Rant incoming
Nov. 24th, 2021 07:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotLast week I read Sarah J. Maas's Throne of Glass while I waited for A Court of Thorns and Roses to come in from ILL. Each is the first book of a YA series, unrelated to each other although, expectedly, given the titles, they're similar in that they're fantasy with a focus on rulers, so well within my interests.
From pretty early on I was sure that Throne of Glass was (like The False Prince) heavily inspired by The Thief. The MC starts out in a prison situation, check. The people who take her out are haughty and superior but gradually become humanized and start caring about her, check. She is intelligent and hates limiting herself to keep others' expectations low (but is clearly doing that both to her captors and on their orders to other people), check. She is cagey about her origins even to the reader, check. She is suspiciously interested in the well-being of the countries menaced by the imperializing power her keepers belong to, check. The major difference being the rest of the plot - she participates in a competition to find the King's Champion, and has a love triangle with the prince and his guard captain which the prince appears to win. But by the end of the book, there was no revelation about her being a Secret Princess even though I was absolutely certain that she was, due to her having been found by the assassins who trained her when she was eight and the royal family of Otherfantasycountry having been all murdered when she was eight - so I checked Wikipedia. I found I was right, BUT also that as the series progresses, she ends up with a completely different guy who is more dangerous, more powerful, more magical, etc. This is a big turn-off because by now I'm reasonably invested in both the prince and the captain as love interests, so I decided not to bother reading the rest of the series. (I also had some issues with the worldbuilding ... magic and the Fae are supposed to have vanished within the last generation and it just didn't feel that way, and I knew it was going to keep niggling at me.)
So I skipped over to A Court of Thorns and Roses when it came in. It's interesting - a sort of combination of the traditional Beauty and the Beast fairy tale (three sisters, beast comes in and demands the youngest, etc. although it's a lot more complicated than that) and Tam Lin (the love interest's name is Tamlin, he's a fae lord in thrall to a high queen, the MC travels to her court to save him). The writing is a lot better than the previous, you can really see how she's improved, and while it's YA it definitely feels like the kind of YA that's now being written for adults who don't want to stop reading YA - there's no real reason for it to be categorized as YA rather than adult except marketing. I was useless last night until I could go to bed and finish it because I had to know how it ended!
Feyre, the main character, starts out very hostile and suspicious, but Tamlin is always ridiculously kind to her and eventually she falls in love with him. As in Throne, Tamlin has a right-hand man, but even though he's a great character there's no love triangle, just a growing friendship, which is great. Really, I can't overstate how much I love these characters' dynamics.
Toward the end of Feyre's stay with Tamlin, they're interrupted by Rhysand, an emissary from the high queen who is menacing as hell to Feyre. He's only there briefly, but then at the end of the book, when they're all in the high queen's court, he gives her help in exchange for her spending one week of every month at his court (he's the most powerful and dangerous of the fae lords) and also goes on to do a whole lot of very iddy stuff to her in order to get Tamlin mad so that when he's freed, he'll take down the queen. Eventually the queen gets taken down and Feyre becomes a fae herself, yadda yadda yadda, and I'm like omg! she can be with Tamlin forever now! OTP!
But I have a real suspicion of Maas after seeing what happened with Throne's series, so I check out wikipedia and NO! Tamlin isn't even mentioned in the later summaries because in the next book Feyre realizes that she and Rhysand are soulmates! What the fuck!
I am hooked enough to read on despite this, unlike with Throne of Glass, in part because at least Rhys has been introduced already and he does have an old-school fanon!Draco vibe that I can see the attraction of, but like ... this is not playing fair with readers. The whole point of Court is that Tamlin and Feyre's mutual love is so strong and enduring that they put up with all kinds of shit for each other, Feyre risking her life repeatedly to save him (and the entire fae world). I definitely see where the new pairing is coming from - Feyre has a lot more contact with Rhys at the high queen's court, he is going through it with her more than Tamlin, and he has that fanon!Draco mask that keeps people from realizing the depth of his pain, except for her - but I am skeptical of Maas's ability to pull it off. We shall see.
Last night I was very excited to use my little kerosene lamp to read by, because it gives off warmth so I didn't want to use it all summer. But there was dust and cat hair in it and now the room is basically covered in little sooty smuts? FFS. I cleaned some of them up last night when I realized, but I'm only now seeing the full extent of it.
