I Am Now a Member of the Fairy Smut Book Club. Here is My Review of A Court of Mist and Fury

SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERS!!!!!!

There will be ALL the spoilers for A Court of Thorn and Roses and a A Court of Mist and Fury here. 

Accompanying this review, please welcome my special guests, my fellow members of the fairy smut book club who are on TikTok and Instagram. Lean into what you love, Friends!

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Okay, I DID NOT LIKE ACOTAR when I listened to it, and I stand by that! Buuuuuutttt it was so easy to listen to while I sewed or took my stupid walks for my stupid mental health that I figured I might as well take a run at the sequel and see if it could keep me entertained, as well.

And yay! Because the sequel is... good? Y'all, I think it's good! I think it's actually very, very good and now I get to join the fairy smut book club, after all!

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Even though I'm an uninfluential nobody and also read this many years after it was published, I swear it's like Maas took almost all of my criticisms about the first book and fixed them. Or justified them while doing something else genuinely interesting! Feyre actually has her own personality in this book, and she stops saying "high lord" every other sentence, and she finally learns to read (although it's clear that Maas doesn't know a lot about how people learn to read, because that's not how phonics works. I did appreciate all the handwriting practice, though!). Tamlin is still a boring shit who doesn't understand consent, but this time we all know it and talk about it!

@jessereadsbookss Reposting one of my favorite videos ive made because tiktok copyright claimed the original #acotar #sarahjmass #acotarmemes #acourtofmistandfury #tamlin #feyrearcheron #acourtofthornesandroses #thesuriel #suriel #sjm #sarahjmassbooks #bookishhumor #booktok #feyrearcheron ♬ original sound - Tay

My favorite part of the book is when, near the end, Rhys sits down and literally rewrites the canon of the first book to fix all the problematic stuff. It's not a bad authorial choice, actually! Maas also did a lot of work throughout this book to change the perspective of the first book and justify those changes through plot and characterization, etc., showing us, for instance, how Tamlin's inaction and refusal to understand consent makes him an unworthy partner and how Rhys' choices to treat Feyre as his equal and accept her as she is make up (I guess?) for that time Under the Mountain when he twisted her literal arm bone in his literal hand. But sometimes you just gotta sit your main character down in a small cabin in the woods and have a good, old-fashioned lore drop.

@itsthesuriel ok this ones actually sad RIP Clare 💔 #acotarmeme #rhysand #feyrearcheron #acourtofthornsandroses #acourtofmistandfury ♬ original sound - the suriel • acotar memes

There was still a lot of stuff that made me lol--Feyre passing flirty notes back and forth with Rhys and painting murals all over that cabin in the woods are soooo corny!--and I still don't think that any member of this particular fairy society is super bright and calculating, but tbh that kind of makes it more fun for me. Y'all, I think I'm smarter than a high fae! I'd even bet good money that I'm smarter than a high lord! I could certainly work out a better system for fairy tithing, that's for sure. That whole Spring Court day of tithing was some real "everyone must travel on foot to the place they were born and register for the census and stop asking me if you have to go even if you're eight months pregnant do you not understand the concept of a census?" bullshit.

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But all the interesting characterizations and the improved relationships and the non-irritating internal monologue would still be boring if all Feyre did was sit around various magical fairy venues again. The real reason the book is so fun is that we finally get to explore fairy land! There's a secret city! A beachside Summer Court with a scary ancient sometimes-underwater building! Forests and byways! More monsters! And the final boss level is a raid into an enemy-filled castle in Hyburn, itself! Feyre does SO much cool stuff here, and yes the fact that she has *all* the fairy powers and is obviously the most specialist fairy ever (immortal with the heart of a mortal for the win!) is high-key corny, buuuuut watching her learn her powers and wield them and finally do some genuine fighting and machinating is fun and interesting. I just really liked the world that Maas builds here, and all the creatures that populate it, and all the adventures that we have in it.

