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A review by eemilycolleen
A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
THIS ONE'S FOR THE GIRLS!!!!!! how to even explain! the girls who get it, get it: this book is my platonic ideal of fantasy romance. acosf is all of the painful trauma and halting recovery and tentative grace of acomaf, only instead of darling feyre as our protag, we get someone far more suited to my particular tastes. someone sharp, and mean, and barbed, and brimming with self-hatred and cruelty and desperation and bitterness; someone who falls further than anyone should fall and then reaches down into the dark pit of herself, smiles through the blood, and heaves herself out of the dark, inch by inch. we get nesta archeron. "she was going in," sjm writes in the prologue, "but she would not go gently." and she does not.
i lost my mind over and over again for nesta archeron. there's nothing on this planet i love more than a horrible girl. i'd die for her, i'd kill for her, i'd train to become a military general for her. i loved everything here: the burning tension behind her offscreen fight with amren reverberating through the whole book; the core premise of the court sending her to the house of wind to train with cassian and work at the library; the hard work of relearning your relationship with your body as you recover from trauma and grief; the careful, pure friendship that grows between nesta, gwyn, and emerie; the dancing and the music and the BALL SCENE!!!; the entire valkyrie plot; the hiking interlude (which made me weep. I'LL ADMIT IT!); the swordplay (nothing sexier); the EXPERTLY played trope of sex as competition and challenge masking emotional connection. and maybe most of all, nesta's relationship with the house, and with those 10,000 stairs she tortures herself with and finally masters, realizing that the real reward is back at the beginning — uncovering the home she has made for herself, the long way around.
but mostly i just loved nesta. the image of the "beautiful, fractured darkness" as the heart of the house, as nesta's heart? the sharp broken jagged edges as not only necessary but also the burning, best parts of you? cool!!! crying!! it absolutely ended me that the final key to the climax was not just nesta's love but nesta's voicing of her love: her owning it, claiming it, sharing it with the people lucky enough to call her family. may we all be so lucky — to love and be loved, openly, without restraint, through the dark. i feel lucky to know nesta's love, and her pain, and her darkness, and her hope. i feel grateful, goddamn it, for sarah j maas. YOU GOT ME, SARAH!!
quotes because i literally could not create a more perfect woman For Me:
- "we're going to have a wonderful time together." they'd likely kill each other.
- they had thrown them all to the wolves. so nesta had become a wolf, armed herself with invisible teeth and claws, and learned to strike faster, deeper, more lethally. had relished it. but when the time came to put away the wolf, she'd found it had devoured her, too.
- "i look forward to your silence." / "glad to see you woke up ready to play, nesta."
- "for you, i have no strategies."
- keep reaching out your hand, cassian had told her. but what would it matter, she began to wonder, if no one bothered to reach back?
- "whatever you need to throw at me, i can take it. i won't break."
- "you'd train me into a weapon and i'd be just that: someone else's weapon."
- "she made ballrooms into battlefields and plotted like any general."
- "nesta is a wolf who has been locked in a cage her entire life."
- the fighting was only part of it. the training would sustain her, funnel that rage, but there had to be more. there had to be joy. there had to be music.
- "how's the training?" / "good. we're learning how to disembowel a male."
- this person she was becoming, emerging into day by day? she might even like her.
- the world was beautiful, and she was so grateful to be in it. to be alive, to be here, to see this. she stuck out a hand over the railing, grazing a star as it shot past, and her fingers came away glowing with blue and green dust. she laughed, a sound of pure joy, and she cried more, because that joy was a miracle.
- she wanted to live, and live well, and live happily.
AND FINALLY, EVERY TIME NESTA SMILES THROUGH BLOOD, including but not limited to:
- nesta grinned through the blood she knew was splattered on her face.
- she bared her teeth in a feral grin at the mountain. "we win the whole damn thing."
- blood flowed from her mouth, her nose, but nesta smiled anyway, its tang coating her tongue.
i swear to god. sexiest woman alive. also one last thing: the repeated image of their calluses rasping against each other as they hold hands. SARAH J MAAS, i am in your walls. thank you for seeing me
i lost my mind over and over again for nesta archeron. there's nothing on this planet i love more than a horrible girl. i'd die for her, i'd kill for her, i'd train to become a military general for her. i loved everything here: the burning tension behind her offscreen fight with amren reverberating through the whole book; the core premise of the court sending her to the house of wind to train with cassian and work at the library; the hard work of relearning your relationship with your body as you recover from trauma and grief; the careful, pure friendship that grows between nesta, gwyn, and emerie; the dancing and the music and the BALL SCENE!!!; the entire valkyrie plot; the hiking interlude (which made me weep. I'LL ADMIT IT!); the swordplay (nothing sexier); the EXPERTLY played trope of sex as competition and challenge masking emotional connection. and maybe most of all, nesta's relationship with the house, and with those 10,000 stairs she tortures herself with and finally masters, realizing that the real reward is back at the beginning — uncovering the home she has made for herself, the long way around.
but mostly i just loved nesta. the image of the "beautiful, fractured darkness" as the heart of the house, as nesta's heart? the sharp broken jagged edges as not only necessary but also the burning, best parts of you? cool!!! crying!! it absolutely ended me that the final key to the climax was not just nesta's love but nesta's voicing of her love: her owning it, claiming it, sharing it with the people lucky enough to call her family. may we all be so lucky — to love and be loved, openly, without restraint, through the dark. i feel lucky to know nesta's love, and her pain, and her darkness, and her hope. i feel grateful, goddamn it, for sarah j maas. YOU GOT ME, SARAH!!
- "we're going to have a wonderful time together." they'd likely kill each other.
- they had thrown them all to the wolves. so nesta had become a wolf, armed herself with invisible teeth and claws, and learned to strike faster, deeper, more lethally. had relished it. but when the time came to put away the wolf, she'd found it had devoured her, too.
- "i look forward to your silence." / "glad to see you woke up ready to play, nesta."
- "for you, i have no strategies."
- keep reaching out your hand, cassian had told her. but what would it matter, she began to wonder, if no one bothered to reach back?
- "whatever you need to throw at me, i can take it. i won't break."
- "you'd train me into a weapon and i'd be just that: someone else's weapon."
- "she made ballrooms into battlefields and plotted like any general."
- "nesta is a wolf who has been locked in a cage her entire life."
- the fighting was only part of it. the training would sustain her, funnel that rage, but there had to be more. there had to be joy. there had to be music.
- "how's the training?" / "good. we're learning how to disembowel a male."
- this person she was becoming, emerging into day by day? she might even like her.
- the world was beautiful, and she was so grateful to be in it. to be alive, to be here, to see this. she stuck out a hand over the railing, grazing a star as it shot past, and her fingers came away glowing with blue and green dust. she laughed, a sound of pure joy, and she cried more, because that joy was a miracle.
- she wanted to live, and live well, and live happily.
AND FINALLY, EVERY TIME NESTA SMILES THROUGH BLOOD, including but not limited to:
- nesta grinned through the blood she knew was splattered on her face.
- she bared her teeth in a feral grin at the mountain. "we win the whole damn thing."
- blood flowed from her mouth, her nose, but nesta smiled anyway, its tang coating her tongue.
i swear to god. sexiest woman alive. also one last thing: the repeated image of their calluses rasping against each other as they hold hands. SARAH J MAAS, i am in your walls. thank you for seeing me
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent, Grief, and Sexual content