From pretty early on I was sure that Throne of Glass was (like The False Prince) heavily inspired by The Thief. The MC starts out in a prison situation, check. The people who take her out are haughty and superior but gradually become humanized and start caring about her, check. She is intelligent and hates limiting herself to keep others' expectations low (but is clearly doing that both to her captors and on their orders to other people), check. She is cagey about her origins even to the reader, check. She is suspiciously interested in the well-being of the countries menaced by the imperializing power her keepers belong to, check. The major difference being the rest of the plot - she participates in a competition to find the King's Champion, and has a love triangle with the prince and his guard captain which the prince appears to win. But by the end of the book, there was no revelation about her being a Secret Princess even though I was absolutely certain that she was, due to her having been found by the assassins who trained her when she was eight and the royal family of Otherfantasycountry having been all murdered when she was eight - so I checked Wikipedia. I found I was right, BUT also that as the series progresses, she ends up with a completely different guy who is more dangerous, more powerful, more magical, etc. This is a big turn-off because by now I'm reasonably invested in both the prince and the captain as love interests, so I decided not to bother reading the rest of the series. (I also had some issues with the worldbuilding ... magic and the Fae are supposed to have vanished within the last generation and it just didn't feel that way, and I knew it was going to keep niggling at me.)
So I skipped over to A Court of Thorns and Roses when it came in. It's interesting - a sort of combination of the traditional Beauty and the Beast fairy tale (three sisters, beast comes in and demands the youngest, etc. although it's a lot more complicated than that) and Tam Lin (the love interest's name is Tamlin, he's a fae lord in thrall to a high queen, the MC travels to her court to save him). The writing is a lot better than the previous, you can really see how she's improved, and while it's YA it definitely feels like the kind of YA that's now being written for adults who don't want to stop reading YA - there's no real reason for it to be categorized as YA rather than adult except marketing. I was useless last night until I could go to bed and finish it because I had to know how it ended!
Feyre, the main character, starts out very hostile and suspicious, but Tamlin is always ridiculously kind to her and eventually she falls in love with him. As in Throne, Tamlin has a right-hand man, but even though he's a great character there's no love triangle, just a growing friendship, which is great. Really, I can't overstate how much I love these characters' dynamics.
Toward the end of Feyre's stay with Tamlin, they're interrupted by Rhysand, an emissary from the high queen who is menacing as hell to Feyre. He's only there briefly, but then at the end of the book, when they're all in the high queen's court, he gives her help in exchange for her spending one week of every month at his court (he's the most powerful and dangerous of the fae lords) and also goes on to do a whole lot of very iddy stuff to her in order to get Tamlin mad so that when he's freed, he'll take down the queen. Eventually the queen gets taken down and Feyre becomes a fae herself, yadda yadda yadda, and I'm like omg! she can be with Tamlin forever now! OTP!
But I have a real suspicion of Maas after seeing what happened with Throne's series, so I check out wikipedia and NO! Tamlin isn't even mentioned in the later summaries because in the next book Feyre realizes that she and Rhysand are soulmates! What the fuck!
I am hooked enough to read on despite this, unlike with Throne of Glass, in part because at least Rhys has been introduced already and he does have an old-school fanon!Draco vibe that I can see the attraction of, but like ... this is not playing fair with readers. The whole point of Court is that Tamlin and Feyre's mutual love is so strong and enduring that they put up with all kinds of shit for each other, Feyre risking her life repeatedly to save him (and the entire fae world). I definitely see where the new pairing is coming from - Feyre has a lot more contact with Rhys at the high queen's court, he is going through it with her more than Tamlin, and he has that fanon!Draco mask that keeps people from realizing the depth of his pain, except for her - but I am skeptical of Maas's ability to pull it off. We shall see.
Last night I was very excited to use my little kerosene lamp to read by, because it gives off warmth so I didn't want to use it all summer. But there was dust and cat hair in it and now the room is basically covered in little sooty smuts? FFS. I cleaned some of them up last night when I realized, but I'm only now seeing the full extent of it.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-25 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-02 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-01 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-02 12:48 am (UTC)What did you hate about it?
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Date: 2021-12-02 02:05 am (UTC)It's been a few years now, i had to go read my review and i had lots to say (oh boy). I couldnt understand Feyre's motives at all, she came off as wishy washy, tamlin was emotionally constipated, the other characters were cardboard cutouts and only appeared when some plot point needed explaining, and holy smokes did "that (descriptor) (noun) get abused in thenlast 4 hours of text(i read it in audio) and then the whole bit with the stone heart and "she died so i could live". It was SO BAD lol. Hard pass on the rest of the series!