66 pages • 2 hours read
Holly BlackThe Cruel Prince
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Prologue-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
The Prologue tells the story of how Jude Duarte and her two sisters, Taryn and Vivienne (Vivi), came to live in the magical realm of Elfhame. One day when twins Jude and Taryn are seven and their older sister Vivi is nine, a strange man comes to the doorstep of their suburban American house. The girls’ mother is afraid when she sees the man, and dialogue between the two reveals that the man, a faerie named Madoc, was their mother’s first husband—and that Vivi is Madoc’s daughter. The girls’ mother, a mortal, left the magical immortal realm of Elfhame (also called “Faerie”), and she had Jude and Taryn with another mortal man. Saying he has come to reclaim his daughter, Madoc kills Jude’s parents and takes all three girls off to Elfhame.
Chapter 1 Summary
The story fast-forwards 10 years, and the narrative switches to a first-person perspective from Jude’s point of view. She has grown up in Faerie, where mortals can only join the Faerie King’s court if they marry a member or are granted permission to do so because of some skill or achievement valued by the King Eldred Greenbriar. Madoc is a general in the King’s army and provides a life of material comfort and ease for all three girls. However, Jude and Taryn are somewhat outcast because they are mortals. The faeries cannot lie, but Jude and Taryn can. However, they must rely on the faeries to help them detect and wield magic, which the faeries can use. Ironically, Vivi—who is half faerie—dislikes Faerie and her father while her sisters have adjusted to their life in the magical kingdom.
Chapter 2 Summary
Jude and Taryn attend a party at the King’s palace with Madoc and his second wife Oriana. Oriana warns the twins not to eat (unless they treat their food with salt), drink, or dance at the party, because mortals are enchanted when they do so.
Chapter 3 Summary
Jude enters the belowground palace in a hill, accessed through a magical portal between two trees. She and Taryn watch the guests at the court, and Jude observes the power dynamics between the King’s three eldest children, each of whom has their own set of followers and vies for power. As she and her sister work their way through the crowd of faeries, marveling at the spectacles around them, they encounter the King’s youngest son, Cardan Greenbriar, their peer from taking lessons at the court. Cardan is insolent, cruel, and haughty, and his friends insult Jude as they go by. Cardan himself rips the wing of one of the faeries there. Disgusted by his callous behavior, Jude unexpectedly shares an intriguing, wordless look with Cardan’s friend Locke as Locke helps the faerie.
Chapter 4 Summary
The evening after the party, Jude and Taryn go to their lessons with the faerie students (because faeries are nocturnal, all the activities in the kingdom begin in the evening and end at dawn). Jude is hoping that one of the King’s children will notice her at an upcoming tournament in a few days, and choose her to be a knight in their household. She is skilled with a sword, and hopes to be able to protect Taryn if she is chosen for knighthood. Cardan and his friends taunt Jude again, underscoring the hostility between her and the faeries. They tell her not to enter the tournament, but Jude is determined.
Chapter 5 Summary
The twins return home from school and find Vivi upset over magical sprites that have nested in some of her beloved books, papers, and pictures from the human world, which Vivi visits often. Jude and Taryn find photos that imply that Vivi has a human girlfriend.
Madoc tells his family that the current King will soon be stepping down from the throne and choosing one of his children to rule. He can select outside of birth order for the inheritance, and its widely believed that he will choose his third child, Prince Dain Greenbriar. Madoc is eager to serve a new monarch who will be militarily aggressive and tamp down revolution within other courts. Jude asks him about entering the tournament, and although Madoc agrees that she is a skilled fighter, he thinks she lacks the brutality needed to kill, and insists that she wait until after the new monarch’s coronation to offer herself as a candidate for knighthood.
Jude gets revenge on the faeries who tormented her (in the previous chapter); she salts their food (salt is inedible to faeries but makes faerie food palatable for humans). She decides to not tell her schoolmates that Madoc has forbidden her from participating in the tournament, and to try to enter without him knowing.
Prologue-Chapter 5 Analysis
These first chapters introduce several key characters and central conflicts that will steadily drive the plot. Taryn, Madoc, Locke, and Cardan will each play important roles. Jude’s focus on Cardan as her antagonist, however, is particularly foregrounded in such decided passages as “I can’t imagine Cardan [...] laughing at something other than [others’] suffering” (21) and “I hate him more than all the others. I hate him so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe” (30). This latter sentence, in which Jude says she “can hardly breathe,” evinces the sheer intensity of the effect Cardan has on her; a distinct passion pierces Jude’s soul through to her body, igniting a profound physiological response. And yet, as vivid as the antipathy is, there remains an ambiguity and even contradiction; her experience of halted breath could just as easily describe something romantic, if not erotic. This suggestive dual experience foreshadows the later mutual attraction between Jude and the cruel prince. Jude’s impassioned response to her rival underscores the unwitting depth of their connection—although at this point in the story, she is only aware of the animosity she feels toward Cardan.
These early chapters also introduce the landscape and inhabitants of Faerie. The setting importantly mirrors several of Faerie’s attributes. For example, the map in the book’s front pages calls the islands of Elfhame “shifting”, indicating the unstable and often treacherous world that Jude must navigate. Further, in Chapter 5, Jude and Taryn stop at the Lake of Masks, a body of water that reflects other faces that have looked into it, rather than the viewer’s own (32). Through a fantastical disorienting effect, the lake undermines the reader’s expectations of a “natural” reflection, just as Jude will later find her own expectations undermined; following the lake’s symbolic allusion to two-facedness and false appearances, Jude’s allies and enemies are not who they seem.
The magical nature of Faerie is also emphasized when Jude chooses “a pale green horse with sharp teeth and a swampy odor” (15)—a description at odds with the conventional understanding of a horse. Such extraordinary creatures cement the book within its fantasy genre.
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By Holly Black
