Life of Bry

Yikes. 

If you love A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, maybe skip this one. 

Every single time I scroll on Instagram, I’m bombarded by bookstagrammers who insist ACOTAR is the epitome of modern literature, especially adult fantasy. It has to be the most recommended book on social media. I was also recommended this book by several friends, and was actually gifted book No. 1 (thanks again, Gillian, if you’re reading this!). Those people were pretty honest with me, and let me know that, while they enjoyed the books, they were kind of garbage.

It was indeed garbage. I didn’t get the hype at all. It was easily one of the top five worst books that I’ve ever read. No questions asked. Terrible writing, watered-down characters, zero emotional pull and enough cringe for a lifetime. I would say the story itself was fine, but the execution was excruciatingly awful.

That being said, I read it in a couple days, and I absolutely have to read the rest of the series. I already ordered the next two books. It reminded me a lot of Twilight — a trashy but enjoyable read that is somehow very bingeable despite its flaws. A guilty pleasure, for sure. Though pleasure feels like giving the experience too much credit. Addicting would be a better descriptor.

I’m not even sure how to summarize this, nor do I care to, so here’s a link to the Barnes and Noble listing.

I wrote this pretty quickly, because I didn’t have much time with work. I’m hoping I can hit some things more in depth as I progress through the series. Feel free to send along questions, topics, thoughts or counterpoints! I wanna hear them!

Here are all my messy 4 a.m. thoughts on ACOTAR:

CHARACTERS

I learned that this was supposed to be a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and I can see that, but it read more like a Beauty and the Beast–Hunger Games au fanfiction. Nothing felt original about this book to the point I almost thought I read it already. 

Feyre gave me Katniss Everdeen vibes if she got the Bella Swan treatment — a cold-hearted hunter who has to provide for her impoverished and broken family and a frail little human girl needing to be protected and saved by strong, super handsome immortals. *eyeroll* Add in a washed-out personality, and I’m officially checked out. 

The characters in general were overall very underwhelming to me. None of them had enough depth or had enough time to evolve into someone I’d care about. 

I hated Tamlin the most. Despite his ‘not-like-other’ High Lords schtick, he gave me manipulative and icky vibes. He lied to Feyre beyond what he had to exclude because of the curse for his own gain and made excuses for his behavior by using her family as bait. In turn, his deceit led to Feyre being blamed for not catching some imaginary drift that nobody even hinted at (because they couldn’t) and that she wasn’t given a proper opportunity to act on. Let’s not forget, HE BASICALLY KIDNAPPED HER. I don’t care if he did so because he was trying to save his court or whatever bullshit Maas tried to candy-coat this plot point with. At its core, Tamlin kidnapped Feyre and imprisoned her — she had the ‘option’ to leave the house, but her safety wasn’t truly guaranteed and her residence would still be dictated by Tamlin to give her some type of protection. Not really an option.

Maas tried way too hard to make Tamlin likable, and it did the opposite for me. It was like he was forced onto me in the same way he forced himself onto Feyre.

0/10, stay away from me.

Feyre herself was just meh. She has potential to be better. She was strong and had a lot of fight away from the immortal beings, which I love to see in female characters. Feyre did kill Andras at the beginning of the book, but we later find out that he was willingly waiting to be killed in an effort to break the curse on Tamlin. In my opinion, that takes away from Feyre’s strength as a character. She doesn’t really do anything on her own. She’s repeatedly saved by the faeries around her, and even her family is better taken care of by Tamlin’s generosity than her tenacity and wit. It’s a personal preference, but I didn’t like the whole theme of her staying away being what protects them. Her promise was to her mother — the only family Feyre ever shows real affection for at first — and there wasn’t enough of an emotional connection between her and the rest of the family for me to see her staying away as any type of sacrifice.

I also just hated being reminded that Feyre’s a weak, incompetent human every other page. Maas was most likely trying to nail home that she is very insecure, but it was too much. Way too much. There’s also a way to portray the power and strength imbalance between humans and immortals without explicitly saying it. I wanted to be shown rather than told, but Maas KEPT TELLING ME. I wanted to scream, ‘I GET IT!’ over and over until it stopped.

I think my biggest wish for the rest of the series is for Feyre to find strength in herself as an individual outside of her trio of faeries — though it will still be tainted by the fact she’s now immortal, because of course she is. I want a better character arc for her that actually makes sense and not a wishy-washy, confusing swing of stupidity marked as bravery.

Surprisingly, I liked Lucien and Rhysand the most. Lucien didn’t seem to try to hide who he was like Tamlin. He was open in his personality. He didn’t put on a front. He had a more interesting backstory with the Autumn Court that I would like to know more of, and he had an actual character arc. We see him genuinely warm up to Feyre, to befriend her in their own way, to help her and even root for her. Feyre and Lucien had WAY more chemistry than her and Tamlin ever did.

