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A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 18 or “”Go To Horny Jail And/Or A National Park, Sarah”

Just a heads up that sign-up for my new Patreon tier and my Ream page are live in advance of this Thursday’s premiere of The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride.

As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.

So, you know what I can’t figure out? Why did they redo the covers for these books and why are the covers so blech? It looks like they’re trying to Narnia this shit up for some reason, when the original covers were so striking. And while there were a lot of “copy cat” covers, nothing quite looked just like those original covers. I’m perplexed, from a marketing standpoint. ed.—I am still perplexed. The original cover was gorgeous. The new ones look like Hogwarts house themed merch.

Not that these books need any marketing. I think they just ship them out in the mail like penny savers.

They’re about as well-written, too.

The next day, the blood of the faerie had been cleaned up by the time I ate, washed, and dressed. I’d taken my time in the morning, and it was nearly noon as I stood atop the staircase, peering down at the entry hall below. Just to make sure it was gone.

Maas chooses the strangest angles. I just wanna break it down.

First of all, we can just assume she’s eaten food, bathed, and put clothes on. Every morning has started that way since she got to Prythian. That is not the strong point on which to center this opening.

Second, pointing out that the blood had been cleaned up is also weird. We’ve seen whole feasts cleaned up by magic. The reader assumes it has been cleaned up already.

Third: Feyre is making sure the entry hall is gone.

Feyre’s mission this morning is finding Tamlin and explaining how bad she feels about having killed Andras. Which was the big moment and entire point of the last chapter, but let’s undermine that moment by doing it again. Why not?

Oh, but then she sees the clouds outside and, like a chihuahua with a strong prey drive, she jumps to:

The water was still enough that the vibrant sky and fat, puffy clouds above were flawlessly reflected. Asking about them seemed vulgar after last night, but maybe—maybe once those paints and brushes did arrive, I could venture to the pool to capture it.

Yeah, I think it probably would be “vulgar” to be like, sorry again about killing your friend, has my Amazon package arrived yet?”

Tamlin and Lucien come in, but Lucien doesn’t talk to her and just goes straight out the door with a little wave.

I glanced around, hoping for any sign of those paints, but Tam pointed to the open front doors through which Lucien had exited. Beyond them, I could see both of our horses, already saddled and waiting. Lucien was already climbing into the saddle of a third horse.

So like…they have a trip or something planned but they didn’t tell her or come to get her. Is this a magic thing? Or just a happy coincidence? Were they just gonna wait out there until she noticed them?

Tamlin suggests that since he doesn’t have anything going on and the paint hasn’t arrived yet (postal service in decline, Tam? Tell me about it), he thought they could go for a killing-free ride. Like, he actually jokes about the ride being sans killing, which seems pretty callous considering everything that happened the night before.

A High Lord digging a grave for a stranger. I might not have believed it if I’d been told, might not have believed it if he hadn’t offered me sanctuary rather than death.

Idk, Feyre, sounds like you’ve believed everything anybody has ever told you about fairies and that’s how this whole damn book started.

There’s a section break and:

I couldn’t come up with any words when we arrived—and knew that even if I had been able to paint it, nothing would have done it justice.

Remember in the early chapters when I was like, oh, wow, I love the way she writes that the character has this interest and describes things using that interest? I RESCIND THAT COMMENT. I had no idea we’d be hearing about something is so gorgeous that not even Feyre could paint it quite this often.

We sat atop a grassy knoll, overlooking a glade of oaks so wide and high they could have been the pillars and spires of an ancient castle. Shimmering tufts of dandelion fluff drifted by, and the floor of the clearing was carpeted with swaying crocuses and snowdrops and bluebells. It was an hour or two past noon by the time we arrived, but the light was thick and golden.

Knoll: small, rounded hill or prominence

Clearing: open space in a forest

Glade: open space in a forest

I want you to keep the description of where they are in mind as we continue. Because I’m going to criticize it.

But you already knew that. 

I hugged my knees and drank in the glen.

Glen: a narrow valley

Jenny: doesn’t know where the fuck we are.

Because sitting on a small hill won’t put you up above towering trees. And if they’re in a clearing, they’re already in the forest, looking down on the forest that’s way far, far down in the glen…which holds a wide glade…full of trees.

I don’t expect fantasy authors to moonlight as geologists, okay? But at least know what the fuck the words you’re using mean. ed.—This particular aspect of the book only gets worse as more environmental features are introduced.

Tamlin and Lucien brought a blanket to rest on, but the grass is so exciting to Feyre that she chooses to sit on that, instead. Tamlin comes and sits next to her, and Feyre asks him where they are.

“Just a glen.”

So, not a knoll-clearing-glen-glade, then? Just a glen?

Well, guess what, Fucknardula, Prince of Contradictions: it can’t be a fucking hill if it’s a fucking valley!

The green of his eyes matched the grass between my fingers, and the amber flecks were like the shafts of sunlight that streamed through the trees.

WHAT TREES?! THE TREES IN THE CLEARING?! WHERE THE FUCK ARE WE?!

