A review by skillyillian
House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas

dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

this entire review is gonna have spoilers abound. buckle in, it's a long one.
(like for real i think this is the longest review i've ever written for a book.)

So idk what the fuck happened here but I have such mixed feelings about this book. I just. What happened here??? Let me clarify: it's not bad. It's really not. But there were a lot of letdowns for me here. And a bunch of really good moments, too. But I have some....concerns.

Bryce has a whole deal with the fae being misogynistic assholes, right? so she
declares herself queen of the fae and when someone's like, "hey so are you gonna do anything about all that, now that you are the sole person capable of changing it?" and bryce just goes "nah. fuck that." granted, she does change her mind later, but at the time it was just a "what the fuck?" moment. she's spent ages fighting sexism. but the second she got a chance to do something about it, she said no without a second thought. why.
and then got mad when other people were disappointed with her, and was like "well then you can uphold the tyranny, but i'm not gonna." girl where did that come from?? pull your head out. you are the one upholding the problems if you can change it and then decide not to.

sjm takes several big traditionally "feminist" stances, with bryce saying "fuck the patriarchy, we're more than incubators" and then
lidia saying "does my being a mother somehow make my choices more palatable to you?"
which like, loved it. but then we had these weird little moments that opposed what she was preaching. bryce sees someone's hair dye is fading and says some shit about seeing the "real female" underneath, as if someone can't be "real" while their hair is colored.
  feyre is mentioned about twice through the whole book, even during the acotar crossover, and is referred to as rhys's mate. Not feyre cursebreaker, wielder of the life creating cauldron, savior of prythian and high lady of the night court. just her relation to her husband.
gross.

AND my biggest problem with the way sarah treats her female characters is that everyone is tiny. for fuckin what? I saw ONE character described as "full-bodied" and that was IT, through an entire 800+ page book. I will NEVER forgive her for how she did the ocean queen so dirty. the queen of the OCEAN, and she was described as a "tiny female." like sorry but hey what the fuck???? from my notes, and i quote, "the endless, 'depthless' OCEANS and she's tiny??? teeny tiny itty bitty little thing to represent the vast swells, deep rolling tides, and stunning, dangerous beauty of all the oceans of this world and you made her micro fucking scopic. ... the ocean queen should be big. make her plus size, make her fat, make her a TRUE representation of the beauty and intensity and power that comes with being the queen of an element that takes up more space than all the land on the planet combined. let her take up the space she deserves, the space she owns!!!!!" like why the FUCK was the OCEAN QUEEN not even past four feet tall, and when she got taller to intimidate them, she didn't even make herself taller than hunt. she was still smaller than the men in the room. NO, FUCK THAT. let her tower over them!!! let puny hunt athalar cower in fear of her!!! tell us about her fat rolls, her big tummy, the way her skin has stretch marks that are lighter than the rest of her skin, like the crests of waves!!!!

just... it feels like for every traditionally "feminist" statement she made, she negated it with weird little internalized misogyny digs at her other woman characters. it makes the rest of her feminist takes come off as performative and forced imho. making the ocean queen "tiny" is a major reason i'm docking points.

but moving on. bryce is a total asshole for most of this book. when she gets back from prythian, she just refuses to acknowledge hunt's trauma because it's making him hesitate on their mission. she says she needs "all of him" but won't give him the space to process the INSANE amount of trauma he went through. 
  He goes through endless, unutterable torture and watches one of his friends chew off his other friend's hand to even try to escape, just to try to find her. and bryce? went on a long walk, watched a movie, and let someone else kill a bad guy. and bryce has the AUDACITY to say "i was scared i'd never see you again" like her journey was ANYTHING compared to hunt reliving his worst trauma but worse because he wasn't alone this time. like for christ's sake ruhn was DISEMBOWELED at one point. but bryce missed hunt and her grandma was a colonizer :(
poor fucking baby. tbqh if bryce hadn't apologized to him i would've hated her by the end of the book. she picked random fights for no reason, using his refreshed trauma to make him feel like shit for not being all in. it felt like it was put in just to create conflict between them. this was not the bryce we saw in the last two books. she does have growth by the end of the book but she also went through this weird, insane regression where she had no respect for hunt or the others around her. and, in true bryce style, failed to tell anyone her plans or thoughts out loud until it was too late and they had no choice but to guess at her plan and try to keep up. that's so fucking irritating and not a good quality in a leader.

honestly, ithan and tharion's plots were the "this could have been an email" part of this story. every time we'd be in the middle of something exciting, it would switch to one of their POVs, and i'd roll my eyes and just suffer through it. it broke the immersion SO MUCH to be in the middle of a lore dump, fight, etc., and then be like "anyway back to wolf boy and fish guy, who can't do a god damn thing right to save their lives, or anyone else's."
to ithan's credit he did get the rifle to bryce tho and his antidotes shattering were not his fault.
it just felt wholly unnecessary for them to be brought to the forefront the way they were when they just felt like interruptions for the rest of the story. i would have loved to have seen more hypaxia and jesiba working together tho, like some crime procedural sitcom combination of
hypaxia as the hofas queen and jesiba her second in command who knows more than she does.
  i would trade that for wolf boy and fish man without hesitating.

