The Wicked King (A Novel of Elfhame): Where TikTok's Faerie Obsession Began (The Folk of the Air Book 2)
The second instalment in Holly Black's Folk of the Air trilogy picks up right where the first left off, and it's every bit as consuming. Both this book and its follow-up, The Queen of Nothing, took home the Goodreads YA Best Fantasy award in 2019 and 2020 respectively, and The Wicked King itself received a CILIP Carnegie Medal nomination. Victoria Aveyard puts it simply: 'Holly Black is the Faerie Queen.' It's hard to argue with that. Jude has manoeuvred Cardan onto the throne through sheer cunning, binding him to her will for a year and a day. You'd think that would give her the upper hand. It doesn't. The new High King is slippery, proud, and seemingly committed to making her life difficult at every turn, even as his fixation on her refuses to fade. Then there's a traitor lurking somewhere in court, turning the political intrigue up to a dangerous pitch. Jude has lives to protect, including her own, and a tangle of feelings for Cardan that won't sit quietly where she puts them. Black writes faerie politics with a gleeful, biting energy. The power games are genuinely gripping, the romantic tension is the slow-burn sort that keeps you reading past midnight, and the pacing never lets up. A year and a day, it turns out, passes far too quickly.
- Author: Holly Black
- Publisher: Hot Key Books
- Genre: Fantasy
- ISBN: 978-1471407376
- Pages: 337 pages