@the.booktok.girls A straight savage 😂 #feyrearcheron #acotar #acotarseries #acotarmemes #acourtofmistandfury #rhysand #tamlin #acomafmemes #acomaf #highladyofthenightcourt ♬ original sound - The BookTok Girls

I barely even noticed how much I hate my daily 3.5-mile walk, I was so entertained, and retelling the book's plot made the hours my family spent in the car during our Father's Day day trip fly by. I'm not sure anyone actually understood the plot as related by me, ahem, but to be fair that's mostly because I kept doing things like say "OMG I forgot to tell you the part where the Spring Court all wore masks magically welded to their faces for 99% of the first book" and "oh, and this time Feyre can winnow because she just discovered that power because all the high lords gave her their special powers and she's now the MOST special" and then thinking about it again, myself, and not being able to stop laughing.

@itsthesuriel the masks are invisible and thats canon- period #acotarmeme #acotarseries #acourtofthornsandroses #acourtofmistandfury #rhysand #feyrearcheron ♬ original sound - the suriel • acotar memes

And then I brought up the mates thing and both of my teenagers were all, "NOOOO CRINGE NOOOO STOPPPPP!" It was the BEST Father's Day! I probably could have made them jump out of a moving car if this fairy world had had soulmarks.

In other news, I still hate Nesta and Elaine on account of how they wouldn't help with the chores while they were all poor, but apparently we're supposed to start loving them again and at this point there is no way they're not gonna be main characters in the third book so I might as well get used to it, sigh. And I'm still way into Lucian although I hate how he acts and I really wish we got a nasty sex scene or two with him, too.

Mostly, though, I wish some of these fairies were gay. Does Prythian seriously have NO queer representation?

@ancientlibrarybooks #fyp #acotar #highladyofthenightcourt #moracotar #amrenacotar #rhysandandfeyre #acomaf #feyre ♬ We go to war - Issy 🤍

Predictions for the third book:

*Nesta and Elaine will become main characters. SIGH!
* Feyre will forget a couple of doses of her fairy birth control in the chaos and we'll have a mini Rhys flying around like Cupid by book four.
* It would be hilarious if the Book of Breathings or the Cauldron possessed Feyre at some point so she was walking around and talking and doing stuff but it was actually the soul of the enchanted artifact controlling her.

* Surely someone will be gay at some point? Even in the background?

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!

All I Want Is To Irradiate Myself With Uranium Glass, and Other Small-Town Indiana Adventures

Our collective family favorite hobby is so boring that I'm honestly a little embarrassed to tell you about it.

No, it's not how we like to sit around a table and work puzzles while listening to audiobooks. That's genuinely awesome and not embarrassing at all.

It's embarrassing how much take-out pizza we eat, but that's not really a hobby.

Our hobby of making themed dinners and then watching movies while we eat is so cool that I don't understand why everybody else also doesn't do this weekly. Don't y'all WANT to be eating rainbow foods while sitting in your living room and watching Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? It's very fun!

This other hobby of ours is also very fun, but only in a very, very specific and highly-focused way, and probably only for us:

Basically, we drive to some seemingly random, poky little town and we just... poke around it? We get ice cream, check out the historical markers, browse the local shops, and exclaim over the most boring shit like, "Ooh, look at the limestone detail on that bank!" and "I wonder why they've got a Civil War cannon in their playground? Let's go climb on it!"

Just writing this out, it feels like an objectively awful way to spend a full day. The drive there and back is always ridiculously long, too, and requires verbally acknowledging every falling-down old barn and even slightly unusual farm animal we pass. This Sunday, y'all, we saw THREE miniature ponies! And a horse grazing in the same field with a bunch of cows! Many cornfields! A giant paintball arena out in the middle of nowhere cut out from the cornfields! Several threshing barns!

But I don't know, you guys. It is also, for some reason, a stupid amount of fun.

