Reviews

Review: The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black

I'm All Booked Up YA
26032912. sy475

Right after the shocking events of The Wicked King, Jude is in the human world living with Vivi and Oak. At this point Jude believes she’ll never go back to faerie or see Cardan again. 

When Taryn shows up with some shocking news, she needs Jude’s help. Jude must go back to faerie and pretend to be Taryn…to save her twin from prison, or worse. Only it’s not safe for Jude to return during exile. Many people would give anything to see her fall. 

But when she arrives, the political situation is much worse than she ever imagined, pitting Cardan against Madoc in the fight for the crown. Jude knows she has to help, but after all the betrayal she faced, she doesn’t know who she can trust. In the conclusion to the Folk of the Air series, Jude faces her toughest choice yet and may have to sacrifice everything. 

The Queen of Nothing is our favorite in the series. Unlike The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King, this book starts off strong. Our biggest problem with the others was the amount of time it took to get into the story. That didn’t happen because right away, Jude gave us action. 

We eagerly anticipated her return to faerie so she could face both Madoc and Cardan. The twist at the end of the last book had us so mad that we couldn’t wait for Jude to enact revenger We weren’t disappointed at all! While everything happened in an unexpected way, we’re so glad that Jude proved that humans are just as badass. Plus, this book especially appealed to the fact that we both follow politics. The Queen of Nothing had more political strategy than the other books.

Another aspect we were both nervous and excited for was how the romance would play out between Cardan and Jude. We weren’t sure we could ship them after Cardan’s behavior early on, but Black gave him strong development and continued to expand on his back story. While we were skeptical, he did earn our (and Jude’s!) forgiveness. Plus, it was hilarious trying to see him be in the human world.

Another character we were curious about was Taryn. We couldn’t stand her in the first two books we’re happy that Black gave her some character growth. Finally she cared about her siblings and not just about herself. Even though she still needed Jude to save her, at least she didn’t have a plan to betray her.

Overall, Black gave us a thrilling conclusion to the Folk of the Air trilogy. The ending felt resolved and the action kept us excited throughout the entire book. We definitely recommend this series for YA fantasy fans.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5/⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Published by I'm All Booked Up YA

We write recommendations and reviews for YA books.

23 thoughts on “Review: The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black”

  8. I really enjoyed this series – the over all story and idea – but there is something Holly’s writing that I feel is missing but I can’t place it. I am tempted to read them again to gain a clearer understanding of what I feel it is missing. I still enjoyed the books though – just my two cents

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s