Book Summary
“The sexy, action-packed first book in the #1 New York Times bestselling Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) series from Sarah J. Maas.
When nineteen-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a terrifying creature arrives to demand retribution. Dragged to a treacherous magical land she knows about only from legends, Feyre discovers that her captor is not truly a beast, but one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once ruled her world.
At least, he’s not a beast all the time.
As she adapts to her new home, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But something is not right in the faerie lands. An ancient, wicked shadow is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it, or doom Tamlin―and his world―forever.”
– A Court of Thorns and Roses, Sarah J. Maas (Amazon Preview)
**THIS IS A REVIEW OF THE ENTIRE SERIES AS A WHOLE**
A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) Review
Initial Thoughts
First off, I will say that this series made me completely fall in love with reading again. I was still reading here and there before I picked up this series. But, nothing I had read had me completely enthralled with the world and characters the same way this did.
ACOTAR Itself
I won’t lie, the start of this book is slow. And the start of each following book is also pretty slow, But don’t worry, there is tons of action to keep your blood pumping to make up for it. It did take me a minute to really get hooked. However, once that hook happened, I couldn’t stop reading. I ended up reading all five books in the span of about 5 weeks.
Sarah J. Mass does a wonderful job of creating unique worlds for each of her stories. I fell in love with Prythian the same way I fell in love with Hogwarts as a kid. SJM creates such fun and interesting creatures in all of her stories. I love that in this series, we get to meet so many different kinds of faeries. From high fae to the more monstrous type of fae, there is a bit of everything.
Something else SJM does really well is create characters that you both love and hate. Her main characters are well-developed, although there are a few that we are still waiting to hear more about (looking at you Eris). She is really good at portraying characters that seem to be one way, and then turn out to be the exact opposite of how you’d expect.
She even does the characters that you grow to hate well. By using snarky tones, jaw-dropping dialogue, or just shady body language, she portrays the bad guys as well as she does the good guys. Overall, something SJM does well is characters.
While Sarah J. Maas’ writing style might not be for everyone, I didn’t mind it at all. Her use of repeated phrases is one of my favorite running jokes in the fandom (aka velvet wrapped steel, vulgar gesture, and invisible lint). Overall, I got used to it quickly though, and it really didn’t bother me.
As a whole, I really enjoyed this series, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. If you’ve read the rest of her novels, you know what I’m talking about! And as a side note, I even loved A Court of Frost and Roses, aka the Christmas Episode. It was a nice break from all the trauma of the first three books before going into A Court of Silver Flames. It’s not for everyone, but it was definitely for me!
Tropes
Some of my favorite tropes in this book were “Nice Job Breaking It, Hero“, “Jerk with a Heart of Gold“, and “Good Is Not Soft“.
For a full list of tropes addressed in this book (with some spoilers), check out this list.
If You Like That, You’ll Like This
Since this is a pretty typical high fantasy, there are tons of similar books that I can’t recommend enough. If you haven’t read it yet, I definitely also recommend SJM’s Throne of Glass series & Crescent City series (reviews coming soon!), The Plated Prisoner Series by Raven Kennedy, and the From Blood and Ash series by Jennifer L. Armentrout.
All of these recommended books I read after ACOTAR and they kept my reading streak going.
