picking this book up sooner. It was so good! It was so much better than the first one.

After the events of the first book, I wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen, but I did know that is was going to be crazy. And I was right. So much happened in this book and I was completely unprepared. Black threw twist after twist at me and I never had any idea about what was going to happen next. I was on the edge of my seat, flying through the pages.

It starts out with a large time jump that I wasn’t expecting and was kind of disappointed by. I wanted to know what happened in the time jump, but by the end of the novel, I was okay with it and I understood why it was necessary.

The character development through the course of the book was perfect, but I want to know what was going on behind the scenes. Both Jude and Cardan caught me off guard by their decisions. But they weren’t the only characters that grew and changed over the course of this novel. There were just as many twists with the side characters as there were with the two main characters.

This book left me with so many questions. I am officially counting the days until The Queen of Nothing comes out.

As for the writing itself, I didn’t notice anything that made me stop or that pulled me out of the story. Though I was reading it so fast that I don’t think I would have noticed if there had been problems.

I gave this book 5 out of 5 stars and I HIGHLY recommend it to fans of Fantasy. Even if you didn’t love the first one, I think you should give this one a try.

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