Reviews

A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas

Only show reviews with written explanations

princessrobotiv's review against another edition

2.0

Overall series rating: 2.67

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The (semi) final installment of the A Court of Thorns and Roses series suffered terribly from a flagrant lack of editing, a flimsily-constructed plot, and gratuitous amounts of purposeless, cringey navel-gazing that added nothing to the narrative.

In short, this read like a shitty first draft.

Let's begin with what worked:

✔ The relationship between Feyre and her sisters: The uncontested highlight of this book imo. Where previous installments painted Nesta and Elain in abstract archetypes (the cold and unyielding shrew / the kind and innocent ingénue), this volume brought each sister into the forefront of the narrative, where they developed some small degree of depth as they grappled with their forced immortality. I appreciated the pacing of each character's growth, and found the scene after Hybern's death where the sisters sleep next to one another to be one of the novel's more moving passages.

✔ Representation of trauma: As in previous installments, almost every character struggles to heal after moments of physical, emotional, or sexual trauma. Maas doesn't flinch from showing us the costs of this, or the little ways in which trauma can impact somebody's life (Nesta's aversion to bathing, for example). That Maas seems to have a "thing" for traumatizing characters as an excuse for character growth is a different discussion, and one I look on less favorably.

✔ Battle scenes: The writing was at its best (take this liberally….) during scenes of high action, particularly the Battle of Adriata and the first battle with Hybern, when Cassian's prowess is described in detail. It felt like these scenes received some level of editing that the others did not - or perhaps Maas is simply better at writing action, who really knows. All I can say is that I had flickers of hope about the direction of the novel during these scenes.

✔ Elriel: Against my better judgment, I find them cute. I'm a forever sap for the death & the maiden trope.

Now for the things that didn't work.

Literally everything else.

No, seriously. But I'll hit on a few major points.

✘ The writing: Bad. Really bad. Let's take a look at a passage and examine:

"Even if all seven courts ally," I said as we plucked grapes from a silver bowl in a quiet sitting room in the House of Wind, having left the dim library for some much-needed sunshine, "even if Keir and the Court of Nightmares join, too . . . Will we stand a chance in this war?"
Rhys leaned back in the embroidered chair before the floor-to-ceiling window. Velaris was a glittering sprawl below and beyond - serene and lovely, even with the scars of battle now peppering it. "Army against army, the possibility of victory is slim." Blunt, honest words.
I shifted in my own identical chair on the other side of the low-lying table between us.

Notice the jarring and pointless degree to which each character's position in a room and the positioning of the objects within the room is focused on. The book is RIDDLED with this. It's an astonishingly amateurish flaw, and that it occurs with such unchecked frequency is freaking unbelievable.

Other readers have discussed the overuse of ellipses and dashes, so I won't touch that (though they're 100% right). To me, the above was a far bigger crime.

Then there's the head-hopping, clumsily excused by using Feyre's "gift" in order to jump into different character POVs - or even to jump needlessly into a past scene in Feyre's POV??? The whole scene where Feyre picks her crown had no reason to be a flashback, yet it was crammed into the middle of a scene and italicized. I've seen fanfiction authors and novice writers decimated over doing something like this. Where was Maas's freaking editor??

✘ The plot and world building: Horrendous. It was flimsy in book one, bad in book two, and just an unholy level of incomprehensible swill in book three.

The plot was . . . I mean, an obvious excuse to throw our characters into a righteous war against a seemingly insurmountable foe for the dramaz. Hybern was a laughable, one-dimensional villain touting standard-issue genocidal rhetoric. The Cauldron has always been dumb as hell and poorly rendered. The oft-referenced "other world" from which creatures like Amren, the Bone Carver/the Weaver, and Bryaxis hailed was described in intentionally obfuscating language because Maas clearly had only the most basic understanding of how that world worked or what its rules were.

The world building and magic system? Barely coherent. Seriously, a tangled mess of retconned, make-it-up-as-you-go nonsense. I'm not even going to bother trying to dissect any of the inconsistencies because I'd spend more time on that than Maas spent developing it all, to be honest.

✘ Let's talk about the Ouroboros a.k.a. Maas tries to shoehorn her trilogy into a chiastic structure for no apparent reason except she thinks it's dramatic and profound, even though that construction makes no sense for the narrative.

Feyre begins and ends in the Spring Court, but why? The passages with her as a "spy" in Tamlin's court served no purpose - what information Feyre gathered was CLAIMED to be important, but it truly had almost zero impact on the plot and could have just as easily been ascertained by Azriel, the spymaster? The entire thing was an excuse to allow Feyre "revenge" against Tamlin for being a dick to her, but that doesn't even make sense thematically. Feyre's journey has been about moving past Tamlin, towards a happier and freer future. So in what way does throwing her back into the arms of her abuser give her OR the readers any sense of gratification/absolution? She even says later that it really didn't do crap.

This was the most obvious example, but I found that none of the call-backs to the first novel worked. And I mean, the fact that there's a magical item literally called the "Ouroboros" is just . . . Lmao. She was sitting there like, "How can I communicate this very fancy literary technique I have decided to force into my novel?" and decided on the direct, bash-it-over-our-heads approach. That the Ouroboros turned out to be so anticlimactic was just the final spit in the face.

✘ General character nonsense: Okay this one is pretty broad and encompasses the god-awful "tying up" of plotlines for our supporting cast, the forced "diversity," the build-up for Maas's next spin-off novels ft. Nesta, and the gratuitous navel-gazing.

First, plotlines - the best (and by that I mean worst) example is the "Prince of Merchants" aka the Archeron patriarch who received a grand moment of redemption by arriving with an armada just when his little girls needed him the most. Sob. Choke.

Just kidding, it was grossly transparent and made no sense.

Other examples include the anticlimactic end of the Bone Carver/Weaver and the way dramatized end for the Suriel. I was like, "Am I watching a play mocking traditional depictions of heroic deaths in Greek tragedies? No? This is for real?" Just…lmao.

The "diversity" was terrible and offensive. I mean, everyone's "golden brown skin" was cited so many times that you could just feel Maas thinking, "Let those meanies call me racist NOW! Nobody is white :) I say it five billion times." Representation of sexuality was even WORSE somehow, with Helion and Mor both flagrantly written as the "greedy bisexual" (even though Mor should have just been a lesbian??? Whatever.) I mean also, you don't get points for including different sexualities by throwing in gross discussions about everyone's sex lives. Mor's coming out was . . . Awful. Just awful.

As for the Nesta plotline, like, have you ever watched a TV series and then a few episodes before the end, you hit an episode that randomly features a popular supporting character, where they go run off and do their own thing and meet new characters who are clearly written to be "important" even though they have no connection to the current plot or cast? And you're like, "Oh. Okay. There's a spin-off coming. Goddammit."

That was this book. I was cool with Nesta overall, but the whole "What breed of MONSTER are you? By all the Gods, I tremble!!!!!!" shit was tiring.

Navel-gazing. There was so much "characters watch as other characters have emotional or sexual moments together even though there's no reason for it at all" that it became laughable. Likewise for the constant attention paid to what everyone is wearing, how they shake their hair/how their clothes move on their body with every tiny gesture (and it's gilded by the light!!!!!!), and who/where/how much each of them are screwing somebody else.

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Anyway, I'm done with this now. I've gone on long enough.