So, Tamlin asks her if she likes the place and she’s like, yes, and he’s like, oh, is that all, and she makes a comment about groveling to the High Lord. So, now Tamlin knows that she asked the Suriel about him. This is a pretty important plot point, right?

That smile of his sparked something bold in my chest. “He also said that you like being brushed, and if I’m a clever girl, I might train you with treats.” 

Tamlin tipped his head to the sky and roared with laughter. Despite myself, I let out a soft laugh. 

“I might die of surprise,” Lucien said behind me. “You made a joke, Feyre.” 

I turned to look at him with a cool smile. “You don’t want to know what the Suriel said about you.” I flicked my brows up, and Lucien lifted his hands in defeat.

Oh. Well. I guess that’s also a choice. That. One could make.

BANTER!

That is a word I hate so, so much, ever since the rise of Chick Lit in the 00’s. Since then, every single damn book in romance/ya had to have “clever banter” as a selling point. Which would be fine, you know? It was kind of annoying when you couldn’t find any books that weren’t trying to replicate the success of See Jane Date and Confessions of a Shopaholic. But things evened out and eventually you had your writers who were known for their banter and writers who actually wrote it well.

Yeah. That’s two different groups.

For some reason, Sarah J. Maas has been lauded by her fans as a master of “clever banter.” So has E.L. James, whose readers almost certainly also enjoy watching someone beat a dead horse.

And one might be tempted to think, well, some people have really ass senses of humor and for some reason they line up with ass literary preferences. But here’s the thing: if you cut off the “you made a joke” part and just left the part about brushing him? That would be cute. But it would also have to be in an entirely different place! Instead of addressing something that seems pretty damn important, something that could have become a substantial conversation, an opportunity to reveal crucial information…we got banter.

That is the curse of the banter. Not that people who aren’t funny are writing it. I mean, that’s one of the issues. But the biggest problem is when a writer prioritizes banter over the actual story. And that’s what happened here. It was more important to Maas to show her male characters reacting to the wit of her heroine than to develop an important piece of the relationship between them.

Tamlin points down the hill/clearing/ravine/space station/etc. and is like, I want to show you something.

I got to my feet, but Lucien remained sitting on the blanket and lifted the bottle of wine in salute. He took a slug from it as he sprawled on his back and gazed at the green canopy.

The green canopy. Over the clearing.

I no longer ask myself, “how did this get published?” I only lament that the authors I enjoy don’t write shittily enough to get traditional publishing contracts and the type of hype popular, shit-written books enjoy. ed.—I wrote these recaps before I got TikTok. Imagine my state of mind now.

Each of Tamlin’s movements was precise and efficient, his powerfully muscled legs eating up the earth as we wove between the towering trees, hopped over tiny brooks, and clambered up steep knolls. We stopped atop a mound, and my hands slackened at my sides. There, in a clearing surrounded by towering trees, lay a sparkling silver pool. Even from a distance, I could tell that it wasn’t water, but something more rare and infinitely more precious.

Are we sure it’s a clearing and not the dead-center of a fucking forest? Or under a highway overpass? Is it a viaduct, Feyre?

Also, the “hands slackened” confuses me because I don’t think any of us were wondering what her hands were doing and now I’m sure that at least 60% of us are imagining that Feyre was walking with her fists clenched angrily.

Anyway, on top of the muscles Feyre is checking out, we also hear about how rough his hands are when he touches her to lead her down to the water.

The silvery sparkling water that dribbled from his hand set ripples dancing across the pool, each glimmering with various colors, and—“That looks like starlight,” I breathed. 

He huffed a laugh, filling and emptying his hand again. I gaped at the glittering water. “It is starlight.”

Wait…is this actually a fantastical element? In this fantasy book?!

Of course, it really says something about me as a human being that I don’t find fairies fantastical. Maybe the worldbuilding thing is more my fault than Maas’s. On account of me being a woo-woo new age ding-dong.

“This is Prythian. According to your legends, nothing is impossible.”

Well, that’s what I’ve been saying. I just want to know why it hasn’t applied to like, any other part of Prythian. For example, their mail delivery speed. Feyre’s gonna need those paint brushes if she’s gonna capture this.

“How?” I asked, unable to take my eyes from the pool—the silver, but also the blue and red and pink and yellow glinting beneath, the lightness of it …

and violet and gold and chocolate and mauve and cream and crimson and silver and rose and azure and lemon and russet and grey and purple and white and pink and orange and blue.

Yes, I am aware of how often I use that joke. But if people wrote better, I wouldn’t fucking have to. Don’t blame me. Blame the author of the book and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I’m just glad we didn’t hear how her amazing artistry couldn’t capture the beauty or whatever.

So, anyway, to answer Feyre’s question:

“I don’t know—I never asked, and no one ever explained.”

That’s convenient, isn’t it?

I don’t mind skipping long explanations, but this could have been so much better. For example, “wait, what? They don’t have liquid starlight where you’re from?” This is just like, a lazy improv sketch.

Tamlin starts taking off his clothes and is like, get in.

