At the beginning of 2018, the Cruel Prince was one of the most talked about novels of the YA genre. With the Cruel Prince, Holly Black created a world of high stakes and vicious political ambition that upturned expectations in this genre and set a high standard for other fantasy novels to compete with. The faery realm and kingdom politics is not a novel concept in the YA genre and fantasy has had peaked at various points in the last decade with the Twilight series and Cassandra Clare's creations but Holly Black nonetheless manages to carve herself a piece of the pie with the Cruel Prince. Her protagonist is Jude, a girl who enters an unfamiliar world as an outsider in race and standing but learns how to manipulate the players of the game for her own gain. Her ambition drives this novel as we see how she masterfully conducts herself as a puppeteer of the airheads she is surrounded with. This is a vastly different approach to the fantasy genre as Holly's predecessors have done so and it comes as a refreshing take of style.