This particular adventure was inspired by Father's Day. We're also pretty obsessed with activity trails, either packaged ones like the Garfield Trail or ones that we DIY, like the indie bookstore trail that was my older kid's birthday gift a couple of years ago. We spent most of the pandemic doing a Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail, and it might have been the thing that preserved my partner's sanity. He was PISSED when we finally completed the trail, sent in our passports, and all we got back were trucker caps as our prizes--acting bitchy about the prize is an important part of the tradition!

So for this Father's Day, I found a giant culinary trail put together by a statewide non-profit. It's got not just ice cream, but tenderloins. Pizza. Diners, drive-ins, and dives. Pie! We all signed up for it, my partner picked our first location, and off we drove through the cornfields to Greensburg, Indiana, a town whose claim to fame is that it's halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati. Which, just between us, it's like two hours from Indianapolis to Cincinnati so I don't know if that's really helpful? If you lived in the middle you'd still have at least an hour commute either way, not counting city traffic, and if you were just going from one place to the other, well, it's only a two-hour drive so why would you need to stop smack in the middle?

Also, I don't understand why that's what they're promoting when as soon as we got there and parked at the town square, THIS is what we saw!!!

They have a tree growing out of their courthouse roof! 

It was baffling and cool and charming, and honestly kind of better that there's no informational signage around at ALL to explain what you're looking at. You just look up, see a tree growing out of the courthouse roof, and exclaim and wonder over it like it's the olden days. You could also literally just miss the tree if you parked on the other side of the courthouse and/or never happened to look up, and then how stupid would you feel later if someone told you about it?

I looked it up later, and these TripAdvisor reviews are cracking me up:

Like, guys. That tree is not even there for you. You don't need to give it a 3 out of 5 rating just for existing!

And for some reason it made TrishA4 mad. Is she contractually obligated to pay for clock tower repairs or something? Did poorly maintained gutters once kill her loved one?

Well, we weren't mad. It gave us something to talk about while we ate our pork tenderloins and French fries in a beach-themed bar and grill that had faux tiki huts and people playing pool inside. I was excited about the poster for a KISS cover band coming through, until a kid pointed out that the poster was from 2015, dang it. 2015 Julie would have ALSO loved to see a KISS cover band! 

After lunch, we walked around the courthouse square, checking out the other nearby restaurants on the culinary trail--

--and then we all got completely sidetracked for over an hour in Pickers Paradise, an antique store on the square. Their uranium glass was a VERY reasonable price!

I haven't worked up the nerve to start my own uranium glass collection yet, but I covet it SOOOO bad. All I need to do is put some black lights in Mamma's old china cabinet, right? Or would I need to store everything in a lead-lined coffin and only take them out on special occasions?

Anyway, I didn't buy the uranium glass, sob, but I did buy a really nice molinillo that my older kid found in a bin of kitchen accessories and recognized from a workshop on the history of chocolate that we took together last month. And then my younger kid found a really nice vintage poster in a pretty frame, and when my older kid told me about a cast iron horse bust that she'd thought was really cool I was all, "Your Dad is already buying me and your sister stuff. Go show him your horse head!" And that's how on Father's Day my partner walked out of an antique store having bought everybody BUT himself a nice little present, ahem.

But we all hugged his neck and told him we loved him!

We walked over to see a nice stretch of historic storefronts that had been restored (and then left to get slightly neglected again, but charmingly so), but our last stop before we drove back through the cornfields was another point on the culinary tour, a genuine A&W!

We didn't realize that this was a place where the waitstaff would come out to your car--I guess it's from the Just Cruisin' section of the culinary trail--so she threw us off our ordering game a bit. And then after she'd come and gone we realized that there was apparently an entirely other menu of specials taped to the window of the building where we hadn't been able to see it, and of course it was chock-full of stuff that everybody would have rather gotten, ahem, so we all sort of sulkily sucked down our chocolate shakes and cream freezes. The younger kid bitched the most about not knowing they had coffee shakes, but she also ate every bite of her ice cream cone while she bitched so I think she'll be okay.

