I Didn't Think I Was Cut Out for the Fairy Smut Book Club, But 700 Pages Later and I Might Be After All?

SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERS!!!!!!

There will be ALL the spoilers for A Court of Thorn and Roses here, and some bonus spoilers for A Court of Mist and Fury, since I've somehow already found myself fifteen chapters in...

While you think about whether or not you ever want to read this book for yourself and therefore do or do not want spoilers of it, here is some actual footage of me posting this book review on Goodreads:

And now, on with the show!

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Setup: I read this book because the cover was copy-pasted onto a flyer advertising the "Fairy Smut Book Club" at a college I was touring with my high schooler. Nobody else in the parent/kid tour group reacted when we walked through that hallway and passed this flyer, but I was all, "Fairy smut? What on earth is FAIRY SMUT?!? If other people know about fairy smut, then *I* should also know about fairy smut!!!" I figured, if it's good enough for some undergrads to make a whole club about, I should read it!

Later I learned that you only need four kids to start a student club at this college, AND I think all the student clubs get funding from the school, so maaaaaybe you don't have to have a super big reason to start a club there and I didn't need to feel fairy smut FOMO, but what's done is done.

All that to say that I'm willing to concede that I might not be the target market for fairy smut. But I listened to this on hoopla (having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card!) while I washed dishes and sewed some new coasters for the house, so at least I know how to pronounce all the names... but I might not know how to spell them correctly for this review, ahem.

Also, the coasters are little log cabin quilt blocks with a fussy cut bee print as the center panel. They're adorable.

Soooo... this book in general is kinda... rapey, right? Are we all getting the rapey vibe? And it's not just the scenes in which Feyre's consent is violated--the fact that I had to pluralize SCENES, because it happened more than once, is grossing me out all over again!--or the specific scene in which she was almost gang-raped by fairies at that spring sex party, but also, seriously, it was a vibe throughout the entire book. Like, that's half the "fun," ahem, of the Rhys character, right? That he's a dark, night-themed sexy boy who's always on the cusp of raping her? And he forces her to dress in "sexy," super revealing clothes that she doesn't want to dress in? And he forces her to have her "intimate areas" painted by fairy servants? And he forces her to dance I'm assuming "sexy" dances for him in public--which reminds me that the other time that she danced a "sexy" dance for Tamlin, which, yuck, SHE WAS ALSO DRUNK!--and in the morning she can't really remember what she did but she's relieved, y'all, that there's evidence that he only touched her waist and arms. Oh, and he non-consensually body-modified her.

That's rapey, right?

Also: Tamlin. Not only does he absolutely sexually assault her, because I HEARD her tell him to let go while I was trimming the batting for my coasters (I'm using stash polyester felt instead of proper batting, but I think it's working really well!) and he did not, and then she literally pushed him and I think that's when he bit her, but tbh that's not even the rapiest thing about him. So maybe it's because I listened to this book instead of reading it with my eyes, but did anybody else notice how many times Feyre says "high lord?" A high lord just spoke to her at the breakfast table! A high lord serenaded her with his fairy fiddle! A high lord wants to swim in liquified starlight with her! It's just... if she's using his status instead of his name when she thinks about him, that's because she thinks about him as his status instead of his name. And she's clearly super impressed by it, so it's definitely a factor in how she feels about him. It sets up a power dynamic between them, and crossing that power dynamic is always going to be sketchy. Like, sub in "my boss" or "my teacher" if you want to set it in the mundane world. See? It's sketchy, right? And not to mention that she's not *exactly* imprisoned inside his estate, but she IS imprisoned inside of fairy land, and if she does leave his estate then she'll get eaten so also she is kind of imprisoned inside his estate. Sub "my warden" or "my guardian" for "high lord" and it's even grosser!

All that to say that I'm not even dinging the book on stars because it's rapey, because books are allowed to be rapey if they want--it was just something I wanted to talk about. I DID personally ding the book on stars because Feyre said "high lord" into my headphones so much. It got on my nerves.

