A review by crazycatgeek
The Rebel Prince by Celine Kiernan

5.0

Again, I remember not entirely grasping what everything meant when I read The Rebel Prince the first time. The plot is so intricate at times, as are the characters' plans, that as a teenager, I sometimes found myself slightly confused - and yet I still loved this book. As a 25-year-old, all the confusion is gone and I love it even more. This trilogy just gets better as I grow older, because I keep discovering new things I didn't notice or understand the first - or second, or third - time I read these books.

The way everything is resolved in the end, as well as the plans Razi, Wynter, Alberon, and the others make to work things out, are just brilliant. There's so much going on and yet everything neatly ties together. Personally, I would have loved to see a little bit more of the direct aftermath of the main story; we get a wonderfully written epilogue that makes it clear where everyone stands and what must have happened (in general terms, anyway), but I just really want to know exactly how everything came to pass and what happened to bring all the characters to where they are in the epilogue. (Maybe a novella? Oh, I would love that!)

All in all, I can't even say how happy I am that I picked up this trilogy again, since as I mentioned, it just gets better with every re-read. It made me giggle and tear up, and I've felt frustrated, angry, sad, and hopeful, often within only a few pages. Sometimes I wanted to yell at characters and at other times I wanted to hug them. Bloody brilliant, these books - not nearly well-known enough and terribly underrated, if you ask me. They deserve infinitely many more readers!