Books I Didn't Finish: A Court Of Thorns And Roses

In the post-Hunger Games world, no book series has managed to dominate the YA space and become the Next Big Thing, as many commentators and (perhaps more importantly) people with a vested financial interest in the YA market predicted something would. Instead we have multiple claiments to the throne, much like a dark fantasy setting might feature a host of squabbling monarchs.

One of those claiments is Sarah J Maas, who wrote extensively for a YA audience before more recently switching to adult novels (probably a smart financial decision). I’m completely unfamiliar with her work, so I decided to experience the Maas Effect for myself by jumping into A Court Of Thorns And Roses, the first book in her most popular series.

I didn’t get too far.

In A World where humans and faeries fought a bloody war centuries ago, Feyre is the daughter of a once-noble family that’s fallen into poverty. Out hunting one winter evening for her ungrateful sisters and emotionally-absent father, Feyre kills a wolf that turns out to be a faery in disguise, having slipped through the invisible border between the human world and the faery realm of Prythian. When the faery’s friend, a High Fae named Tamlin, comes to demand her life in exchange, Feyre chooses to go with him to live in Prythian rather than being messily killed in front of her family.

Then the book gets really dull and I quickly lost interest, so I can’t tell you what happens next. I assume they fall in love, as this is clearly a Beauty And The Beast retelling.

Let’s start with the protagonist herself. Feyre feels like two different characters mashed awkwardly together: on one hand she’s your typical post-Katniss girlboss huntress who faces down Tamblin with dignity and tells her family what-for when they get out of line, but on the other hand she’s also a poor, put-upon Cinderella figure, half-starved because her greedy sisters take all the food and money she brings in. As such, her being spirited away to Prythian is simultaneously a story about a hardened proto-rebel penetrating the stronghold of her enemy, and also a changeling fantasy about a wispy pauper girl who’s plucked out of her hovel and into a magical world of luxury and romance. 

These two characterisations don’t fit together, which makes it feel like Feyre is switching personalities depending on the scene she’s in. It feels like she should have no trouble standing up to her older sisters…but she just doesn’t, handing over her hard-earned money so they can buy new clothes as though she’s powerless to resist (this is ostensibly to honor an oath she made to her dying mother that she’d protect the family, but I don’t see how letting her sisters spend all their money is accomplishing that).

Despite these issues, I was cautiously optimistic about the opening chapters of A Rose Of Court And Thorns. The wintery setting is moody and atmospheric, and much like the monster in a horror movie, the land of the fae seems very interesting when we’re only being told about it.

Then Feyre actually goes there—very abruptly—and the book entered a steep nose dive from which there was no possible recovery.

The book’s prose up until this point was fairly threadbare, but that didn’t matter so much when the story was taking place in a simple medieval(?) village. But then the plot takes us into Prythian, and it’s…well it’s mostly surprisingly uninteresting, actually; the book could have just said “Tamriel’s estate was like a palace from a Disney movie” and it would have conveyed roughly the same amount of information and atmosphere.

The book’s descriptions have that (increasingly common, I’ve noticed) issue where the environment is sketched out so loosely that it feels like locations and characters are popping in and out of a featureless void. I know YA novels are often said to have overly simplistic prose, but a lot of the writing here would be simplistic even by middle-grade standards.

A fairly large chunk of the early story is taken up with Feyre over-reacting to everything she sees in Prythian in a way that quickly gets tiresome. “Tim Minchin looked at me…with the eyes of a predator! I admired the satin curtains…which no doubt hid eeeeevil!” I get that she’s supposed to have been raised from birth to hate and fear the fae, but surely there’s a more elegant way to convey that.

In its crucial early chapters, the book seems to be going out of its way to defuse any potential conflict or tension. Timon Of Athens offering to let Feyre come and live with him in his luxurious palace instead of killing her already defangs the story inherently, but then he also reassures her repeatedly that he’s not going to hurt her, tells her that she can just hang out and vibe instead of working to earn her keep, and just to make absolutely sure the reader doesn’t get too excited about anything, Feyre is also free to leave at any time as long as she doesn’t cross the border back into the human world.

That leaves the sole early source of conflict being Feyre’s family back home, who’ll starve without her. Every second she spends in Amblin Entertainment’s estate, her family are slipping closer and closer to starv—oh wait, he arranged for someone to take care of them while she’s gone? Like, for the rest of their lives? And faeries can’t lie (or at least Feyre believes they can’t), so she knows he’s not deceiving her? I guess there’s nothing to worry about, then.

Now, okay, this is supposed to be a romance novel. Maybe all of these problems are excusable if the smolder is smoldery enough.

But even that doesn’t work, because Tamblo Ramblo is as smoldering as a pile of wet leaves. The guy has no real personality beyond occasionally getting pissed off at people, and despite being the beast in this book’s Beauty And The Best motif, there’s absolutely nothing beastly about him. His “beast” form is something he can transform into and out of at will, and as I spent several paragraphs describing, the story goes out of its way to make him seem as non-threatening as possible.

The only real beast-esque element to him at all is that Feyre thinks all fae are dangerous and that he’s going to melt her skeleton with magic at any moment, but it very quickly becomes apparent to both her and the reader that this isn’t the case. As such, her fear of him quickly starts to seem irrational, even kind of annoying.

I will give the book one point on the romance front for not having Feyre immediately start pissing herself over how superhumanly hot Tamlin is. I’m always annoyed when books like this are trying to do the whole “dangerous badboy” thing with the love interest, and the protagonist is swooning into unconsciousness over his immaculate jawline even though the only interaction they’ve had so far suggests that he’s at best an asshole, at worst actively dangerous. You need to build up (like, a lot) to the point where the main character is looking past his knife collection and permanent joker face tattoo to notice how dreamy his shoulders are.