A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

I was very confident when I previously stated that I would never read ACOTAR.

I knew this wasn’t going to be for me. I am very hard to please with Fantasy and Romance, so finding a “Romantasy” I’d actually enjoy is potentially impossible. I’d also read Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas about a decade ago and not had a good time.

I will admit I went into this book with a prejudice against it because I am sick to death of seeing it everywhere. You cannot move in a bookshop or anywhere in “bookish” social media without seeing these books. A primary reason I gave up on Bookstagram was because of this fucking book jamming up the algorithm!

The inexplicable popularity of this series is the reason publishers are now trying to drown us in Romantasy slop

So, as a generally discerning reader, why the hell did I put myself through reading this? My husband (who is not immersed in any online reading communities and mostly reads Warhammer novels and Malazan) decided he wanted to read some popular “smutty” books to see what the fuss was about. Since he was reading it, I gave in to morbid curiosity, thinking at least I’d be able to talk to him about it and that might be fun.

I think after all the rants about how much I hated it, he now regrets encouraging me to read it with him.

Having read it now, I’ll say it is both not terrible but also in some aspects worse than I expected it to be?!

I give it two stars because it’s readable, I guess. I did manage to finish it, even if it was only ever either boring or enraging me.

The writing is bad

I do not like SJM’s writing style. The excessive em dash usage is irritating, and sometimes I was just confused by her turns of phrase. I swear, once she says “overestimated” when “underestimated” was the point, and I had to read it three times to be sure. It’s also repetitive with the same phrases and details repeated over and over and over again (green eyes, red hair, russet eye, Tamlin’s bloody baldric and whether he is wearing it and whether it has any knife in it, etc).

I think I found it worse than I expected because it’s the mother (or Patient Zero) for the rash of Romantasy everywhere now, and so I thought it might somehow be better than everything derived from it. Like the first page you photocopy is OK, but every time you copy a copy from it, the quality gets a bit worse, you know?

It’s not… I guess everyone just saw how popular this is with its lazy writing and realised they didn’t need to bother to write something that’s actually coherent with any craft to it.

I think the most fatal flaw is that this whole book is written from the point of view of Feyre. I hated Feyre. She has the whiff of a Pick Me. She’s Not Like The Other Girls. She is a Stubborn Girl who will only do the opposite of what she is told to a degree that is so absurd it’s tipping into satire. Her other personality traits are that she can’t read (and rejects reading lessons, this is not Belle!), good huntress (like a bargain basement Katniss Everdeen), and likes painting. She likes painting in such a way that makes it clear SJM has no idea how artists think – they don’t go around constantly thinking literally about how they want to paint everything they see. Feyre has absolutely no curiosity; she never questions any of the very unusual and suspicious things happening around her, and gets passively bobbed along by the plot. When she does take any action, it’s always mind-bogglingly stupid. This makes for a terrible POV character.

I think this could have been a better and more interesting story if it were either a third-person narration or multiple POV characters. If Tamlin had POV chapters, it might have made the author develop a character for him and actually think through her stupid plot. Maybe if I could read how he feels about Feyre I might have liked her or been invested in the romance in any way. And maybe the author would have been because clearly she lost interest in that – despite hanging the whole plot of the book on it – and decided about 80% in that, actually, Rhysand is way hotter, so he’s going to be the love interest and essentially sticks Tamlin mute in the corner.

(Spoilers) The story is incredibly dumb

The way it is plotted is incredibly juvenile and, honestly, lazy. The story is basically in two parts. I felt like she started off with one idea, which was Beauty and the Beast, and then got bored with that and decided to write a different story with the evil queen’s ridiculous trials.

There is so much that doesn’t make sense in this book that I’d spend a week writing this, and why would I give this trash any more of my time and effort (when SJM didn’t)?! I’m going to try to go for bullet points of what annoyed me, for posterity!

