A Court of Wings and Ruin by
Sarah J. Maas
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
I don't even know where to begin. Only 5% of readers give three stars to this book and yet, here I am. And it's not even that I didn't like the book! I enjoyed it! A lot! The writing is absorbing and easy to read and process. And yet...
First of all, a lot of authors are susceptible to word-parasites, but Maas takes it to another level. She's so prone to them, they keep jumping out of pages. I lost count how many times someones eyes shuttered (what does it even mean, like physically?) and it's not the only example. Usually, there are one to three such words or phrases, but in this book there are at least eight that were repeated needlessly over and over.
My second problem with this book is the attempt at diversification. I heard that fans were complaining about the low diversity in the two previous books. Apparently, it was the reason why Maas tried to incorporate some... I'm not sure it made the book better though. The diversity per se is very important and I'm always thrilled to see it. But here it's more like an after-thought, tucked in because the fans pointed it out. In the first two books there is no mention about any other types of sexuality than good old heterosexual relationships (or no less heterosexual rapes). Here, we are introduced to several homo- and bi- characters, but 1) we don't know much about them; 2) their relationships are not shown at all; 3) it's more like "don't worry, there are gay couples in this world too". Not impressive.
The characters are still very naive, all of them, not only "young and reckless" Feyre, even though they are battered and hurt enough. So my third problem lies with real-life history starting to show up in the series. While it was a more or less imaginary world, it was easy to deal with naivety. But as soon as almost transparent references to recent (spanning a couple centuries) events appeared, along with author's naive interpretation and moralization, I started to feel... I don't even know... slightly offended? I believe that if an author wants to put a historical perspective and lessons into a fantasy book, their understanding of history, events, human behavior, and causality must go much deeper than this.
And that leads to my fourth (is it fourth?) big issue. I so didn't appreciate the jumble of folk tales from different cultures! Sometimes, those cultural references are perfect, because they touch something in our subconscious, tug slightly, and make the readers more open and raw. In this case, however, it didn't quite work. I'm already tired of everyone trying to incorporate Koschei into their stories. He became quite fashionable of late. And mostly misunderstood. Some other references to Slavic, Roman, and Greek mythologies were also not very skillful.
Which leads to my final issue! This book is a fine example of grave digging! So many ancient monsters were dug up and forced to act on the pages, it's amazing! And very cheap. Because let's face it, digging up ancient monsters to solve all the problems is too easy a solution to make a good plot. And then the authors kills them all off!!!! Apparently, in order to spare her favorite characters from paying their debts. I couldn't see any other good reason to first bring those monstrosities into the plot and then permanently get rid of half of them. The other half is stoked up for the next book, where they probably will continue to haul the plot.
That's about it! Only five major issues :) It's hard to believe after I wrote them all down, but I did enjoy the book . And I will be reading the next one.
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