Elfhame Ruined Me for Regular Fantasy Romance

A Mortal Girl, a Murdered Family, and a Court That Wants Her Dead

Here’s the setup, stripped down: Jude Duarte is seven years old when a Faerie named Madoc kills her parents and takes her, her twin sister Taryn, and her half sister Vivienne back to the High Court of Faerie to raise as his own. Ten years later she is seventeen, mortal, mortal-fragile in a world where everyone around her can glamour her into doing anything, and she wants power so badly it has curdled into something close to rage. She is not a nice girl. That is the whole point.

Cardan Greenbriar is the youngest prince of Faerie, spoiled, cruel, gorgeous in the specific way that only fictional princes are allowed to be, and he makes Jude’s life hell at school (yes, faerie kids go to a kind of school, it is a weird and delightful detail Black never over-explains). The plot kicks into gear when Jude gets pulled into a scheme to put a puppet king on the throne, and from there it is knives-in-sleeves political maneuvering, poisonings, betrayals, and Jude discovering that the fastest way to survive a court that sees her as prey is to become something scarier than prey.

I won’t spoil where it goes because the turns are the fun of it, but I will say the ending of book one broke a lot of readers’ hearts in a way that felt almost mean on Black’s part. Good mean. The kind where you close the book and just sit there.

Why Jude Works (and Where the Series Wobbles)

Look, the reason this series became the phenomenon it became is not the worldbuilding, though the worldbuilding is good. It’s Jude. Most YA heroines get put in danger and react with fear or nobility. Jude gets put in danger and reacts by deciding to become the most dangerous person in the room. She lies. She manipulates. She wants a seat at the table so badly that she will burn things down to get it, and Black never once asks you to feel bad for finding that thrilling. There’s a moment early on where Jude is humiliated at a revel, forced to dance until her feet bleed, and instead of the scene existing just to make you pity her, it exists to explain exactly why she becomes who she becomes. That’s good writing. That’s cause and effect done right.

Cardan is the more contested part of the equation and I get why. He starts out as genuinely cruel, not misunderstood-broody cruel but actually calls-her-names-and-humiliates-her cruel, and the pivot to romance asks you to do some work. I did that work happily. Other readers, reasonably, did not want to. If forced villain-to-love-interest arcs make your skin crawl, this series will test you, especially in book one where the softening hasn’t started yet.

Where it wobbles: book two, The Wicked King, sags in the middle. There’s a stretch of court intrigue that starts to feel like watching people play chess where you can’t quite see the board, plots folding into plots until the stakes get abstract. I remember reading it on a plane, exhausted, rereading the same page three times because I’d lost track of who was betraying whom this week. And the throne-and-council politics, while inventive in flashes, sometimes reads more like teenage manipulation dressed up in crowns than an actual functioning kingdom. I don’t think Black is that interested in governance. She’s interested in Jude and Cardan circling each other like two people who know kissing would ruin them.

The prose itself is sharp and controlled without being showy, which I respect. Black doesn’t overwrite. She trusts a short sentence to land hard, and it does, over and over.

Am I overrating this because I read book one in basically a single sitting on my couch with a cold cup of tea I never finished? Maybe. I think about that reading session more than I think about books that were objectively “better” that year.

Jude doesn’t want to be loved by Elfhame. She wants Elfhame to be unable to look away from her, which is a much more dangerous thing to want.

About Holly Black

Holly Black has been writing faeries since before faeries were cool again, going back to Tithe in the early 2000s, and there’s a reason she’s basically the reigning monarch of modern faerie fiction. She writes fae that are actually alien, actually rule-bound and dangerous and amoral, not just pretty people with pointy ears. She lives in Massachusetts, co-created the Spiderwick Chronicles, and has a gift for writing teenage girls who are allowed to be furious, petty, and strategic instead of just sweet and scared. That’s rarer than it should be.

If Elfhame Wrecked You, Read These Next

Start (or revisit) the trilogy here if you somehow haven’t, and then try:

• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, for more fae court politics, though with a much more romance-forward, slower-burn engine
• Vicious by V.E. Schwab, for another story about characters willing to become monstrous to get power, minus the faeries entirely
• Tithe by Holly Black, if you want to see the earlier, rougher, more punk-rock version of her faerie obsession
• Serpent & Dove by Shelby Mahurin, for another prickly enemies-to-lovers pairing with real venom in the banter

For your book club

1. Is Jude a hero, an antihero, or something else entirely by the end of the trilogy, and did your answer change between books?
2. Cardan is cruel to Jude before he’s anything else to her. Did the romance earn your buy-in, or did you resist it the whole way through?
3. Madoc raised Jude after killing her parents. What does the series argue about loyalty that isn’t chosen versus loyalty that is?
4. Does the court politics ever feel like real stakes to you, or is it always really about Jude and Cardan no matter what’s happening on the throne?
5. Which ending, of any book in the trilogy, hit you hardest, and why do you think Black chose to end it that way?