I’ll start with Feyre’s family situation:

• Feyre’s mother, who never had a good relationship with died and made her promise to take care of her sisters and father. Feyre is the youngest child. Feyre goes on and on about this promise, even though she didn’t even like her mother, and her whole family is terrible, ingrateful and treats her like a servant.
• The father was a merchant before he lost everything in bad investments. He spends his time making wooden carvings now, but for some reason, he is not the one taking things to market to sell?!
• The attitude of the father and two sisters is bizarre and feels unnecessarily cruel. I think this is meant to make us feel sorry for Feyre, but it just made me hate everybody, and made it really tiresome when she wangs on about missing them and worrying over them later in the book… and made me actually angry when they get made magically wealthy later in the book!
• I kept wondering why she decided to make them that poor and that fucking awful to Feyre! I can only assume that SJM read part of the Wikipedia about the original version of the story, decided reading that was too much research, so skipped to the shorter paragraph on the Beaumont version, and just couldn’t be arsed to write any believable, nuanced family dynamic that could provide any depth of character.

The Spring Court / Pyrthian

• Tamlin is presumably also based on the Scottish folktale, but as above, in the laziest way that removes all the interesting parts. He is “Beast”, except he is obviously hot and is only wearing a pretty mask over his eyes. His character is very blandly, passively heroic, and he also plays the fiddle.
• Lucien (Lumiere) has a bit more personality and interacts a lot more with Feyre. So much I thought we were going for a love triangle for a while… which was even more confusing because I knew from all the fan art I’d unwillingly seen on the internet that Rhysand was going to be her love interest!
• Turns out that, contrary to legend, the fae actually can lie. Which instantly makes them 1000% less interesting. The Fae are just hot people with magic powers.
• Feyre never truly questions the motivation for taking her back with them and being so nice to her when she killed their friend, and that was the whole pretext for abducting her. The whole time I’m screaming WHY ARE YOU NOT SUSPICIOUS!!!
• There are scenes where the two of them take her off for picnics in the forest, and he just stays on the blanket while Tamlin takes her off into the trees alone for a nude swim in the magic pool. This felt uncomfortably rapey (think Dennis Reynolds and the implication). I think SJM was going for romantic, but to me, it was threatening!
• Then there is the whole Fire Night debacle. She is told to stay in her room by Tamlin because it will be very dangerous. She ignores them because she wants to go to the party. Nearly gets gang raped by faeries. Meets Rhysand (Gaston?), who has all the creep vibes, and he also tells her to stay in her room. Lucien rescues her, tells her to stay in her room because Tamlin will be high on faerie horny drugs and basically in dangerous beast mode, unable to control himself because of some ritual bollocks that night. She again ignores warnings because she just has to get a midnight snack, and obviously almost gets raped by Tamlin (but it’s fine because she’s not a virgin and is kind of into it). Still, she gets mad about the bruises and pouts and tries to make him feel guilty despite being told repeatedly by different people that this is what would happen. I hate her.
• The only truly great scene in the whole book is when Feyre is briefly curious about the truth of the “Blight” and captures the Suriel, a very dangerous creature that must tell her the truth, but is too stupid to ask decent questions. The descriptions of the Suriel were genuinely great, it was atmospheric and creepy… and also this creature seemed to recognise Feyre as a dumbass and tried to help her, but alas… she was too dense to understand. And this whole chapter turned out to just be a way to have Tamlin rescue Feyre to further the “romance.”

“Stay with the High Lord, human,” the Suriel said. “That’s all you can do. You will be safe. Do not interfere; do not go looking for answers after today, or you will be devoured by the shadow over Prythian. He will shield you from it, so stay close to him, and all will be righted.”

That wasn’t exactly an answer. I repeated, “Where did the blight come from?”

Those milky eyes narrowed. “The High Lord does not know that you came here today, does he? He does not know that his human woman came to trap a Suriel, because he cannot give her the answers she seeks. But it is too late, human—for the High Lord, for you, perhaps for your realm as well …”

The best bit of the whole book, Chapter 14. Creepy eldrich horror is what SJM should be writing, not romance.
The Suriels mistake was telling Feyre what to do, she should have told her the opposite of what to do and everything would have gone according to plan.