A swim—unclothed, alone. With a High Lord. I shook my head, falling back a step. His fingers paused at the second button from his collar.

He never tells her to take her clothes off. He just says “jump in.”

“Don’t you want to know what it’s like?” 

I didn’t know what he meant: swimming in starlight, or swimming with him. “I—no.” 

“All right.” He left his tunic unbuttoned. There was only bare, muscled, golden skin beneath.

What was supposed to be under there? A toaster? Six tickets to Wrestlemania Live? A puppy?

Also, we’re meant to believe that Feyre, who is so brave and who also has zero hangups about meaningless sex in a barn and who fucking loves art, is going to pass up the chance to swim in a pool of colors because she’s afraid of being undressed with someone.

Feyre asks Tamlin why he brought her there and he’s like, this was one of my favorite places when I was a kid. She’s like, when was that and he’s just like, a long time ago. Feyre asks Tamlin if Lucien is better after the stuff the night before  because “He…didn’t react well.”

Tamlin shrugged, but his words were soft as he said, “Lucien … Lucien has endured things that make times like last night … difficult. Not just the scar and the eye—though I bet last night brought back memories of that, too.”

I’m not sure how Feyre expects someone to react to the sight of someone with limbs ripped off, bleeding and screaming everywhere. How do you react “well” in that situation? There’s really no good way to react, is there? But whatever, it’s too bad Lucien wasn’t brave enough to react like Feyre did.

Next comes, I shit you not, a page-and-a-half long block paragraph info dump in which Tamlin just tells Feyre Lucien’s entire backstory. I honestly don’t think my Kindle app will let me copy and paste the whole thing because of how much text I would have to select. It’s that unbearably long and painfully unbroken. But here’s what we learn, all in dialogue delivered by Tamlin in his little speech:

Lucien is the youngest son of the High Lord of the Autumn Court He’s the youngest of seven brothersThey’re all competitiveInheritance of the High Lord title goes to the strongest, not birth orderEvery court in Prythian works that wayLucien didn’t care about being a High Lord, anywaySo he was a total fuckboybut he fell in love with a lower-class fairythere’s something called a “mating bond” (that isn’t explained)his father had the girlfriend fairy executed in front of Lucien and made him watch.

All of that information I just relayed is in ONE. PARAGRAPH. Tamlin just vomits all that out like, here, reader, you’re all caught up.

Gosh, wouldn’t it have been great if this conversation had happened…between Feyre and Lucien, maybe? Since he’s the one involved in the whole thing? Since it’s his pain, and revealing it would be a bond of trust between him and Feyre? And then his inevitable betrayal of her would be way worse?

Because I’m thinking that at the end of this book we’re going to find out that Lucien is actually evil or something. Either Lucien or Tamlin. One of them is gonna be evil.

Just because the paragraph is over, don’t think we’re suddenly safe from the info dump. Tamlin goes on to add that:

Lucien ran away from homehis brothers came to try to kill himTamlin and Lucien killed two of themTamlin brought Lucien onto his team to protect himbut also for his people skillsnow the remaining brothers are afraid of TamlinLucien’s father isn’t sorryand Lucien is still haunted by the whole watching his true love murdered thing

Again, imagine how cool all of this would be if it weren’t just slapped in our eyes like a dead herring.

I feel like Maas has a difficult time making her characters communicate and relay important information in natural ways. Why isn’t Lucien involved in telling his own story? And why did the mystery of his past have to be solved all at once like that, in the clumsiest way possible?

It didn’t quite excuse everything Lucien had said and done to me, but … I understood now.

What has Lucien “done” to you? I mean, we know he tricked you with the Suriel thing and almost got you killed, but you didn’t seem that pissed off about it. Like, you mentioned it and moved right on past it. And why does it take a long, harrowing tale of personal tragedy to make Feyre understand why Lucien has been occasionally rude to her and tried to get her killed? Isn’t, IDK, skinning his friend a good enough reason?

Feyre is like, whoa, that story is bummer, I wanna change the subject, so she asks what will happen if she drinks the starlight. Tamlin says it would make her happy “until your last breath,” which sounds like some fairy trap bullshit to me because it doesn’t state specifically when that last breath is gonna happen. If I huff brake fluid I might be happy until my last breath, but that last breath is probably gonna be around fifteen minutes after I do it.

It’s okay, though, because Feyre has to wrestle the sad stick away from Lucien for a second:

“I don’t think that entire pool would be enough for me,” I said, and he laughed. 

“Two jokes in one day—a miracle sent from the Cauldron,” he said.

She’s not joking, Tamlin. She really thinks she has it worse than anybody else in the land. Take it from us, the readers. We’ve been in her self-pitying, selfish little head the whole time.

Tamlin asks what would make Feyre happy.

I blushed from my neck to the top of my head.

How do you know this, Feyre? Are you looking in a mirror?

“I—I don’t know.” It was true—I’d never given that sort of thing any thought beyond getting my sisters safely married off and having enough food for me and my father, and time to learn to paint.

Time to learn to paint? You already know how to paint. We keep hearing all about it.