On the way back home, I was trying to research why on earth there was a tree on the courthouse roof, and I realized that the city of Greensburg has a Wikipedia page! At first it was fun, making everyone try to guess the city's population and the name of their county and when their first post office was built--I'm really fun to travel with! But then I had to be all, "Oh, shit, y'all! Greensburg used to be a sundown town!"

Ugh, we are ALWAYS running into that around here! We won't even go to Martinsville, another former sundown town, on purpose, because it still feels really racist there, and this November will actually be the 100th anniversary of the time that the Ku Klux Klan won nearly every election, from school board up to governor, in our state but then couldn't keep hold of their offices or get anything of consequence done because, you know, they weren't politically or administratively trained--they were just organized racists! Halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati would have been an awful place to have a sundown town, though, sigh. 

But we're not going to spend our precious Father's Day talking about racists, so instead I went back to my most recent fun hobby of telling my partner, in detail, the entire story of A Court of Thorns and Roses so far. The drive was long, but this book is longer, because I had barely finished the part where everyone in Feyre's family had gotten fairy ensorcelled but Nesta, apparently because she's just too big a bitch to be ensorcelled, when we pulled back into our driveway. I put a pin in it until our next day trip!

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June WIPs: Books, Bookmarks, and a Bookshelf Quilt

Little Free Library Bookmarks

Making these quilt-as-you-go scrappy bookmarks is my favorite thing these days! You can tell from the variety of ribbon that I'm even using up all of those little scraps that I've been hoarding saving, too. That rickrack?

It's VINTAGE! New in the package, too! I held onto it for another probably 15 years or so after getting my hands on it, but I think it'll be much happier as a dozen bookmarks than it was moldering away in the back of my closet.

I think the bookmarks in general look cuter with smaller scraps all pieced together, but I had some novelty fabric scraps that I feel like I've been holding onto forever, trying not to waste them but not knowing what to do with them. I'm especially in love with those vintage dinos!

Even though these bookmarks look finished, they're technically still WIPs while I wait on my partner to design some fabric for me, because my dream is to use Spoonflower to print custom messaging onto fabric, complete with the bookmark template as a cutting guide. Then I just need to cut it out and edge-stitch it to the backs of my bookmarks and yay! I'll have cute bookmarks with literary quotes on the backs to give out inside my Little Free Library!

My Too-Long TBR-ish Pile of Books

I normally read a couple of books a week, so I don't know why I'm dragging through those top four books so slowly. I even like them, so that's not the reason!

Oh, lord, I've just noticed that my Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh isn't even on this list, and I've been puttering through that one since last winter...

In other news, though, thanks to all the sewing and gardening I'm almost finished listening to A Court of Mist and Fury. I'm really liking it, and my review of it is going to be VERY different than the one that I wrote for A Court of Thorn and Roses, ahem. My favorite part of the book so far is when, near the end, Rhys sits down and literally rewrites the canon of the first book to fix all the problematic stuff. It's not a bad authorial choice, actually! The author also did a lot of work throughout this book to change the perspective of the first book and justify those changes through plot and characterization, etc., but sometimes you just gotta have a good, old-fashioned lore drop.

Bookshelf Quilt

It consists so far entirely of aspirational Pinterest pins:

But one day, ideally before September, it will be a real quilt on the dorm room bed of my younger kid!

Just have to teach myself Foundation Paper Piecing first...

In other news, look who loves the newly power-washed back deck!

Does anyone else's co-parent buy himself everything he's ever wanted right before every gift-giving occasion? Did it occur to him that maybe I knew he wanted his own power-washer instead of renting the one at Menards, and maybe I might want to buy it for him for Father's Day? SIGH! The kids have at various times been reporting to me about actively heading him off from impulse-purchasing other long planned-for Father's Day gifts, but all I can say is that he better not buy himself a single other thing before Sunday!

