Court of Thorns and Roses

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m not sure if I can fully describe a Court of Thorns and Roses for you in a way that will be sufficient. I picked it up because I was told that if I liked the Throne of Glass series, then the author’s other series would blow me away. I finished this book feeling not blown away but definitely entrenched in the new world.

One of Maas’s biggest strengths is in creating dynamic female protagonists who don’t need men to rescue them. Unlike the majority of the teen romance and adventure novels, Maas’s girls are strong and independent thinkers. They love deeply but they don’t spend the entire book analyzing or whining about that love. Once the love of another character is realized, it is a determined fact. There’s no will they/won’t they. There’s no “he couldn’t possibly love me” or “I couldn’t possibly love him”. It’s incredibly refreshing in a genre of overly analytical and irritating female leads. I often had trouble remembering that she’s writing about someone who is essentially a teenager. These girls (and I use girl loosely because they come off the page as grown women) are not like they are in Twilight or Divergent or even to an extent Hunger Games.

In this world there are faeries and there are humans. The two worlds rarely collide. Feyre is struggling to feed her family after the death of her mother and the disabling of her father. While hunting one day in the woods she encounters a wolf whom she kills and skins in an effort to survive. The wolf turns out to be a faeire in shape-shifting form. The High Lord of the Spring Court comes to collect Feyre to take her back to the faerie realm and forces her to live there cut off from her family as punishment.

The faerie realm is being ruled over by an evil woman who wants to destroy everything. Adventures occur and tasks must be completed to survive. I can’t give away too much but it’s one of the more intense conflicts I’ve read in these sorts of books in a while.

If you like the Throne of Glass series, you’ll like this book. I imagine that the follow ups in the series will be just as detailed, vivid, and intense as the first one. I’m interested to see where Maas takes Feyre next.


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