Introduction
A Court Of Thorns And Roses, book one in the best selling series released in May 2015, the series began to blow up on BookTok in 2022, and take over the rest of the online book community. Sarah J Mass is an American author already renowned for her fantasy writing ACOTAR, being one of her many high fantasy, young adult novels with an intense romance subplot.
Storyline/ plot
We start the novel within the mortal realm with a huntress, strong willed, determined, and precise, debating on shooting a wolf who for a short second would be mistaken for a high fae, a mysterious, powerful creature from the land of Prythian. Feyre ultimately shoots the wolf and strips it of its fur, in order to take it to the market and trade it for essentials and enough money to feed herself, her father and her two sisters.
Feyre and her family hadn’t always had to hunt for their food, earn their money with hard potentially life threatening risk. Feyre’s father used to be a successful merchant so, the family lived comfortably within a good social crowd until, one day his ships crashed, leaving their family with nothing.
Feyre had made a pact with her late mother to ensure the family was well looked after in her passing and Feyre did everything she could to honor that, including killing and skinning a high fae.
Feyre soon reaped the consequences leaving her being taken to Prythian by the High Lord of the spring court, Tamliin, due to an ancient clause made between the mortals and the High Lords over five hundred years prior. With the bargain unlikely to have any loopholes, Feyre is likely facing the rest of her days in Prythian, making her feelings blatantly obvious since her arrival, it comes as a shock when her tolerance for her new High Lords suddenly shifts
to much more than she ever anticipated.
To her demise, Feyre is faced with the tough challenge of her love, is her love worth dying for, worth killing for?
Writing style
Sarah J Maas is an incredibly talented fantasy writer, with extremely well thought out worlds that are so complex, with so many different elements of the magic within them. Her writing is heavily based on world building and setting the scene, giving the reader a good image to create within their minds, which is what I feel makes her books so popular. Her books give you a form of escapism a lot of books cannot give with it’s complex politics, incredible imagery and the amount of depth she gives all of her characters, with a good background story to go along with each one.
Pros/ cons
I thought this book was amazing, it had such descriptive settings, characters and the magic element was really well explained. Although it is technically a high fantasy book it wasn’t confusing at all, I actually found this quite easy to understand because of how descriptive the writing is. Each character served purpose and each different plot line added to the book overall and didn’t take or distract me from the main story. The only negative I would say is that it was a little slow at parts which I understand with it being the first book in a series.
Conclusion
Overall this book was a solid 4.5 stars for me, I really enjoyed it especially for my first fantasy
read it definitely had me interested and looking forward to what was going to happen next. I enjoyed the world building and the character relationships were really nice too. It was a nice pace throughout the book but especially the last few chapters were incredible, and I loved how it ended to then carry on into the second book in the series