But also, what do you mean, you don’t think about what would make you happy? It’s literally right there, and you’ve mentioned it a bunch of times throughout this book so far.

“Hmm,” he said, not stepping away. “What about the ringing of bluebells? Or a ribbon of sunshine? Or a garland of moonlight?” He grinned wickedly. 

High Lord of Prythian indeed. High Lord of Foolery was more like it. And he knew—he knew I’d say no, that I’d squirm a bit from merely being alone with him.

Sometimes, I honestly don’t know how to criticize this book. This is one of those times. I’m so stuck here. We’ve had zero indication so far that Tamlin enjoys making her uncomfortable, so why is she assuming that he’s trying to do that, now? Other than to force some sexual tension that we apparently aren’t smart enough to pick up from the constant updates on Tamlin’s skin being under his shirt.

Seriously, at this point I’m wondering where else he’s supposed to be keeping it.

No. I wouldn’t let him have the satisfaction of embarrassing me. I’d had enough of that lately, enough of … of that girl encased in ice and bitterness.

That’s gonna be the title of my memoir: A Girl of Ice and Bitterness.

Actually, an Enby of Ice and Bitterness, but it ruins the joke if I don’t misgender myself and that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

But yeah, Feyre? We’ve all had enough of you at this point, too.

Based on Feyre’s projection of her feelings onto Tamlin, she decides to go swimming after all. So he won’t win or something.

My undergarments were modest enough that I wasn’t showing much, but I still looked straight at him as I stood on the grassy bank.

Wait…are you trying to not see yourself naked?

Slowly, so slowly, his eyes roved down, then up. As if he were studying every inch, every curve of me. And even though I wore my ivory underthings, that gaze alone stripped me bare.

I know she means the color ivory but I cannot help myself. I have to imagine that she’s wearing a bra and panties made out of elephant tusks. Because it’s funnier that way. And I need something, anything, to wash the cliche out of my eyes after reading that.

“As if” he were studying every inch, every curve. No, jackass, it’s literally the thing he is doing. Plus, since when is Feyre curvy? I thought she was sickly thin. Maybe she just has curves “in all the right places.”

His eyes met mine and he gave me a lazy smile before removing his clothes. Button by button. I could have sworn the gleam in his eyes turned hungry and feral—enough so that I had to look anywhere but at his face.

Wait, didn’t she think they were going to eat her “or worse” at one point? Why drop your guard when he looks “hungry and feral” and you’re naked and defenseless?

I let myself indulge in the glimpse of a broad chest, arms corded with muscle, and long, strong legs before I walked right into that pool. He wasn’t built like Isaac, whose body had very much still been in that gangly place between boy and man. No—Tamlin’s glorious body was honed by centuries of fighting and brutality.

Just look at his dick and tell us how big it is, okay? There’s no way you got from the chest to the legs without the dick getting involved. Sack up and stop the “tee-hee nakey.” Your readers want the D, and I know that because BookTok says it’s “spicy”.

The liquid was delightfully warm, and I strode in until it was deep enough to swim out a few strokes and casually tread in place. Not water, but something smoother, thicker. Not oil, but something purer, thinner. Like being wrapped in warm silk.

It’s water soluble lube.

I also appreciate the way Maas just repeated the same sentence twice there. Awesome.

Tamlin asks Feyre who taught her how to swim. I will give you a multiple choice, okay?

A) Feyre
B) Feyre
C) Feyre
D) All of the above

“When I was twelve, I watched the village children swimming at a pond and figured it out myself.”

Because, and I cannot stress this enough, Feyre cannot possibly have ever learned anything by being taught. She is such a Strong, Kick-Ass Heroine that she’s only ever gained skills by watching someone else do them and then she’s just magically good at them.

I bet you were thinking, wow, this is a nice change, the characters are doing something rather than just spouting exposition at us. Well, great. Your vile thoughts have damned us all like Ray thinking of summer camp at the end of Ghostbusters.

But instead of Stay-Puft, we get Stay-Sad as Feyre tells Tamlin the story of how her father used to be rich, but then he wasn’t anymore because the generational wealth he’d enjoyed ran the fuck out.

We were just a good name that masked three generations of bad debts.

I know it’s not word-for-word copying, but the second I read that line I was like the meme of Leo DiCaprio pointing from his armchair. Because I have watched Titanic obsessively since it first came out and I know every single line. So when Feyre said that? What I heard was, “Your father left us nothing but a legacy of bad debts hidden by a good name.”

Anyway, to sum up yet another page of pure exposition dump. the whole story is that her father put all their eggs in one basket by sending all of their wealth on three ships and sending them to someplace called Bharat for “spices and cloth” so I’m guessing that Bharat is the Middle Eastern portion of this fantasy world. He had the ships take a shortcut that resulted in their sinking and that made them poor.

Someone help me out here, because that is absolutely the backstory from something but I can’t put my finger on it. It’s not original. It’s from something and it’s driving me up a wall that I can’t remember what it was. ed.—It’s one of the versions of Beauty and the Beast.

My father … he just stopped trying after that.” I couldn’t bring myself to mention that final, ugly moment when that other creditor had come with his cronies to wreck my father’s leg.