I also dinged the book for being weirdly plot-less for the first 80%, and when Feyre finally went under the mountain and started doing stuff it honestly made me even more annoyed because hey! She was always capable of doing stuff! We could have had a plot the whole time! Tamlin is apparently NEVER capable of doing stuff so it's not his fault we didn't have a plot while we were at his house, I guess. I'm trying to think of something he even DOES in the book... Okay, he came and scared the snot out of Feyre's family in Beast Mode and abducted her and did a ton of magic to ensorcell the rest of them while setting them up for life, which must have taken all the energy out of him for the rest of the book because later he makes a huge stinking deal about magicking his dining room table to a different size. Otherwise... he picnics with Feyre. He sits at the table and eats. He stands there and lets Feyre be the one to comfort that random wing-less fairy as it dies from blood loss. He gets hopped up on spring fairy magic at one of his parties and nearly rapes Feyre, and then at another party he's part of the house band. He sits on the dais with Amarantha and widens his eyes once. He sneaks her off to try to have sex with her the night before her third task, I'm only assuming so Amarantha kills them both on the spot instead of making Feyre go through the actual task. Like, half the time when Feyre is admiring how powerful or whatever he is when's he's standing there doing absolutely nothing, she's all, "His claws almost came out that time." But they didn't.

I was pretty much just listening to this book for the noise until Feyre went Under the Mountain, and then all of a sudden it got interesting! I don't know if I really liked it yet at that point--I'm still not sure if I actually liked this book at all or not--but it was surprising, and I became much more interested in the plot and unable to predict the characters' actions. I am so invested in how completely odd Rhys behaved and how he was written, for one thing. I was all, "Wait! Are Rhys and Feyre about to be A Thing? Ooh, are Rhys and Feyre and TAMLIN going to be A Thing?" I'm still not totally sure, tbh; I'm pretty sure we got some Rhys and Tamlin backstory at some point but I wasn't paying attention, so I'm not sure if Rhys and Feyre are supposed to be low-key into each other and that's why Rhys kept sticking his neck out for her, or if Rhys and Tamlin are down-low a thing and he's sticking his neck out for her to help Tamlin... or he's just supposed to be a chaos lord who's sticking his neck out for Feyre just to have something to do. Being an immortal fairy really seems like it would wear on you. I'd be bored to death after four of those Under the Mountain cocktail parties, and they've apparently been doing them every night for multiple human generations, yawn.

Okay, but until then the book was pretty uneventful and very light on graphic details, and then all of a sudden it got INSANE and I was so there for it! The worm battle was kind of stupid but Feyre was left with literally her ARM BONE STICKING OUT OF HER BODY and OMG they just left her like that! For a crazy long time! And then Rhys is all, "I'll heal you but only if you enslave yourself to me," and Feyre is dithering about how she should probably wait for Lucien to do it, but then she does the deal with Rhys and worries that it was a huge mistake, etc. So the way I'd have expected this to go is that Feyre says, "Nope, I'm loyal to a fault, that's why I'm here Under the Mountain instead of on a boat halfway across the ocean with my asshole family by now, duh, and I am of course going to wait for my pal Lucien," and then she does, and Lucien heals her.

But y'all!!!! NOOOO!!! Later, after she's done the deal with Rhys and has to do all the mostly-nude dirty dancing, she actually talks to Lucien about it, and he shames her for her decision even while in the same breath telling her that Amarantha fucked up his back torturing him and he'd only been able to stand up the previous day. AND THEN NOBODY SAYS, "SEE? IT WAS THE RIGHT CHOICE TO DO THE DEAL WITH RHYS BECAUSE OTHERWISE YOU'D HAVE DIED." Nobody mentions that AT ALL!!! I am both inordinately amused/entertained that the wrong decision *was* the right one, and irritated that nobody pointed that out to congratulate Feyre on making what it turns out was the right decision after all.

Okay, and then. And then! Obviously, the entire point of the third task should have been for Feyre to refuse it. It should have been an agonizing decision for her, of course, but in the act of refusing it, that's when the solution to the riddle should have come to her. Because the whole point should have been that she, as a human, while she doesn't have the powers that the fairies have, has the power of her humanity and that is what makes her equal to them and able to overcome Amarantha's fairy wickedness. Also, she's showing that she's no Jurien and Amarantha is obviously wrong to treat all humans like they, too, are inconstant and immoral. Because YOU GUYS. HUMANS OUGHT NOT EXECUTE INNOCENT PEOPLE IN COLD BLOOD. I'm sure that's a basic moral stance that should unite us all. If someone, anyone, any fairy tells us to, they're wrong and we shouldn't do it. If there's some magical task that instructs us to do it, the task is wrong and whoever made it is bad and we should not do it. Even if it means death, we are supposed to embrace our humanity and make the right choice.

