Brittany's Book Corner “A Court of Mist and Fury” by Sarah J. Maas

 A few months ago, I tried my hand at the viral Booktok sensation, “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” and came to this conclusion: it was okay. 

      For several months after that, I struggled to get through the second book, “A Court of Mist and Fury.” In this book of Sarah J. Maas’ romantasy series, Feyre realizes she and Tamlin were not meant to be and finds more honest love in an unexpected place, all while the threat of war (yes, another one) looms over them.  

Ultimately, I gave up after six months of turning pages and finding nothing but tedium, I realized that I was simply too bored to read any more. 

      To put it simply, Maas has created an intriguing fantasy world that can captivate some, but I found her writing style to be too amateur for my enjoyment. The repetitive character voices and end dashes grated on me eventually, not to mention that I have a unique dislike for the YA and YA-adjacent use of first person due to my years of reading fanfiction.  

I don’t like reading from Feyre’s, our protagonist, point of view because I found Feyre to be wholly unlikable (more on that later), and do not get me started on the “spicy” scenes, which were surprisingly few and far between, considering this book is widely known to be intensely smutty.  

It is not,, and the way Maas writes the occasional instance of intimacy is troubling and strange, to say the least. It is very similar to “Twilight” in my opinion, but at least Stephenie Meyer didn’t bog down her series with smut. Maas appears to be using the writing process to insert herself into her fictional world, and the smut scenes read as perverse because they are so intertwined with her own preferences. 

      Now, the main reason why I dislike this book: The characters are horribly one-note and archetypal. Even Feyre, the protagonist I dislike, has very little dimension to her personality. The only thing I can really say about her is that she is self-centered, stubborn and compassionate.  

That’s all fine; plenty of characters are this way and are universally loved. The main difference between a character like Feyre, and say,, Katniss from “The Hunger Games,” is the consequences for the negative effects of these character traits.  

Katniss is repeatedly punished for her stubborn disposition and even her compassion.  

She struggles implicitly by default.  

Feyre is not punished for anything; I never get the sense that she truly struggles at all in this book, even though she is supposedly experiencing PTSD from the events that occurred Under the Mountain.  

The stakes I apply to this character and many others in the book are so low because they are poorly written. At this point, I can name of all the characters I like in less than a line: Lucien, Azriel, Amren, Mor, Elain and Nesta (yes, I find Nesta more likable than Feyre). 

      That’s not to say that there isn’t anything to look forward to here. I may have stopped reading the books, but I have found great enjoyment watching Cari Can Read’s recap of them on YouTube.  

If you are interested in the hype and story of the ACOTAR series but do not want to read several 500 page books of subpar writing, I would recommend watching those instead. Cari makes the unlikable tolerable and the questionable amusing. 

Rating: 3/10