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A review by tommysyk
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
adventurous
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
2.0
Quite enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. I needed some YA fluff to easy my mind and found some of the stuff in this (read: the first few chapters and the last 30% of the book) to be really thrilling. As a Beauty and the Beast retelling, it shoots itself on the foot almost immediately, but whenever Maas weirds things out and goes full medieval, it works as a fantasy epic with an intense cartoonish caricature of colonialism in magical lands.
The thing is, both main characters are absolutely painful to stand. Feyre has no agency at all for most of the novel, makes baseless and senseless decisions throughout, and her narration often falls into a pit of repetitive and endless blabbering. Her love interests aren't much better - one is boring and has no personality of his own, whereas the other is a manipulative and abusive prick. Never mind that, this is a love story that's inherently destined to fail - if Tamlin HAS to fall in love with Feyre to survive, and every single one of his moves towards gaining her affection are premeditated and planned, how am I supposed to believe that his love is real and not just a grasp at survival? And, besides her systemic-hate towards the faerie kind, which goes away almost instantaneously, what has Feyre to overcome in falling in love with Tamlin if she already desires him from the first moment she sees him (unlike Belle having to overcome Beast's monstrous appearance)?
And then again, this book has been described to me as "faerie porn", but there are exactly two sex scenes in this, and one of them is unbelievably rape-y. And the worst is that you know the author meant for it to be hot. And I know that, because the narration actually states that. Picture this: you wake up at 4am and are on your way to the kitchen to satiate your hunger with some leftover cookies, and your drunk-ass crush stumbles through the door, pins you to the wall and starts biting you even though you're saying "no". It doesn't sound hot, because it isn't.
There's a cute scene right before that, set beside a lake of starlight water. Why wouldn't you just do that over there?
Moving on. Ignoring all that, once you get to the third act of the book, things do pick up quite a bit. The world-building is stellar, stakes are felt, the villain is deliciously evil, and it does get quite a tad darker. Maybe it's the screenwriter in me, but I always picture how I would adapt a book while I'm reading it. I would (love to) adapt the shit out of this. I wouldn't treat it as an YA novel, which they'll surely do whenever they churn out a Netflix series, but as an actual artsy fantasy epic - fix all that nonsense with the central romance, shoot it in full 4:3, and keep all the gnarliness of violence in there. This might sound delusional, but I'm 100% certain it'd work wonders.
The thing is, both main characters are absolutely painful to stand. Feyre has no agency at all for most of the novel, makes baseless and senseless decisions throughout, and her narration often falls into a pit of repetitive and endless blabbering. Her love interests aren't much better - one is boring and has no personality of his own, whereas the other is a manipulative and abusive prick. Never mind that, this is a love story that's inherently destined to fail - if Tamlin HAS to fall in love with Feyre to survive, and every single one of his moves towards gaining her affection are premeditated and planned, how am I supposed to believe that his love is real and not just a grasp at survival? And, besides her systemic-hate towards the faerie kind, which goes away almost instantaneously, what has Feyre to overcome in falling in love with Tamlin if she already desires him from the first moment she sees him (unlike Belle having to overcome Beast's monstrous appearance)?
And then again, this book has been described to me as "faerie porn", but there are exactly two sex scenes in this, and one of them is unbelievably rape-y. And the worst is that you know the author meant for it to be hot. And I know that, because the narration actually states that. Picture this: you wake up at 4am and are on your way to the kitchen to satiate your hunger with some leftover cookies, and your drunk-ass crush stumbles through the door, pins you to the wall and starts biting you even though you're saying "no". It doesn't sound hot, because it isn't.
There's a cute scene right before that, set beside a lake of starlight water. Why wouldn't you just do that over there?
Moving on. Ignoring all that, once you get to the third act of the book, things do pick up quite a bit. The world-building is stellar, stakes are felt, the villain is deliciously evil, and it does get quite a tad darker. Maybe it's the screenwriter in me, but I always picture how I would adapt a book while I'm reading it. I would (love to) adapt the shit out of this. I wouldn't treat it as an YA novel, which they'll surely do whenever they churn out a Netflix series, but as an actual artsy fantasy epic - fix all that nonsense with the central romance, shoot it in full 4:3, and keep all the gnarliness of violence in there. This might sound delusional, but I'm 100% certain it'd work wonders.