A Court of Mist and Fury by
Sarah J. Maas
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
On the one hand, I enjoyed reading the book to some degree and got through those 600+ pages in less than a week. But the only thing it says is that the book is easy to read and has a lot of local cliffhangers. Like you can't put it down at the end of a chapter, because chapters end in the middle of action. This easiness may be worth four stars. On the other hand, there is all this bad writing and plotting, poor world-building and not-thought-through characters, which drags my rating to three stars. The actual rating I settle to doesn't matter at all, with 30,000+ ratings averaging at 4.77 on Goodreads.
Concerning the writing my main complaint is that the author is very prone to repetitiveness, even more so (or maybe not more, just fresher in my my mind) than in the first book. Just about everything is a "sleight of hand". Characters still flick the invisible dust from their clothing pretty often. The first half of the book is filled with people tasting "ash in the mouth". And in the final battle almost all of the participants at some point "had a sence to look" this way or that, mostly unnerved or nauseated. And those are just examples.
Plotting is... well, it isn't. It just isn't there. Several conflicts are started or fleshed out, but nothing, absolutely nothing is resolved at the end. So here we go, a book about a girl with the posttraumatic syndrome trying to piece herself together. And I don't want to spoil anything to anyone, so... sploiler alert!
The fact that Feyre and Tamlin will not live happily ever after was pretty obvious at the end of the first book. He was too impassive, sitting on his ass and not intervening with the process of saving him. The fact that the new hero was to be Rhysand was also quite clear. He did too much Under the Mountain for it to be written off for scheming to his own ends. I was wondering only how the author would deal with the love triangle. How do you make a hero love someone so much it's enough to sacrifice everything for this love and then make this hero love someone else? Easy, as it turns out. And yes, I know that people do fall in love, when someone showed them more kindness than others. And yes, I know that people often change their heart. It happens, all the time. My problem is that "sacrifice all" part. People don't do heroic deeds for a love that's a choice between a small fish and an empty dish. But yeah, sure, Rhys is hotter. Though he somehow turns from a smart, cunning, old High Lord we knew, who makes his own sacrifices and plans, into a simple brute, who makes tactical mistakes and gets distracted by lust. As a summary, the book is a long chewing on several romantic relationship that never gets to resolving anything.
The world-building was just a little bit better than in
A Court of Thorns and Roses. Not so many data dumps at least. The puzzling piece was the evolution vs. creation problem. The world was created from the Cauldron, and yet there are allusions to some animalistic instincts that are ancient and responsible for the mating bond. Ms. Maas, just make up your mind. Please. The piece of this world that made laugh out loud was the flying over the "forested steppes" in the mountains. Again, make up your mind. They are either forested or steppes.
On top of everything else, of course, the book ends with cliffhanger, so now I will have to read the next one, because it left with a sense of an unfinished tale. A cheap trick.
As a final note, I really could do without chapter 54. I do believe that an author should assume at least a flicker of intellegence in readers and not chew for them the content of the first book in the light of the second. This self-explaining goes on for pages... And was the cover meant to portray the author?
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