next, the crossover. good god. now, i am fully aware that the fandom caused a ton of hype for this and made it out to be the hugest thing to happen to fantasy since tolkien. but, that being said, sjm, her publisher, and marketing team all hyped the fuck out of this, too. all of the marketing for hofas was about the crossover, and she ended the second book with bryce meeting the whole inner circle. so why did she spend the entire crossover
with only two characters from acotar. you'd think for a 15 or 16 book connected universe, the first true intersection of that would include more of the main cast. like i know nesta has her own book and az is super important, i'm not saying they're not, but we got no feyre, who was only acknowledged as rhys's mate, and not for any of her real accomplishments or epithets. and we saw seven whole seconds of rhys and amren. what it was, was nesta and az saying "we're not helping you" and no one else's opinions on it. and i'm not saying those opinions would have been different but i would've liked to have seen bryce have at least one full conversation with the inner circle.
idk maybe i'm being nitpicky lmao but the crossover was not as much as i had hoped for or like i feel like they'd hinted it would be.

and the finale.
bryce being pulled into the black hole she made from the firstlight core was like, yeah that makes sense. opening a portal to essentially catch the black hole so she could enclose it like taking a fish out of its tank with a ziploc baggie was great. but when she watched the other asteri get sucked into the black hole, and then went "well, i have absolutely no way of getting back, despite being able to teleport and open portals to anywhere, and despite having just consumed a god's worth of magic. guess i'm stranded." and then she???? decides to make sure rigelus is going to go into the black hole by grabbing onto him???? make that make sense. the entire reason black holes exist is because their gravity is so strong they consume everything around them. rigelus was going in there no matter what. and bryce had no way of boosting them into the black hole, since apparently she can't teleport anymore for whatever reason. so they were just going to have to wait for the black hole to suck them in anyway because it's not like he had a way to separate himself. her grabbing onto him did nothing to ensure his demise and only made sure she was going to die without even trying to send herself back. and then hunt in the mecha piloted by the ghost of his centuries dead lover, ghost-guiding his hand to the missile button? or at least he could have sworn that's what happened.
it was insanity. i don't know how we arrived at that point but it sure did happen and get published. like please try to explain that out loud to anyone who doesn't read sjm and listen to how insane it sounds.

also, i'm so tired of every single sjm character being painfully aware and yet unaware of their surroundings. please, it's in every fucking book, and you'd think after 15-16 books she would have moved beyond "could have sworn", and yet. this is probably me being a dick but the final count was 52 times (which, in an 800+ page book, isn't a ton, but it's in every single book she writes) where something happened, like for sure happened, and someone just "could have sworn" it happened. like please just say the damn thing happened instead of giving the impression that your characters are only half aware of their surroundings.

anyway moving on to greener pastures. ruhn and lidia carried the fuck out of this book. i like their romance better than anyone else's in all of CC. they're just so good despite their occasional dumb choices. i love them. plus
lidia's connection to the galathynius bloodline was awesome, i really loved the big reveal of her being basically flame incarnate, definitely a cool moment.
  give lidia her own trauma recovery book like nesta got. come on sarah, don't be a coward. speaking of lidia tho,
her killing pollux was so sick. all the revenge kills were great. pollux, sabine, the astronomer, good shit.

overall, i think this is one of sjm's weaker books for sure. it was entertaining and gripping enough, but mostly because i wanted to find all the lore connections and easter eggs, and my bestie and i read it together, which makes reading anything fun. fuck, she could make the bible fun. the plot was fine, if not drawn out in some places, but i wasn't ever, at any point, invested in ithan or tharion. the ending was a little rushed compared to the other 800 pages of the book, but i like that she acknowledged the consequences of destroying the ruling class and that there would be a power vacuum there.
and the magic returning to avallen was lovely, despite the winged horses kinda feeling like a "fuck it why not it doesn't need to make sense" moment lmao.


also, hunt finding out about
his heritage was fucking insane but i liked it and it gave us the funniest line in the whole book, which was "I'm some weird demonic test-tube baby." and the way i fucking CACKLED at that. he's a spicy lab rat. and that's fucking amazing.
definitely a high point for me.

anyway sjm is someone you read for the characters and worldbuilding, not necessarily for incredibly strong plots, prose, or descriptions.
the whole battle at the eternal city happened and not a single building, street, blown up shopping center was mentioned. i had no idea what this battle actually looked like except there were ghost piloted mech suits and demons from hel fighting angels. and how did we even get to that point anyway?
  the amalgamation of magic and modern technology just ran rampant and it was really creative but ended up just feeling like it was trying to do too much at once for a grand finale. it kind of put more contrast on the way she'd had so much she could have done with the acotar crossover and left it all to the wayside. i don't doubt she'll do more in future books but i wish she had utilized everything acotar gave her to work with for the first time her worlds truly intersected. she pulled every CC string in her arsenal and the finale ended up feeling kind of scrambled, but ignored almost everything acotar she could have used while bryce was in prythian. it was like the first half of the book was supposed to do more work than it did and just ended up being underwhelming, whereas the second half just felt very top-heavy.

But also, credit where credit is due, connecting three different series across nearly a dozen and a half books is an insane feat of storytelling. the easter eggs and lore connections were great. i feel like she laid a lot of groundwork for other connections. she ended cc3 as if it was the end of the series, and i think it should stay that way imho. as much as i'd love more ruhn and lidia, i have had enough bryce and hunt for probably forever. this book did a lot, and carried a lot of weight for the maasverse, but i think it ended up being kinda messy. i wish the crossover had been better and that the characters weren't so prone to poor life choices for the sake of conflict. AND THE OCEAN QUEEN SHOULD HAVE BEEN FAT.
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