Oh, you couldn’t bring yourself to mention that your father didn’t “stop trying” because he lost his ships, but because he became physically disabled? And that despite his disability he did, indeed, try to provide for his daughters?

If I ever run into Maas, I’m going to corner her in a bathroom like Sinema and demand to know what the fuck her problem is with people like me. Because I’m getting like, personally insulted by the ableism in this book and how much the author seems to think that ableism is justifiable if it gives her heroine a sad.

“And here you are. What else did you figure out for yourself?”

Everything, Tamlin. She can do everything and she doesn’t need help from anyone else because she’s a Strong Kick-Ass Heroine.

That’s what makes her so likeable.

This section ends Feyre saying that she told him all about “those years in the woods” so who the fuck knows what she tells him besides the hunting part. After a section break, they ride back to the house. Feyre keeps looking at Lucien until finally he’s like, what? And Feyre decides not to bring up his painful past.

I waited until Tamlin was far enough ahead that even his High Fae hearing might not pick up on my words. “I never got to thank you for your advice with the Suriel.” 

Lucien tensed. “Oh?” 

I looked ahead at the easy way Tamlin rode, the horse utterly unbothered by his mighty rider. “If you still want me dead,” I said, “you might have to try a bit harder.”

I’m not sure any line in something we’ve read in a recap has made me laugh as hard as “the horse utterly unbothered by his mighty rider.”

Lucien loosed a breath. “That’s not what I intended.” I gave him a long look. “I wouldn’t shed any tears,” he amended. I knew it was true. “But what happened to you—” 

“I was joking,” I said, and gave him a little smile.

“You can’t possibly forgive me that easily for sending you into danger.”

Nah, you’re hot, she’ll forgive you and probably you’ll end up having a three-way with her and Tamlin or something.

But Feyre is surprisingly pragmatic about it. She’s like, you know, I get it, I killed your friend and now you have to live with me, so some hard feelings but not like, a bunch of hard feelings. Lucien tells her that Tamlin said she saved the Suriel before trying to save herself, and she’s like, it was the right thing to do.

The look he gave me was more contemplative than any he’d given me before. “I know far too many High Fae and lesser faeries who wouldn’t have seen it that way—or bothered.” He reached for something at his side and tossed it to me. I had to fight to stay in the saddle as I fumbled for it—a jeweled hunting knife.

LOL, let me just throw a knife at you as a sign of good faith.

But this conversation here is a great turning point in their relationship. I wish we could have gotten the same kind of moment over like…all the shit Tamlin just rattled off in a dialogue clump.

“I heard you scream,” he said as I examined the blade in my hands. I’d never held one so finely crafted, so perfectly balanced. “And I hesitated. Not long, but I hesitated before I came running. Even though Tam got there in time, I still broke my word in those seconds I waited.” He jerked his chin at the knife. “It’s yours. Don’t bury it in my back, please.”

Note to Feyre: this is an apology. This is how a person apologizes.

And with that chapter hook, I’m firmly on Team Lucien.

A Court of Jealous and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 17, “Did she take your wings? You never mentioned if she took your wings.”

Just a heads up that sign-up for my new Patreon tier and my Ream page are live in advance of this Thursday’s premiere of The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride.

As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.

With every chapter of this book, I have to sit back and go, is this really a bad chapter/bad writing, or is your judgment clouded by the chapters you’ve already read. But now that we’re up to seventeen chapters, I really do feel like, okay, seventeen chapters is seventeen chances for me to be fair.

And this book has used those gracious chances up.

After this, the gloves are coming off.

Since I’m not giving this book the benefit of the doubt anymore, I’m gonna use the first paragraph to make some predictions:

I jerked awake in the middle of the night, panting. My dreams had been filled with the clicking of the Suriel’s bone-fingers, the grinning naga, and a pale, faceless woman dragging her bloodred nails across my throat, splitting me open bit by bit. She kept asking for my name, but every time I tried to speak, my blood bubbled out of the shallow wounds on my neck, choking me.

Remembering that I have avoided spoilers and not skipped ahead, allow me to give you a forecast about this villain. She will be super attractive but aware of how attractive she is. She is an ex-lover of Tamlin’s. She will be jealous of Feyre. To prove just how much Tamlin loves Feyre, he will murder this unnamed Executive Bitch Woman. Oh, and when we get to the scene she’s dreaming about (if it ever happens and the author doesn’t just abandon it for three chapters or move on to some other side plot), Feyre will be rescued by Tamlin, whom she was martyring herself to protect.

So. Let’s see if I end up being right. No spoilers. ed.—a shocking amount of that turned out to be correct.

The nightmare wakes her up, and she hears screaming and noises downstairs.

Every hair on my body stood upright as I flung open the door. I might have stayed and cowered, but I’d heard screams like that before, in the forest at home, when I didn’t make a clean kill and the animals suffered. I couldn’t stand it. And I had to know.

Could you have stayed and cowered, Feyre? Because we heard all about how you watched your father get his ass beat until you shit yourself and puked, but somehow that was stronger and nobler than your sisters because they ran away.