So I was shocked--and honestly thrilled because it was so surprising--when Feyre literally murders those people just because the task told her to! OMG! I mean, she was very sad about it and she's definitely going to be traumatized for life, but I can't believe she did it! AND that it was apparently the correct move! Like, what on earth kind of amoral psychopathic fairy tale IS THIS?!? Our heroine just executed two innocents for The Greater Good like freaking Grindelwald! It would have been even more hilarious if it had been a test and she failed it, but whatever, at least the plot kept moving.

It does make sense, then, that she's turned into a High Fae herself, since she apparently gets nothing and no guidance from her humanity. Considering how poorly her family and most of that village treated her, actually, maybe she'll go all Evil Fae on them in a future book?

Okay, last thing that got on my nerves: I'm not going to try to sift back through the audiobook to check, but I swear that when Rhys and Feyre did the deal to heal her, she promised to enslave herself to him for one week a month "for the rest of her life." I was sure that part of the ending gimmick would be that because her life had ended then she was free. But nobody mentioned that, so I guess no? I could have remembered wrong, though.

No, wait, this is the last thing, but this is something I loved: We never learn what the question was that Feyre had to answer with the levers in the second task, lol!

Predictions for future books:

*We're going to learn that Feyre's mother has some sort of connection to the fairies, or some other reason for making Feyre be the one to promise to support her entire family, and not, say, her older sisters or, I don't know, her FATHER?!?

*Nesta is going to become a mercenary and there will be conflict and drama there. Because otherwise, what was the point in having that scene with the mercenary at the beginning of this book? Just to tell the news about Trouble in Fairy Land? We didn't actually DO anything with that news!

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Here lie the spoilers for the first fifteen chapters of A Court of Mist and Fury:

Are you SURE you want to keep reading? Don't spoil yourself if you think you might want to read A Court of Mist and Fury, because shockingly, it's good so far! While you think about it, here's some archived footage of how I spend my days:

Fortunately, I solved the above problem with this series, as I'm listening to it on audiobook while I sew lots of little patchwork pretties. I finished the coasters, and now I'm making blank greeting cards with patchwork fronts to give as graduation gifts. They're turning out so adorable!

Now, back to our show!

Mind you, I know nothing about the author of this series, but if I had to guess, I'd say that ACOTAR (check out how I can do the acronym title like all the real fans!) is one of her early works, and she learned a lot in the process of writing and promoting it. I wonder if she got some good feedback and applied it, or if she thought through the plot and characters with a long-term view. Because ACOMAF (I don't even know if people do acronyms for the later books or not, but I love it and I will not stop) is SO much better!

And not just better than the first book--it's SO genuinely good so far!

There's more action, yes, and although Feyre hasn't actually acted much of that action her ownself, Maas is writing in a ton of realistic trauma responses that make a lot of sense and that are also easily applied to the characters' stupid behaviors from ACOTAR. 

Like, I still don't know if we're supposed to really, genuinely think that Feyre murdering those innocent fairies for the third task was the Right Decision, but Feyre is for sure hard-core suffering from it in a way that shows that it wasn't, at least morally speaking. 

And Rhys, who was a full-on sociopath in the first book, literally told Feyre that his 50 years Under the Mountain with Amarantha had been a hostage situation for him, and he strongly implied that Amarantha had been raping him the entire time. So his awful violations of consent with Feyre, and that one bonkers torture scene where he touched her literal ARM BONE VOMIT, are still awful, buuuuuuut now they're in line with his character at that time, sort of a "hurt people hurt people"/Stockholm Syndrome/acting out one's abuse onto others sort of vibe. 

Even some irritations that I had with this very book are calming down as I get further in. I was so irritated with what a miserable bastard Tamlin was being at first, because the same thing happened in the first part of ACOTAR with Feyre's family, mainly implying that when you're not supposed to like someone, DON'T WORRY ABOUT FIGURING IT OUT BECUASE MAAS WILL TELL YOU. 

But I dunno, because now I'm pretty into what a miserable bastard Tamlin is being, AND it makes sense with his behavior in the first book, AND AND it's turning into quite a compelling domestic violence narrative that actually reads pretty realistically considering it's a fantasy novel. I still don't really love how Maas writes her secondary characters without a ton of nuance, but I would not have told you even 24 hours ago that I would be 15 chapters into the book and gushing even this much about it.

So stay tuned, I guess, because I think this book is going to see me through at least the rest of this graduation present and possibly through the Little Free Library bookmarks I'm making next!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!