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spider_silk 's review for:
A Court of Wings and Ruin
by Sarah J. Maas
so for some reason i didn't really enjoy reading this book. like...barely at all. which is odd considering i adored the first two. i just wasn't feeling it this time around, and i'm not quite sure why. my current working explanation is that 1. i just finished reading Harry Potter for the first time and those books are unrivaled in just about every aspect...this just couldn't compare to that world. 2. i picked up this book 200 pages in after having put it down a few months ago, so i didn't remember details or important plot stuff and i was moderately confused the whole time (especially considering i hadn't bothered to reread ACOMAF or read a summary of it).
first off: i do not like feyre. she's fucking boring. i don't care about her at all. i think her powers are cool, but their full potential wasn't reaaallly realized in the final battle, except for healing the cauldron/rhys. speaking of the final battle...it wasn't that engaging or climactic. there were a few really great moments (amren going full monster, elain stabbing hybern in the neck) but otherwise, i wish we saw more action. and the stakes were so low...nobody died. seriously!???! NOBODY. sure, their father, but no one we followed throughout the series. they have rhys 'dying' but the battle doesn't leave enough of an emotional impact on the reader in my opinion.
the only character i really love is lucien. i also love cassian and azriel, and i used to love rhys, but i'm just a bit tired of him. all of his jokes are so goddamn predictable, and the typical YA fare. this whole book felt a little too banal. like i said, it had some shining moments, some good plot twists/plot elements (i really liked the parts where they had to make bargains with monsters. wish that those kind of had strings attached, though. we don't see many bad effects from the battle. it seemed so trivial)...but i think the protagonist being boring as shit really takes away from the story. why does rhys even love her?
i feel like i enjoyed this book less than it deserved, in a way. i think the writing style is pretty atrocious - it is really repetitive, it tries and fails to be elegant -, the dialogue is bored and unoriginal, and a few of the characters are equally overdone and lackluster (like the villain...he is very underdeveloped and meh), but i would also say that sarah j maas always has really fantastic plot 'twists' and most of her characters are dynamic, engaging, and interesting. just not to me...in this book...but i know, 'objectively', that most of them are. i think elain's development is really good. and of course, lucien's development was by far my favourite. i just enjoy cassian as a person. and while i can say that feyre does develop, it feels like the author is telling us that instead of showing (same for a lot of the main circle...she's just like 'ahh yes the battle changed them' and shows them COMPLETELY UNCHANGED acting just as before).
like i said, i think this book is of pretty good quality, i just really didn't enjoy it. to the point where i'm tempted to rate it 2 stars. (woops now i have)
last thing - too much sex. again, this is all subjective, but all the sexual jokes and then the sex scenes were so frequent that they started to get on my nerves. i like maybe one, but this was so often that it took away from the plot at certain points. and none of the jokes in this book were funny. NONE. they were too typical. the dialogue was so predictable that i would know what was coming before even having to read the next line. (okay, so that was two last things...)
i miss caring about sarah j maas's characters...i DNFed empire of storms too which upsets me because heir of fire is such a phenomenal book and i used to be so invested in celaena as a character. all her books just seem to be going downhill for me and ugh i hate it. i used to love her books so muchhhhh.