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!

This Seven-Year-Old Girl Scout Vest is Graduating

Congratulations to every high school graduate in the Class of 2024!

And even bigger congratulations to every Girl Scout vest that's been hanging on by an invisible thread since its owner first Bridged to Cadette way back in the sixth grade! You've got cat hair all over you, you haven't been washed in at least five years (because god forbid the dye in those crappy fun patches bleeds!!!), you've been camping and you've been to Mexico, you've fallen into the mud and into the fire, you once got lost for three months but it turned out you were just in the garage that whole time, and one of your badges is sewn on upside-down, but you made it.

You're finally graduating, too!

Who knows what memories and stories this Girl Scout vest will bring to my kid's mind in future years, but I love looking at it and remembering all the adventures that inspired these messily-sewn, overlapping awards. I remember how the kid wrote her first full French-language essay as part of earning that Anne Frank fun patch, and how we spent that first pandemic summer visiting all the Girl Scout camps in our council to earn that Camp Adventure series:

The troop trip to St. Louis! The family trip along the Garfield trail! The overnight at the Newport Aquarium! The Girl Scout camp where the kids all played pirates for a week and couldn't wait to tell me about their midnight raid on the director's cabin and how she'd chased them across camp in the dark in her golf cart!

My personal favorite awards are the pins that you can only receive by visiting a site significant to the Girl Scouts. The kid will always have an official reminder that she's pilgrimaged to Juliette Gordon Low's home and to Pax Lodge:

And she'll always be able to remind herself how many cookies she sold each year!

I love the older badges and IPPs that she's earned. I'm pretty sure I had to ebay that Cadette Trees badge, and it's easily the oldest thing on her vest:

I also really love the Make Your Own badge that she invented and designed and painted herself. She wanted to learn how to play the keyboard, so she made it into a Girl Scout badge and she did it!

No longer being a "Girl Scout Mom" is one of the transitions that I'm working to come to terms with this summer. Yes, I can still volunteer with my Girl Scout troop, and yes, I can continue to volunteer with the Service Unit and the council, and yes, I'm a Lifetime Member so I'll always be a Girl Scout, but you know what I mean. Beth is the second-worst character in Little Women (Amy is the worst, obv), but I really get that part where she gripes about why does everybody have to grow up anyway and why can't they all stay home like her and keep putting on plays in the attic and publishing the family newspaper, etc.

Instead, my brave young Jo is going to march out into the world (see what I did there?) soon, leaving her old mum behind. Thankfully, I taught her all the important Girl Scout life skills already: she can make a kick-ass fire from scratch, she knows three different ways to emergency evacuate a fellow human (I didn't tell the kids at the time, of course, but one of the ways will be particularly useful for moving ambulatory but extremely drunk friends...), she knows what to do if she's lost in the woods, she can upsell you out of every dollar in your wallet, she knows at least four different methods of tie-dye, and she knows that the whole point of learning a new skill is to use that skill in service to others. 

So into retirement this seven-year-old Girl Scout vest goes, and off its girl goes to make the world a better place!

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Enforced Family Fun Day: Punk Rock, Mystery Cemeteries, and Several Local Barns

I swear that I do not know what these guys would do with themselves if I wasn't around to always be suggesting fun family activities. It's definitely an insidious form of emotional labor, constantly finding and planning stuff to do and cajoling people out of the house to do it when they'd apparently be happy enough just holding the couch down all weekend, but the secret is that it's all for ME. *I'M* the one who likes to do family stuff, and stuff outside of the house, and I'd be bummed to go out alone. 

To be fair, I knew from the beginning that my excellent idea of hitting up the Monroe County History Center on a Sunday afternoon was only going to be a "fun" family activity for me. But hey, there's an exhibit on local barns! AND an exhibit on the local punk scene! And there's lots of bonding to be done in shared misery, but fine, we'll add in a walk afterwards over to the bakery that has delicious milk tea and crepe cakes by the slice. 

