This review contains minor spoilers if you have not read The Cruel Prince - no major plot points are revealed. You can read reviews for The Cruel Prince, The Wicked King, and The Queen of Nothing on my blog now!
As many of my reader friends know, I am Taryn's Number One Hater and will be until the end of time. I will never forgive her for what she did to Jude, and while I understand that there are two sides to every story and she was a teenager, I cannot bring myself to even begin to come to terms with her reasoning. Nevertheless, it was high time I made my way through the novellas before embarking on The Stolen Heir.
Let me say this... Taryn is living in delulu land right from the start of this novella. Every other page I was reminding myself that she is a teenager and that teenagers do not always make the right choices, but my word, she sure knows how to make wrong choice after wrong choice like it is a competition. She definitely should have clocked the Locke situation from the bat -- it was painfully obvious when I was reading The Cruel Prince, and arguably even more clear in this novella.
Every single time Locke would speak to Taryn, the red flag lights were going off in my head. It was actually somewhat infuriating to see Taryn essentially walk through everything that she and Locke did, and still not understand until the very end that she should not have done these things to her own sister. Obviously, Locke is definitely deserving of some blame, as he was the root of the issues, so I will give Taryn just a drop of understanding, but never forgiveness.
The writing choice to make this a letter/explanation to Jude was something that I did enjoy -- it was weird to read in this perspective, as it is something that I tend to avoid. However, once you reorient yourself and put yourself in Jude's shoes, it makes the novella's flow and structure easier to adapt to after about ten pages.
I would certainly recommend reading The Lost Sisters to get a deeper dive into one of the many betrayal's in The Cruel Prince. It sheds a light on Taryn's decisions and the manipulation Locke spun throughout the first installment.
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