Downstairs, Tamlin and Lucien rush in with a fairy who’s been wounded.

The faerie was almost as big as Tamlin, and yet the High Lord carried him as if he were no more than a sack of grain. Another species of the lesser faeries, with his blue skin, gangly limbs, pointed ears, and long onyx hair.

That’s another telling passage, isn’t it? She can instantly tell that this fairy is “lesser” because…his skin isn’t white.

Back in the day, I wrote some pretty racist fantasy novels, myself, okay? But a lot of you have told me on social media (or in comments) that this aspect of Maas’s writing never improves, and has even gotten worse. So, we won’t be doing the entire series of these. I’ve heard enough about how she treats her very few queer characters or characters who don’t have white skin. ed.—Later in this series, Maas retcons two major characters, Lucien and Rhysand, out of whiteness, despite describing them as “tan” and “pale” in this book. Fans have insisted that it wasn’t a retcon, at all, and that Maas’s cast of characters have always been staggeringly diverse and well-represented. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I understand, Feyre somehow “discovers” that Lucien isn’t white in a later book.

Feyre notices that the fairy is bleeding profusely from stumps on his back.

Lucien rushed into the foyer below just as Tamlin shouted, “The table—clear it off!” Lucien shoved the vase of flowers off the long table in the center of the hall.

Editor’s note: Doesn’t this castle have an infirmary? Why didn’t they bring him there?

Author’s fix:

Either Tamlin wasn’t thinking straight, or he’d been afraid to waste the extra minutes bringing the faerie to the infirmary.

If I were still editing, and this was my author, we’d be having a troubleshooting convo right now.

“Scouts found him dumped just over the borderline,” Tamlin explained to Lucien, but his eyes darted to me. They flashed with warning, but I took another step down. He said to Lucien, “He’s Summer Court.”

“By the Cauldron,” Lucien said, surveying the damage.

Well, well, well. Look who’s figured out what the fuck his religion is.

So, wanna know what happened to the fairy? Don’t worry. He’ll tell you. Numerous times. And I’ll keep track of all of them.

“My wings,” the faerie choked out, his glossy black eyes wide and staring at nothing. “She took my wings.” 

Again, that nameless she who haunted their lives.

Remember: it’s she. It’s a woman. Because women are terrible.

Tamlin flicked a hand, and steaming water and bandages just appeared on the table.

But he had to order paint and canvases and brushes from Faerie Amazon or something.

“She took my wings,” said the faerie. “She took my wings,” he repeated, clutching the edge of the table with spindly blue fingers.

She Took My Wings Count: 3

Whoever she was, she hadn’t just taken his wings. She’d ripped them off.

Are these definitions mutually exclusive? Because it doesn’t feel like they are.

I mean, until we get to:

The wounds were jagged—cartilage and tissue severed in what looked like uneven cuts. As if she’d sawed off his wings bit by bit.

So, were they “ripped” or “sawed”? Those are different verbs.

“She took my wings,” the faerie said again, his voice breaking.

She Took My Wings Count: 4

“Keep still,” Tamlin ordered, wringing the rag. “You’ll bleed out faster.”

…should there be an “or” in there? Or is this advice that Tamlin is giving the dude on how to die quicker? I totally heard that little kid from The Emperor’s New Groove saying, “that seems like a pretty crucial conjunction.”

It’s even more confusing when the fairy struggles after that sentence. Is he fighting for life? Feyre guesses that he’s trying to avoid the pain of having the stumps touched and holds him down so Tamlin can tend to the wounds.

Which is interesting, what with faeries being so super strong, but I guess he is dying. It’s a good thing he has such an attentive EMT working on him:

His skin was velvet-smooth and slippery, a texture I would never be able to paint, not even if I had eternity to master it.

Literally holding down a dying creature who has blood spraying everywhere and Feyre’s like, let me compliment the texture of his skin by bestowing an “even I couldn’t duplicate it”-type humble brag comment in my internal monologue. This is the most character consistency we’ve seen so far.

Another thing that just grinds me down about that line? She described the colors of the fairy and how extraordinary his veins looked in an earlier passage, but it’s the tactile sensation and not the visible image that makes her think of painting. Why not? Why should this be the one place in the whole book where the writing makes sense?

Tamlin calls for Lucien, but Lucien isn’t brave and strong and selfless like Feyre, so he vomits in a potted plant and runs away.

Editors Note: How can Feyre hold this faerie down? You’ve already stated multiple times that faeries are stronger than humans.

Author’s Fix:

The faerie twisted again and I held tight, my arms shaking with the effort. His injuries must have weakened him greatly if I could keep him pinned.

Which is fine. That’s a reasonable fix.

It should have been further up the page, is all. Writing Tip: You always want to answer the editor’s continuity questions somewhere in the manuscript before where you received the note. You want to answer those questions that the reader is going to have before they have them.

“She took my wings,” the faerie sobbed. “She took them.”

She Took My Wings Count: 5

“I know,” I murmured, my fingers aching. “I know.”

