4.5/5
If you're a fan of Holly Black's The Cruel Prince, I would highly recommend you give The Shadows Between Us a try. They are similar in that our female protagonist isn't afraid to be cruel to get what she wants, and that both the female and male leads have very gray morals.
I liked that Alessandra was so different from most YA leads who are usually goody-two-shoes fighting for justice. I can't say that I liked her as a person though, because the things she does and the way she thinks were too cold-hearted for that. The same can be said for the Shadow King. I was shocked to find that he approved of her calculated methods, and I wish that he'd been given a more developed backstory.
While The Shadows Between Us is the closest novel to The Cruel Prince that I've read so far, and it is very impressive for that in itself, it doesn't quite match up to The Cruel Prince because its characters lack the charisma of Jude and Cardan. But characters like Jude and Cardan are rare, so to set every character to that standard would be unjust. Plus, Shadows had a host of side characters that I appreciated.
Though I complained earlier about do-good protagonists, I did feel like the novel lacked a bit of justice at the end. Other than that, The Shadows Between Us was extremely satisfying, with strong themes of independence and feminism, and I would recommend it to mature teens.
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