Review: A Court of Thorns and Roses

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

More and more often, searching for a new book to read, I swallow the bait of the public opinion and choose a highly praised one. I need to stop, because more and more often I have to start a review with "I don't understand how that can be rated so high". At least this one wasn't as bad as some others I read recently (say Red Rising), so it's fine.

I laughed out loud at the first paragraph. The book starts with the heroine "monitoring the parameters of the thicket for an hour". Yes, I know this word can be used in this context, but should it? Am I reading a SciFi? By the second page I couldn't get rid of the feeling that it's a version of the Game of Thrones. Winter, the Wall, deadly tall creatures... And the heroine and her family didn't bother to store enough food and fire wood for the winter. Really? Either the author has a very vague notion of how it works, or tries to picture Feyre as completely and irrevocably stupid. And then comes the data dump, it goes on and on, for several pages... I don't think a data dump is a good way of world building, but this method is repeated several times in the book; there are at least three clusters at least five pages long each with nothing but data dumps on them.

After that initial "world building" the action starts. Sort of. First it's the Cinderella, then it's the Beauty and the Beast, then it's the Beauty and the Beast with elements of the Cinderella. How clever. And all of it full of... I don't know how to call. Discrepancies? Logical holes in the narrative. Like a daughter of well-off people wasn't taught to read by eleven. Women are still "marriable" after twenty. No language barrier whatsoever after 500 years of separation. Faes requiring more than several hundred years to learn when to keep their mouth shut. And so on.

The most annoying part was repetitive descriptions. The same words and phrases were applied to similar objects and situations over and over again. I lost count how many times somebody flicked the dust from their jackets or gowns, in exact same way. And the end is just cheap.

Was it entertaining? I'd say yes. Is it worth reading? Probably yes. Is it a must read? Definitely no. Though, I admit I'll give the next book a try. It's rated even higher. Here I go again...

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