“I know,” the reader murmured, their brain aching. “I know.”

Blood gushed—so fast and bright that it took me a heartbeat to realize that a wound like this required a tourniquet—and that the faerie had lost far too much blood for it to even make a difference. It poured down his back and onto the table, where it ran to the edge and drip-drip-dripped to the floor near my feet.

First of all, Doogie Feyre, M.D. couldn’t know how much blood loss a non-human creature could survive. One of the biggest mistakes Maas made with Feyre’s characterization was not being able to let Feyre admit that she lacks expertise. With a change as simple as something like, “and that the faerie had lost more blood than I could imagine any creature surviving,” Feyre isn’t stating something as fact, but as her personal assessment. Instead of coming off as a know-it-all (when we’ve already discovered that she does not, in fact, know as much about Prythian and its residents as she thought she did), it would just be her using the knowledge she has to form a grim conclusion.

Feyre asks Tamlin if he can use his magic to heal the faerie.

Tamlin swallowed hard. “No. Not for major damage. Once, but not any longer.”

First the paintbrushes, now this. It is not Tamlin’s day.

Just in case you haven’t caught up yet on what caused these wounds on the faerie:

“She took my wings,” he whispered.

She Took My Wings Count: 6

Tamlin’s green eyes flickered, and I knew, right then, that the faerie was going to die. Death wasn’t just hovering in this hall; it was counting down the faerie’s remaining heartbeats.

What a missed fucking opportunity here. With all the European folklore she’s mined, Maas never thought to include any of the deities or creatures associated with death? Come on. This could have been so much more dramatic and cool and imaginative. Instead, we get:

“She took my wings,” he said again, his shaking subsiding a bit.

She Took My Wings Count: 7

Feyre holds the dying faerie’s hand and tries to comfort him.

I stroked his limp hair, its texture like liquid night—another I would never be able to paint but would try to, perhaps forever.

Not in a snarky way, I’m starting to wonder if Maas has synesthesia, because while I do a fair bit of painting myself and I do understand the difficulty of painting texture, I don’t understand how “night” is a texture and not a description of something you see rather than something you feel, sensory-wise.

Something wet touched my feet, and I didn’t need to look down to see that his blood had pooled around me. “My wings,” the faerie whispered.

Oh no. Did someone take them?

Then Feyre tells him that he’ll get his wings back, even though she’s aware that he’s dying and it’s not actually gonna happen.

The first false vow I’d ever sworn.

Except for the one where you vowed to go with Tamlin to uphold the treaty by living out your days in Prythian because you immediately started planning ways to wriggle out of that deal.

Tamlin says a little prayer that is the reason the side of my Kindle is dented:

“Cauldron save you,” he said, reciting the words of a prayer that was probably older than the mortal realm. “Mother hold you. Pass through the gates, and smell that immortal land of milk and honey. Fear no evil. Feel no pain.” Tamlin’s voice wavered, but he finished. “Go, and enter eternity.”

So much of that is straight from the damn Bible. Like, Exodus and Psalms, for one. Plus the concept of salvation and eternity? I’m so confused. Did Maas think we wouldn’t notice? Was she just banking on her readers having never heard them? Because even non-Bible-using people probably recognize them.

It’s just so incredibly lazy to create a death culture that’s as tainted with the Bible as American death culture is in the real world. Especially when Maas obviously at least glanced at a list of European fairy myths. Why not take it that one extra step and build on the research you’ve already done?

Anyway, the fairy dies.

I could feel Tamlin’s eyes on me, but I wouldn’t let go. I didn’t know how long it took for a soul to fade from the body. I stood in the puddle of blood until it grew cold, holding the faerie’s spindly hand and stroking his hair, wondering if he knew I’d lied when I’d sworn he would get his wings back, wondering if, wherever he had now gone, he had gotten them back.

Again with the super real-world belief system. I’m not saying other cultures don’t have concepts like souls and the afterlife, just that this one is real…let’s say “big three Western religions” to avoid any troublesome terminology. Little to no attempt was made in this fantasy story to make much about it fantastical.

I studied the faerie’s face—so unearthly, so inhuman. Who could be so cruel to hurt him like that?

Unearthy and inhuman are usually the reasons someone would hurt something. For example, when you killed that fairy in the forest. Or the Naga. You remember those unearthly, inhuman creatures you killed? Tamlin’s killed them while you’ve been here.

Yeah. Not so appetizing once you’ve seen how the sausage gets made, huh?

Feyre is so noble and distraught that Tamlin has to gently guide her away from her vigil beside the first dead faerie she gave a shit about. 

“We can’t leave him there,” I said, making to step down. Tamlin caught my elbow. 

“I know,” he said, the words so drained and weary. “I was going to walk you upstairs first.” 

Before he buried him. “I want to go with you.” 

“It’s too deadly at night for you to—” 

“I can hold my—” 

“No,” he said, his green eyes flashing. I straightened, but he sighed, his shoulders curving inward. “I must do this. Alone.”

