Synopsis(from Goodreads): Feyre has returned to the Spring Court, determined to gather information on Tamlin’s maneuverings and the invading king threatening to bring Prythian to its knees. But to do so she must play a deadly game of deceit-and one slip may spell doom not only for Feyre, but for her world as well.
As war bears down upon them all, Feyre must decide who to trust amongst the dazzling and lethal High Lords-and hunt for allies in unexpected places.
My Rating: 3.5/5
Warning: This will contain minor(very minor) spoilers.
Let me start off by saying I *did* enjoy this book. Not as much as the second one but A Court of Mist and Fury was a character driven book and this was more plot driven. SJM is better at writing characters than plot. In the following paragraphs it may sound like I didn’t enjoy reading it but keep in mind, I did. It just had some weaknesses that I couldn’t look past after 3 books with the same issues.
Her “erotic” scenes have not gotten better. If I were a teenager who had never kissed a boy and spent homeroom fantasizing about a boy loving me someday then I might like it better than I do being 26 and engaged. The sex scenes also served zero purpose to this book other than fan-service. In ACOMAF there was sexual tension. There was the dynamic of the “will-they-won’t-they” Even though when they eventually got together it was not well written, it served a purpose.
There is a lot of lazy writing in this book. Particularly as we get closer to the end. There are spells and prayers and whatnot that are super important to the plot (like…saving the whole world type important) and we never get a word of those spells. For one of them, after Feyre says an incantation we don’t at all get to read, she thinks to herself “if I change one word it could work…” but we don’t know what the word is and we don’t know what the spell says. There is another spell that Feyre HAS TO LEARN IMMEDIATELY in order to save someone she loves. Rather than her learning it at all, SJM dismisses it by writing that Feyre didn’t hear anything the person teaching her the spell is saying but eventually she got it right. That bothers me a lot. She had 30 pages left in the book at that point. Rather than doing such a disservice to the story as a whole, make it an extra page longer and show us what happened.
She stops showing the audience anything, in fact, as she gets closer to the end and instead just starts hastily telling everything.
There was a lot of messy tie ups because this was the end of Feyre and Rhys’ story while other things were left blatantly open ended so she can write about them in other books.
She also still loves certain descriptors and her editor, apparently, never said “Stop it” Which he/she should have. There are only so many times in 700 pages I can read the same descriptors, i.e. “moon-pale, night-dark, purred, gobbled, etc…” without wanting to rip my eyes out.(It gets worse when you read the almost 2000 pages to the whole series back to back and she uses the same descriptors every. single. time.) There is also only so many times I can read “cleaved in two” before it I begin cringe every time it comes up.
We also never find out what happened in the cauldron with the sisters. We are teased that we are going to find out many many many times but it never actually comes out. Perhaps in an upcoming book but as of now…
I was going to do a re-read of the Throne of Glass series after I finished this series but this book made me tired of her writing and I had to completely switch gears to recover.
ALL THAT SAID:
For the most part the story moved a long at a good pace. I liked most of the final battle. There were some surprises that I loved.
I liked that, while I was able to call a couple of the twists from the beginning, there were a few that still took me by surprise. I teared up at most of the moments I was supposed to and I felt relieved for the characters at the end. I wanted Feyre and the courts to win rather than being indifferent to it. I wanted to know more about what happened with the characters. I stayed up a couple of nights reading late because I was entrenched in their story.
Elain and Nesta’s- particularly Nesta’s- character development comes along nicely. I feel like SJM intends on writing more about them in the upcoming books because Nesta got cut off from telling us why she is so protective of Elain over any and everyone else. Elain/Azriel/Lucien’s stories are all left open to be continued as well. I hope we get more of Azriel and Lucien’s back stories and get more information on the Autumn Court. I think we will get more information on Eris, Lucien’s brother, because he was also cut off in the middle of an explanation of his torture of Mor.
All in all, this was the weakest of all 3 books but it’s worth reading to close out the series. It has it’s up’s and it’s down but it is not, in and of itself, a terrible book if you can look past the weaknesses. It can just be tedious. Especially if you have just read the previous two right before and notice her lack of a thesaurus.
I still gave it a high rating because I did enjoy reading it. Mostly.
-M-
In This Moment 