Same goes for Rhysand. We didn’t get as much of his backstory, but he was a character that tiptoed the line between good and evil. He had dimension. He was playful in his trickery. He had an ulterior motive. He didn’t try to hide it, but he left enough to the imagination to want to know more. Plus his actions spoke for him — he seemed like a better man than Tamlin.

PLOT

The story felt lazy, lacking and predictable.

Using the phrase ‘watery bowels’ twice in a book is twice too many. 

But that’s not the point. 

From the moment Feyre shot the wolf, I knew some sexy faerie was going to show up to take her as some payment for the Treaty — is the lore ever truly explained about the war and the Treaty? Doesn’t feel like it. And of course she was going to fall in love with said sexy faerie. And of course the cringe riddle at the end would have love as the answer. Love is the answer to everything, even if you barely know each other and said person lied through his teeth to you and kidnapped you.

I digress.

Also, the sisters randomly being cool with Feyre felt totally out of the blue. I don’t remember Feyre ever giving any inkling that there had been any warmth between the three of them — at least between her and them — so it felt disingenuous for them to suddenly care about her when she returned. I suppose Nesta could’ve truly had a change of heart as she spiraled after the mist didn’t affect her. But why Elain? I don’t get it. As a reader, it was a bit off putting.

I will say that once Feyre went to rescue Tamlin, the story got a lot better. The action was pretty great. I liked the challenges that were presented and the horrors lying under the mountain in Amarantha’s infernal court. I just wish we saw Feyre stand on her own more. She relied on Rhys too much that it did a disservice to her character. I want more of Feyre being a badass because she’s a badass and not because she has some fae help — which we won’t get because she is now a high court fae or whatever. 

I wanted the message of being human doesn’t mean you can’t survive, but instead we got that being human in a fantasy world gets you killed and then the immortals have to pity you enough to make you immortal too. The world is unfair, I get that. However, it just felt very inconsistent with the story, especially since Feyre talks so much about her humanity, Rhys compliments her human heart and there’s never any discussion on it. I don’t believe Feyre ever even ponders the idea of immortality, except that she would be a small blip in Tamlin’s life. Plus, she’s clearly not comfortable with the supposed gift she was awarded. They stole her human right to death without consent. That’s fucked up.

You could argue that she wasn’t supposed to die because she won the challenges and solved the riddle, but humans are inherently meant to die. I’m not buying that. It’s cheap. My least favorite trope.

Also, the pacing was a dumpster fire. Seventy-five percent of this book moves at the slowest speed imaginable. It’s terrible. That’s all about that.

WRITING

The writing on its own was just lackluster.

For Feyre loving art, I never felt a true connection with Maas’ descriptions. Feyre was experiencing something profound, but it wasn’t conveyed in a way that showed readers that rather than told them. It didn’t establish a link between the reader and Feyre as a narrator. 

The emotions in general just weren’t executed well. I’m a reader that relies a lot on pathos. You can have a shit story, but if it makes me feel, I can forgive everything else. The Infernal Devices trilogy is the perfect example of books I kind of hated, but let slide because they triggered a vast emotional response.

I didn’t have any emotional response to ACOTAR besides dread and curiosity for how it could get worse.

Maybe I’ll warm up to this series when book No. 2 finally arrives, or maybe it will simply continue to be a hate read. Either way, I have to know where this story goes, and that says a lot.

WORLD BUILDING

Finally, I think the strongest part of this book was the world Maas created. The faerie courts are nothing new, but she presented them in what I believe was a very unique way with the inner conflict between courts that contrasted the conflict between the faeries and the Mortal Lands. With the little glimpses we get of the sort of folk tales told to Feyre growing up and the bits of (what I think was) truth about the war she learned in Prythian, there’s a lot of cool details to work with. It’s a very magical and fantastical world that Maas also makes mysterious, which is such a fun thing to get to experience alongside Feyre as truth is revealed. 

The river/lake thing with stars was really gorgeous to imagine, and I wish I could rewrite it for Maas to make the writing do the concept more justice. This book had so many cool elements that just weren’t presented as strongly as they could’ve been.

I really want to see more of the different courts and see how the war affected them moving forward. I want the world to be expanded and for the lore to be properly fleshed out. Focus less on trying to make these half-assed men ‘sexy’ and more on the setting and plot. 

By the way, I have to mention it because so many of the reviews I’ve seen on Instagram praised this book for its ‘spice’ (excuse me while I vomit and cringe at that term), but I’ve definitely read YA books that were more explicit than ACOTAR. It doesn’t affect my opinion one way or the other honestly, I was just expecting to clutch my pearls or something wild. 

That’s probably a good way to express my overall opinion on A Court of Thorns and Roses: underwhelmed and expecting more.

Hopefully A Court of Mist and Fury is better. … Or worse. That would kind of be fun, too.

One star.