Books like The Cruel Prince
What should you read after Holly Black’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Holly Black
- 2018
- Young adult fantasy
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Cruel Prince
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchShadow and Bone
Leigh Bardugo
The other great YA fantasy about a girl who wants to matter, a court that will use her, and a beautiful antagonist you should not root for but will.
- A mortal girl in a faerie court
- Enemies who genuinely hate each other
- Court intrigue and poisoned wine
- Chosen-one plotting throughout
Best for a heroine trained as a weaponGraceling
Kristin Cashore
Katsa is what Jude wants to be: lethal, used by a king, and slowly working out that being the sharpest thing in the room is not the same as being free.
- Wanting power, not love
- Court intrigue and poisoned wine
- A mortal girl in a faerie court
- Kinder book overall
Worth a look — with a warningThe Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
Shares the gorgeous-and-dangerous register and two rivals bound to hurt each other, but replaces Black's knife-fast plotting with atmosphere and standing about.
- Enemies who genuinely hate each other
- Cruelty played straight
- Very little plot movement
Best for the crueltyAn Ember in the Ashes
Sabaa Tahir
One of the few YA fantasies willing to be as nasty as Black is. Laia's household is Madoc's, with less glamour and more blood on the floor.
- Cruelty played straight
- Raised by her parents' murderer
- Court intrigue and poisoned wine
- Considerably more brutal
Great matchThe Bone Season
Samantha Shannon
A human held by an older, colder species that considers her useful property, who decides to become indispensable rather than obedient. Jude's strategy exactly.
- A mortal girl in a faerie court
- Wanting power, not love
- Raised by her parents' murderer
- Heavy world-building front-loaded
Best for the betrayalRed Queen
Victoria Aveyard
Read it for the last fifty pages. A girl learns to lie inside a hostile court and gets taught what happens when someone lies better than she does.
- A last-page betrayal
- Court intrigue and poisoned wine
- A mortal girl in a faerie court
- Familiar YA dystopian scaffolding
Great matchUprooted
Naomi Novik
A girl bound to a powerful, contemptuous being she spends the book arguing with, in a forest that means her harm. The antagonism curdles into something else.
- Enemies who genuinely hate each other
- Cruelty played straight
- Standalone, gentler resolution
Best for the schemingThe Gilded Wolves
Roshani Chokshi
Every character is running an angle, nobody says what they mean, and the pleasure is watching plans overlap. Black's court politics, relocated to 1889 Paris.
- Court intrigue and poisoned wine
- Wanting power, not love
- Heist mechanics over emotion
Worth a look — with a warningCaraval
Stephanie Garber
Also built on the rule that everything you are told may be technically true and entirely misleading — though Garber plays it as spectacle rather than politics.
- Faeries who cannot lie
- A last-page betrayal
- Sisters over ambition
Great matchThe Bear and the Nightingale
Katherine Arden
Arden's spirits bargain, evade and tell the truth in ways designed to ruin you — the old, unsafe folklore that Black is drawing on, written with more chill.
- Faeries who cannot lie
- A mortal girl in a faerie court
- Slower, more atmospheric
Great matchThe Hazel Wood
Melissa Albert
The nastiest fairy tales in recent YA, where the story rules are fixed and cruel and the heroine discovers her own place in them is not the one she wanted.
- Cruelty played straight
- A last-page betrayal
- Raised by her parents' murderer
- Contemporary setting for half of it
Best for the enemies dynamicThe Wrath & the Dawn
Renée Ahdieh
She marries the man who has been killing brides, intending to murder him. Whatever you enjoyed about Jude and Cardan, this is that engine at full throttle.
- Enemies who genuinely hate each other
- Raised by her parents' murderer
- Romance is the whole spine
Best for ruthless competenceSix of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
A cast who lie, calculate and betray as a matter of professional pride. If Jude's appeal is that she is good at being awful, this is a whole crew of her.
- Wanting power, not love
- Court intrigue and poisoned wine
- A last-page betrayal
- Heist novel, not court intrigue
What should you read after The Cruel Prince?
The Cruel Prince by Holly Black works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo — the other great YA fantasy about a girl who wants to matter, a court that will use her, and a beautiful antagonist you should not root for but will.
If what stayed with you was wanting power, not love, read Graceling by Kristin Cashore instead: katsa is what Jude wants to be: lethal, used by a king, and slowly working out that being the sharpest thing in the room is not the same as being free. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is the other strong option — shares the gorgeous-and-dangerous register and two rivals bound to hurt each other, but replaces Black's knife-fast plotting with atmosphere and standing about.
Loved something else?
Start from any book and we’ll build the list around your reasons.
Find my next book →NextBook is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. We earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t affect which books we recommend or how we rank them.
More “what to read next” lists
- Books like 1984
- Books like 2312
- Books like A Clockwork Orange
- Books like A Darker Shade of Magic
- Books like A Gentleman in Moscow
- Books like A Little Life
- Books like A Man Called Ove
- Books like A Memory Called Empire
- Books like A Wrinkle in Time
- Books like All Systems Red
- Books like All the Bright Places
- Books like Altered Carbon