You guys. Do you remember that my first introduction to fairy smut was back last Spring, when I was touring a college with my younger kid and saw a student-made flyer in a hallway advertising the "Fairy Smut Book Club," with a picture of the cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses on it? That's the entire reason why I got started reading this series! As the secret non-student participant and only active member of the Indiana chapter, I had to do my part!
On that topic, I have terrible news for you. My younger kid actually attends that college now, and I'm sorry to tell you that she reports that currently, there IS no longer a Fairy Smut Book Club. They weren't at the Activities Fair, they never post any meetings or activities on Bionic, and no more flyers have ever appeared in the hallways of the Old Library.
Friends, I appear to be the last remaining member of the Fairy Smut Book Club.
I promise to make them proud.
SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER
In all serious, DO NOT READ THIS if you ever want to read any of these books for yourself, because I want to properly write about them here, not play coy with the plot details.
If you've read them, though, here's my review of ACOTAR and here's my review of ACOMAF.
And here's a TikTok about what it's like to be me just to take up some more room on the screen in case you're still deciding...
Okay, if you're in, you're in. Here's my review of ACOWAR!
A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This has been eating at me for three books now, and so I’m just going to come out and say it:
Y’all, I don’t think that Feyre and Rhys and their good-guy gang are very smart.
I’m not going to go so far as to say that EVERY decision they make, individually or collectively, is flat-out wrong, but I’m definitely willing to say that most of their decisions are in the neighborhood of wrong-ish.
Except for when Feyre single handedly takes down the entirety of Tamlin’s Spring Court solely out of spite--that shit is HILARIOUS and is my favorite part of this entire series. It turns out that Feyre only becomes her truest self when she is being a petty little bitch, and I loved it. When they go low, you go lower, Feyre, darling! I literally cackled when she went so far as to get up in the middle of the night and go move around a bunch of rocks just so that during their fairy ceremony the next morning the first magical sunbeam would just happen to strike her and not Ianthe. Lol! Oh, and when she did a bunch of machinations to make Tamlin think that she and Lucien were having an affair, for no other reason than to piss him off! I want THAT Feyre to be my best friend and come with me to every social occasion!
Sooo…. that was the 20% of *this* book that I liked! See also: Under the Mountain in ACOTAR. If we’d stopped at Feyre’s reunion with the Night Court--I’d even have allowed that gross sex scene at the end, just because I’d been spared smut up to then--I’d have given this book 5 stars. Feyre as High Lady of Chaos and then on a buddy adventure with Lucien is just that good.
But then Maas has to go and spoil it all with another billion pages of bad decisions by people I think we’re supposed to see as smart?
BUT THEY ARE ALL SO STUPID! Which is understandable, I guess, as none of them are scholars or appear to have been academically trained in administration, politics, or bureaucracy. All their history seems to be oral, told in folk tale format? There’s also not a lot of logic, or even common sense, on display. When two more of the bloated cast of characters, Miryam and Drakon, make their miraculous appearance at the end of the book, it turns out that they hadn’t actually mysteriously disappeared at all? They’d just put a glamour over the island they’d been living on, so when fairies flew over it the island would look empty? And so everyone thought it was empty and they’d disappeared? But they hadn’t? It was just that nobody had ever thought to, I don’t know, LAND on the island and look for clues? Perhaps even look to see if they’d left a note saying where they’d gone? They were just all, wow, that island looks empty from the air, guess Miryam and Drakon disappeared what a mystery!!!
And part of their trouble is that none of the other courts trust them because Rhys spent the past several hundred years acting like a sociopath to protect his one special city. So maybe he should stop acting like a sociopath! Like, YEAH Tarquin hates you and doesn’t trust you and is unwilling to cooperate fully at first, thereby hindering your ability to defeat Hybern--you all acted like ABSOLUTE SOCIOPATHS to steal his artifact, and then you let that artifact fall into the enemy’s hands and now it’s going to kill everyone. MAYBE THAT’S WHY TARQUIN HID IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Oh, that reminds me! It’s actually 25% of the book that I liked, because my other favorite thing is how they all try to have a meeting of the “high lords” (vomit) and when Tamlin shows up, he is such a petty little douchebag and I loved it. He is my college boyfriend who, when I told him that I was breaking up with him, immediately became incensed and started screaming, “NO, I’m breaking up with YOU!!!”, and then my Uncle Sherman, who was sleeping on the couch in the den and woke up to the sound of this random-ass guy screaming at his niece out on the carport, had to come outside and be all “Young man, it’s time to go home.” Thank you, Uncle Sherman!
In all fairness, the 25% that I liked should have been more like 60%--it only wasn’t because this book is sooooo loooooong! At one point I lost serious momentum with it when hoopla auto-returned it and then when I went to check it out again for some reason like 12 people were randomly in line ahead of me and I couldn’t get it again for months, but even when I got it back the last four hours were, like… oh, right, we’re still at war and we’re FINALLY having a battle now! I keep forgetting because we keep going on side-quests to ally with people and save random magical creatures and visit other random magical creatures and make deals with magical creatures and come back to visit them again to for more wheeling and dealing or whatever and fight somebody else and have a chat with our allies and go visit the mortal world for a minute. Like, can we not do a little more of that off-screen? Or just… not?
