A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR)

I keep my profile private and I still wanted this one to be findable, so here it is. I did not believe one of the reversals, and I still turned the next page immediately. The setting is specific enough that I could draw the main street from

Four solid stars, and the fourth is for the pacing rather than the plot. I finished it in three sittings and would not recommend that to anyone else. The stakes are personal before they are political, and the order is the whole trick. A sec

Opening this up for discussion rather than closing it down, so take the rating loosely. The ending earns itself, which is not something I say often about a series this long. A few chapters near the end move faster than they need to, and I w

Short written version here; the long one is in the video I attached.

Five stars, no hedging, and I have reread it twice since to check I was not exaggerating. The first hundred pages ask for patience and then pay it back with interest. Nobody in this cast is written as a lesson, which is rarer than it should be. The chapter breaks are doing more structural work than the chapter titles admit. I kept expecting a shortcut that never came, and I respect that. Two of the subplots could have been one, and the book would have been shorter and better. The romance is allowed to be inconvenient, which is the only reason it works. There is a stretch in the middle where the geography stops mattering and the argument takes over. It is funnier than the cover suggests, and the humour is never at a character's expense. The prose gets out of its own way exactly when it needs to. I finished it in three sittings and would not recommend that to anyone else. The stakes are pe

This is the one I keep coming back to when somebody asks where to start, and I have stopped apologising for that. The pacing settles about a third of the way in and never loses its grip after that. I read the middle section twice, once for the plot and once for the way the chapters are cut. The side characters are given enough room to be people rather than furniture. Some of the dialogue does more work than the descriptions around it. It rewards a slow read, and skimming would drop half of what makes it hold together. The ending earns itself, which is not something I say often about a series this long. A few chapters near the end move faster than they need to, and I would have taken more of them. The world is explained by what people do in it rather than by anyone stopping to lecture. Where it repeats itself, it repeats on purpose, and the repetition lands. I would hand this to somebody

I have reread book two four times and books one and three maybe once each, which probably tells you everything you need to know. What I love is how much of the second book is about being allowed to want things again after being made small. The court politics are thin if you look straight at them, so I mostly do not. Four stars is an average of one very good book, one fine book, and a couple I have opinions about.

Book one is a slow, strange fairy tale retelling and book two is a completely different animal, and I think you have to sit through the first to be hit properly by the second. Feyre in book one is surviving. Feyre in book two is rebuilding, and Maas writes that recovery with a patience I did not expect after the first book's pacing. The Night Court chapters are the best worldbuilding in the series, partly because Velaris is allowed to exist as a place people love rather than a set piece for a fight. Rhysand works because his awfulness in book one is not quietly retconned, it is explained and then paid for. The spice is very present and mostly earned, although a couple of chapters read like they wandered in from a different book. If you are on the fence after book one, keep going. That is the whole review.