The Folk of Air Series: Book Review

In quarantine, I, like everyone else, found myself with a lot of time on my hands, especially over the summer. While we were at school, all we ever wanted was some free time, but once we were given unlimited amounts of it, we suddenly had no idea what to do with ourselves. I found that the novelty of quarantine quickly wore off, leaving boredom to settle in. I took to some new hobbies such as painting and collecting and pressing flowers, but I also reverted back to some of my old routines, one of them being reading. Over the summer I’ve read many books, but the most recent series that I’ve completed is The Folk of Air by Holly Black. The series consists of three books, a nice length to keep you occupied without getting redundant.

A gory fantasy about the world of faeries, this series begins with the book The Cruel Prince, which immediately gets off to an action-packed start. The prologue dives right in with a brief introduction of Jude, the main character, her older sister Vivienne, and her twin Taryn.

The tone quickly shifts when a strange man named Madoc appears at their house. He reveals that he is a faerie and that he was once married to their mother. They had a child, Vivienne, together, but Madoc found that the mother faked her death and ran away to be with another mortal, with whom she had Taryn and Jude. He quickly kills both the parents and, seeing the children as his responsibility, adopts them into his care. The book picks up many years later with Jude and her twin living as mortals in the faerie world and adapting to the fear of living with more powerful beings. Meanwhile, their older sister Vivienne, a faerie who hates the faerie world, wishes to go back to the mortal one.

Jude and her twin have to take many precautions, such as wearing a necklace of certain berries, so that they cannot be put under the faeries’ spell. They go to a prestigious school for faeries and are in the same class as the youngest prince of the faeries, Prince Cardan, who is known for his cruel nature. Jude and Taryn suffer bullying every day from Cardan and the other faeries, but Jude is determined to become a knight, having learned to handle a sword extremely well from Madoc. After Madoc forbids her from becoming a knight, though, Jude doesn’t know what to do, until she is recruited as a spy for another prince due to her being mortal and thus capable of lying.

I don’t want to give too much away, but the King of the faeries steps down, and Jude gets entangled in a conflict about who is to be the next leader. Be warned that this series is rather gory, but it has a little romance as well. The three books are The Cruel Prince, The Wicked King, and The Queen of Nothing. Enjoy!