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A Court Of Thorns And Roses (A Court Of Thorns And Roses book 1) by Sarah J. Maas (book review).

‘A Court Of Thorns And Roses’ is book one in the new ‘A Court Of Thorns And Roses’ trilogy by Sarah J Maas. The second book, ‘A Court of Mist and Fury’, is set to come out in May 2016.

ACourtOfThronesAndRoses

This book circles around a girl called Feyre, who lives in a world in which the Fae have fought the humans and taken the vast majority of the country she lives in for themselves. Humans are forbidden to go into that part of the country called Prythian on pain of death. However, the Fae regularly come into the mortal lands to steal humans and generally taunt them. Prythian is split into multiple different courts such as the Spring Court, Winter Court, Dawn Court, etc, each ruled by a High Fae. Unfortunately, the human lands are running low on food especially for those living close to the border with Prythian which is where Feyre lives. Feyre tries to make ends meet by hunting and, unfortunately, she manages to kill one of the Fae while he is in the guise of a wolf.

In order to make amends, she is taken to live in the Spring Court for the rest of her life, but things do not go as anyone had planned as Feyre falls for her Fae captor and then all hell breaks loose and she finds herself fighting for her life. In essence, this is a retelling of beauty and the beast where the Feyre is the beauty and is taken from her family by the beast, known in this book as Tamlin.

To be completely honest, the beginning of this book did not draw me in, I felt it was quite dry and dull for a good portion, however this changed dramatically as soon as Feyre was taken into the Spring Court. I loved the descriptions of the different creatures, both good and bad, you could really imagine the whole place. It was interesting learning about the Fae through the eyes of Feyre, a girl who had grown up hating them all for what they had done to the humans over generations.

Once things start to pick up with the various dangerous creatures and Feyre trying to figure out what the heck is going on with everything and everyone, this book really does drag you along. This book definitely gets a lot darker and gorier as you get towards the end, there are some unpleasant characters and deaths before the story ends. I found the ending to be amazing with most of the storylines tied up so it’s not a massive cliff-hanger so, technically, you could read this book and not carry on with the others. Personally, I want to find out what happens to Feyre and some of the others that we meet later in this book, in particular one of the darker Fae.

Feyre as a character was, by turns, infuriating and then completely understandable. One minute, she was going off to find highly dangerous creatures that she had been warned against because she thinks she knows better than everyone else. The next minute, she was having an amazing scene falling in love with Tamlin or picking on his friend, Lucien. I really did enjoy some of the scenes with Lucien and Feyre, he turned out to be someone I didn’t guess at from his first introductions. In fact, almost all the characters changed a great deal during the book which I felt was pretty humanising for them.

I am a great lover of fairy tales of the traditional kind, so this book really did entertain me in that respect, it even had one of my favourite fairytale creatures, the pucah. I really do hope that in the next book we get to meet more fairy tale creatures and not just the boring traditional Fae. I’d like to see some creatures from other cultures fairytales as we may be movoing from the UK-based country towards some of the other Fae lands.

Overall, this is not a bad book. I did enjoy it but I would like to see more things from this series rather than just one retelling after another.

Sarah Bruch

March 2016

follow me @shelbycat

(pub: Bloomsbury Children’s, 2015 419 page paperback. Price: £ 7.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-40885-786-1)

check out website: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/childrens

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