The second book also allowed Black to get at what she sees as the series' big question: What Jude would be willing to do for power? 'But escalating is not necessarily easy to do, so that is both the fun of it and also the nervous-making part.' 'What I love about them is we already know the characters and now basically (I'm) just escalating all of the tension,' she said. But after writing a host of books series, Black knows her way around writing second books. Events that she originally planned for the second book ended up at the end of 'The Cruel Prince,' so she had to rearrange the timeline. Toggling between a fantasy land and the real world is tricky, but Black said one of the most difficult parts of writing 'The Wicked King' was plotting. For a writer (and her readers), the contrast is significant. Jude's complicated childhood also interested Black because, while the book is mostly set in Faerie, which gives it a feeling of high fantasy, every once in a while Jude puts on jeans and sneakers and goes to the mall in the human world. 'They're beautiful and terrible and inexorable.'īlack came to the idea of 'The Cruel Prince' through her main character Jude and how being raised by the man who killed her parents would shape her. She thinks she keeps coming back to fairies because of the sense of awe and wonder they bring. She started her career writing about fairies with her debut book ' Tithe' and fairies have peppered her works over the years. She must fight her way through political scheming, betrayal and her own complicated feelings for Cardan to make him the king that she needs him to be.īlack, who rose to national fame thanks to her mega-popular books ' The Spiderwick Chronicles' (co-authored with Tony DiTerlizzi), is no stranger to fantasy. In this second book, Jude's test will be to see if she can keep that power without getting herself or the people she cares about killed. Through her scheming, she's positioned herself so it is she, not her nemesis, Cardan the High King of Faerie, who holds the true power. 'The Wicked King' continues the story of Jude, a human who was raised in Faerie by the man who killed her parents when she was a young child. The third and final book in the series, 'Queen of Nothing,' is scheduled to release Jan. And yet, she said, it's the characters that she loves most about writing this series, a young adult fantasy trilogy based in a fairy world.

Chronicles of the black company