See? Family fun for all!

Alas, the teenagers were completely unimpressed by barns and immediately wandered off to gaze at John Mellencamp's guitar and such:

So they missed out on the excellent visual explanation of the difference between hand-hewn and milled timbers. This one is hand-hewn:

The milled one is in the background:

I thought this illustration of immigrants and where they settled was interesting, not just for what it shows about the spread of barn architecture, but also because it perfectly reflects my own ancestors' path from Ireland to Virginia to Ohio:

One of those early 1800s ancestors changed his last name in adulthood and moved far away from his entire extended family and down to Arkansas (of all places), and if you think I am not burning with curiosity about what brought that on then you have seriously underestimated my capacity for gossip.

Anyway, this was a really cool exhibit because it took all the old barns around the county that you always notice when you drive by and it wrote up a whole museum display about each of them:

My favorite part in each blurb is learning what each barn is up to these days. 4-H is POPULAR around here!

I like the Vernacular style best. That style is essentially just something along the lines of, "I need to build me a barn. A plan, you say? Who needs a plan to build a barn?" 

I see this barn the most, because it's over by the post office that's open the latest:

I'd mostly wanted to go to this museum to see the exhibit on the local punk scene. I feel like the punk scene was kind of on the wane by the time I got to Bloomington (although I swear I remember Pretty Pony), but, perhaps thanks to having a stellar music school here, there have always been plenty of indie musicians. My best memory is the time I used part of my grad school scholarship to sign up for a recreational yoga class, then halfway through the first class suddenly thought, "Huh, is my yoga teacher one of the Blake Babies?"

Why yes, she was! And if you think that I did not come to the next class with my Blake Babies CDs (Innocence and Experience is my favorite!) for her to sign... then you would be right, because I have always been and will always be way too bashful for that. 

ANYWAY, I'm super impressed by all the ephemera that the museum has. Flyers and set lists and receipts and zines are all the types of precious things that are so unlikely to make it into a museum, but THIS museum has a bonanza of items:

I'm equally impressed that the museum has such a substantial list of the punk groups that performed in Bloomington. That type of info is more ephemeral than their promo flyers, and yet the exhibit had five lines' worth of band names extending across the entire wall:

I VERY much wish they could have also had listening stations or some kind of way that we could hear the archival music, but I guess that would be a copyright nightmare.

One last very boring-to-everyone-but-me exhibit:

Notice all the cemeteries that are now in the lake. Once upon a time, my Girl Scout troop learned the whole dishy story of how that happened! 

Y'all KNOW how I feel about old local cemeteries!

I've got a couple more to look for now, thanks to this wall map:

This map says that there's another cemetery across the street from the Mt. Salem Cemetery--that's the one that has the 116-year-old guy--but on Google Maps all there is there is forest and an old quarry. Ten bucks says I get arrested this year for trespassing (wearing my high-visibility safety vest, of course, because hunters) in old limestone quarries!

After all that learning, crepe cake and milk tea really hit the spot:

It was the younger kid who first convinced us to try this place; she'd been wanting to try crepe cake FOREVER, and she was so stoked! Joke's on her, though, I guess, because it turns out that she doesn't super like crepe cake, and the first milk tea she got here was kind of weird, too (for the love of all that's good, keep your picky kids away from taro!), so now she's not into it anymore but the older kid and I love it so we keep dragging her here endlessly. 

Thai milk tea and matcha crepe cake is the perfect taste combo!

And what's this week's (Enforced) Fun Family Activity, you ask? Well, last night three of us went out to a local theater production, then we met up with the fourth one for late-night tacos downtown. And tonight there's supposed to be a cabaret-style performance of a selection of songs from Sondheim's Assassins in a downtown bar that claims to be open to 18+ for the show. I have no idea how to act in a bar--do you get to order a cocktail, or are you supposed to stick to beer? If the latter, what beer do you get?--so that will be a fun adventure.

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