And THEN I lost the book again for a few weeks when I had only 45 minutes left, and when I finally got it back I listened to those last 45 minutes while riding the TranzAlpine over the Southern Alps from Greymouth to Christchurch, and absolutely nothing happened in that time. Feyre talked with the legendary fairy people who’d been lost. She had a funeral for her father. Amren doesn’t drink blood anymore (and that whole side-plot to get her god powers unveiled was also stupid). For FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. UGH!
Arthur’s Pass is sooooo pretty, though!
I’m sorry to report that my second-book prediction was correct and Nesta and Elain ARE part of the ensemble cast now, and I still hate them. I’m especially pissed that Elain is mated or soulbonded or whatever to Lucien, because Lucien is clearly the hottest fairy and he does not deserve that. The second-hottest fairy is Cassian, though, so FUCKING SIGH. I think we’re supposed to see Nesta and Elaie as… redeemed? Sisterly? now, but they still act basically the same as those basic bitches who wouldn’t even help Feyre chop wood or skin rabbits in the first book, and I don’t care what kind of powers and shit they have now--they’re still not very helpful! But the wooooorst redemption is their father! I mean, come ON! We’re supposed to believe that the bastard who ALSO wouldn’t get off his ass to keep his family from starving, or at least give his youngest daughter a little bit of help every now and then while she singlehandedly kept their family alive, had an off-screen redemption and is now a knight in shining armor? Ugh, whatever. Whereas Tamlin’s complete personality change is totally believable because even in the first book I thought he was high-key gross, this complete overhaul of Feyre’s awful family does. Not. Work. I know it sucks that Maas wanted to do something different with them after she’d written them into a corner, but sorry, that’s just what happens when you write people into a corner. Pick a different plot that works with what you’ve already done! And honestly, it would have made Feyre a much more interesting character if she chose to fight so hard to protect the mortal realm even though nearly everyone in the mortal realm had been worthless pieces of shit to her. She should have had more of Greyson’s characterisation, because that dude was all, “I fucking hate you but fine, I will help you, because morals.”
I’m also a little sorry to report that my second-book prediction that Feyre was going to have Rhys’ winged babies was INCORRECT, gasp! I would have bet real money on that one! I was also really hoping Rhys was going to die at the end, and he kind of did, but only for a minute, sigh. So I guess they can have some bat babies in the next book. Which, at this point I have NO idea what the next two(?) books are supposed to contain? I’d kind of thought we’d carry the war on for longer, but nope, everything is all wrapped up! So what on earth are we going to plot next?
And there was a little bit of queer representation in this book, finally, but most of it was brief and uninteresting enough that you’d miss it if you happened to instead notice a deer next to your walking trail, or a squirrel ran out in front of you (I eventually took to listening to this book almost entirely on walks, where I couldn’t get away to do something, anything more interesting). The only “significant” inclusion was solely to give me an extremely disappointing #bisexualrolemodel, sigh. Or, rather, what Morrigan describes is actually being a closeted lesbian with some really terrible self-hating masking techniques, right? That was… genuinely upsetting to read, tbh. The fairy realm really needs more qualified therapists.
Oh, but the good news--for a fairy smut book, it wasn’t super smutty! Or at least… I don’t think? Just between us, the sex scenes are sooo cringy that I do the 15-second skip forward every time one starts, then repeat until it’s over, and the little snippets are still veeeeery cringey, but I don’t think I had to do that too many times, so yay! The psychic snapchatting between Feyre and Rhys is something I’m super embarrassed for them about, but hey--what mutually consenting couples do together is their own business. They don’t know we’re invading their privacy, so we need to give them some grace.
So, predictions for the next two(?) books:
Feyre and Rhys will have a baby, maybe even twins so they can have a girl and a boy barf. Maybe there will be a kidnapping plot or something?
The only possible overarching plot I can think of is something with those cross-universe old gods, just because they got brought up a lot in this book for not really any good reasons.
PLEASE do not let the POV shift from Feyre to Elain or, god forbid, fucking Nesta! Feyre already gets on my very last nerve but I will flat-out stop reading this series if I have to continue through the eyes of either of those worthless pieces of shit.
It won’t happen, but it would be HILARIOUS if we had another complete turn-around in the next book, so that Rhys is now a total dick and we cheer as Feyre falls into the loving arms of Tarquin. I would read the snot out of that!
As for the Fairy Smut Book Club, perhaps it was just a busy semester for the members, and they'll reactivate it next semester, fingers crossed. My kid has told me flat-out, numerous times, that no, she will NOT join the book club on my behalf, but she IS a member of the school's Sherlock Holmes book club, so I guess there's that. The other day she was all, "One of the other members is really obsessed with Holmes slash Watson... you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"
And that's how I may or may not have found myself sharing fanfic recs with yet another total stranger!
P.S. View all my reviews.
P.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!
Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros
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