• Some stuff happens (Rhysand leaves a decapitated faerie on their lawn), and Tamlin makes her go home. It’s boring and annoying, except it turns out her bitch sister Nesta is actually smart, but it doesn’t fucking matter because she’s not in this story, no smart characters are allowed in this story. Nesta, and the mercenary lady that was in one scene, and has more stage presence than any other character in the book, going to rescue Feyre is the book I want. She goes back because she just knows Tamlin is in danger.
• The true plot is revealed as chapter-length dialogue exposition dump thanks to Alis (Mrs Potts), who’d conveniently hung around waiting for Feyre to return. This prophecy is not only extremely dumb (if I’d been reading a paper book, I’d have thrown it across the room) and unbelievably specific… but reveals Tamlin to also be a fucking idiot because he’s basically already broken the curse and still had 3 days to get an “I love you” out of her.
• Feyre must now go to rescue Tamlin from the evil Queen.

Under The Mountain / Trials

• The one other thing I thought was great in this book, in addition to the monsters in the earlier chapters, is the human eye ring that the evil queen has! The idea of that guy’s soul being trapped in his eye forever, having to watch all this horror – that’s fucking cool. SJM does have talent with horror; why does she insist on writing romance, which she struggles with?
• The Evil Queen – who is just a cartoon character and whose primary motivation is a combination of petty revenge and wanting to fuck Tamlin – decides Feyre must complete 3 trials or solve a riddle, and then she and Tamlin can leave and she’ll lift the curse. The trials are boring and very unsatisfying, and the riddle is stupid. Feyre doesn’t bother to think about trying to solve the riddle, even though it’s not that hard, and it’s the clear, easy out that doesn’t involve her stabbing innocent faeries through the heart.
• She ends up making a bargain with Rhysand to save her life when she’s dying from her worm shit infected wounds. At this point, I think SJM has decided she prefers Rhysand to Tamlin, so now it’s all about Rhysand. And yet… and yet, what happens is he strips her naked, paints her entire body and dresses her in scraps of gauze, drugs her and makes he do sexy dances in front of the whole court every night. But this is fine… because he doesn’t rape her and he only touches her waist, we can trust that he and nobody else assaulted her because of the paint… what the actual fuck. THIS is the great love of the series?!
• In a last possible second memory montage, Feyre figures out that Tamlin’s heart is stone, so if she stabs him, he won’t die. And THEN (with the corpses of two innocent faeries at her feet), she works out the answer to the riddle was fucking love. I was so bothered by her “remembering” that Tamlin doesn’t have a heartbeat that I went back in the book to check whether this was mentioned when she was lying on his chest… and no, it wasn’t. I hate this.

Perhaps I was wrong—perhaps it was just a faerie turn of phrase. But all those times I’d held Tamlin … I’d never felt his heartbeat. I’d been blind to everything until it came back to smack me in the face, but not this time.

• They defeat the Queen. Feyre technically dies. All the High Lords sprinkled some magic on her, and now she’s a High Fae too. And I’m sure, the most special and strong High Fae there ever was in the rest of the books. Which I will not be reading.

I despair of the 4.16 average rating

I will never be able to understand the people who rate a book of this lazy quality 5 stars.

I can only, generously, think that they’re a majority of teenagers and otherwise people who have little reading experience and have not read widely.

I’m 37, and I never had a fan-fiction reading phase. The poor writing, the flat self-insert type character, the lack of world-building and retcon tendencies in the plot have a juvenile quality that puts me in mind of fan-fiction. Maybe this appeals to readers who have nostalgia for fan fiction?

There was potential here. The premise is good, SJM has cool ideas, but she can’t write characters, interesting relationships or an intelligent (coherent) fantasy story with any depth.

I haven’t even touched on the title! The title has nothing to do with the book. There is no motif of roses or thorns (as you might expect for Beauty and the Beast!) because the author doesn’t do themes or motifs at all. I found it impossible to remember the title of this; I had to think of the bloody acronym that is seared into my brain from social media.

A lot of the critical reviews I read on Goodreads get flooded with comments from fans of the series begging the reviewer to read the second book because that is when the series gets good. From what I understand, that is when SJM just decided to go full smut (this book has barely any sex in it), but no, I have no interest in forcing myself to waste time reading any more of this crap.

It is not for me!

It has put me in the mood to re-read Uprooted by Naomi Novik, which, in my memory from a few years ago, is a fantastic fantasy fairy tale/folklore story with lots of cool magic and compelling characters. I am now cleansing myself with that well-written book!