Like, Feyre, know when to shut up please. This is not about you and how brave and strong you are. This is about something awful that just happened to someone that Tamlin apparently knows or knew or at the very least, feels responsible for. You’re not a part of this particular story, even though it’s happening in your story.

And he’s got a good reason for not involving her in this part of his life:

“Feyre,” he said—softly enough that I faced him again. “Why?” He tilted his head to the side. “You dislike our kind on a good day. And after Andras …” Even in the darkened hallway, his usually bright eyes were shadowed. “So why?”

Exactly. She hates fairies, killed a fairy, he’s making good points here.

“Because I wouldn’t want to die alone,” I said, and my voice wobbled as I looked at Tamlin again, forcing myself to meet his stare. “Because I’d want someone to hold my hand until the end, and awhile after that. That’s something everyone deserves, human or faerie.” I swallowed hard, my throat painfully tight. “I regret what I did to Andras,” I said, the words so strangled they were no more than a whisper. “I regret that there was … such hate in my heart. I wish I could undo it—and … I’m sorry. So very sorry.”

FINALLY. Finally, Feyre actually apologizes for murdering Tamlin’s bff. But I’m gonna be real concerned if, “I regret that there was…such hate in my heart,” is enough to absolve her for the rest of the story. 

I couldn’t remember the last time—if ever—I’d spoken to anyone like that.

Yeah, I can’t remember you ever apologizing for wronging someone, either. Usually, you’re just whining about how you’ve been wronged.

Or, you know, just not thinking that other people might have emotions at all:

If he felt such grief, such guilt, over a stranger, then Andras …

WOW! You’ve made such a stunning (and might I say, lightning quick) connection here: people get sad when their friends die! And it only took you…seventeen chapters and nearly half the book to get there!

We end the chapter with another opportunity for Feyre to check out Tamlin’s muscles and a chapter hook that, while poetic, I guess, annoys the piss out of me for petty reasons:

I watched him—watched every movement he made, the muscles of his body visible through that blood-soaked tunic, watched that invisible weight bearing down on his shoulders. He didn’t look at me as he scooped up the broken body and carried it to the garden doors beyond my line of sight. I went to the window at the top of the stairs, watching as Tamlin carried the faerie through the moonlit garden and into the rolling fields beyond. He never once glanced back.

OF COURSE HE DIDN’T LOOK BACK! HE’S CARRYING A DEAD BODY! THOSE ARE DIFFICULT TO TRANSPORT, TAKE IT FROM SOMEONE WHO KNOWS. WHY WAS HE SUPPOSED TO LOOK BACK, FEYRE? DID HE FORGET HIS WALLET?

Maybe we’ll find out in chapter 18, which I have just now skimmed only to find it’s impossibly long and just nonstop exposition. So, that’s gonna be a real treat for everyone involved.

THE OGRE’S FAIRYTALE BRIDE sign-ups are open!

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A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 16 or “Forget what you read before, we’re doing this now.”

As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.

Another chapter, another hygiene scene:

After soaking in the bath for nearly an hour, I found myself sitting in a low-backed chair before my room’s roaring fireplace, savoring the feel of Alis brushing out my damp hair.

Usually, I’m a fan of fairy tales where the kind, loving, self-sacrificing heroine finally gets to live in luxury. But there has been no reason for me to root for this outcome for Feyre. Especially since she sneered at her sister for longing for that type of life.

Alone with Alis, Feyre starts getting chatty about the blight and the troubles in fairyland, but Alis tells her it’s none of her business.

I twisted in my seat, glaring up into her masked face. “Why aren’t the other High Lords keeping their subjects in line? Why are these awful creatures allowed to roam wherever they want? Someone—someone began telling me a story about a king in Hybern—”

Now, I know the last chapter was a thousand miles away but I’m almost 100% sure that the Suriel, whom Feyre specifically sought out for counsel, told her to mind her own business, too.

“If this spills into the human world—if there’s war, or this blight poisons our lands …” I pushed back against the crushing panic. I had to warn my family—had to write to them. Soon.

She gave up that plan like two chapters ago. But now it’s back on. I mean, the Suriel said to just chill out, do nothing, and she’ll survive. Why listen to the entity you risked–and nearly lost–your life to get answers from? Obviously, you’re the one who knows best.

“The less you know, the better. Let Lord Tamlin deal with it—he’s the only one who can.” The Suriel had said as much.

No shit? Are you just remembering that right now?

Even Alis remembers about the Suriel two chapters ago:

“You think no one would tell me what you asked the kitchen to give you today, or realize what you went to trap? Foolish, stupid girl. Had the Suriel not been in a benevolent mood, you would have deserved the death it gave you. I don’t know what’s worse: this, or your idiocy with the puca.”

Due to the nature of this book overall, I truly expected Feyre to be like, “What puca? We’ve moved on.”

I see that the puca isn’t capitalized either. So, maybe the non-capitalization of Naga wasn’t racism. Maybe it was just another example of the inconsistency at which Maas excels.

“Would you have done anything else? If you had a family—” 

“I do have a family.” 

I looked her up and down. There was no ring on her finger.

Bitch, there’s no ring on your finger, either, and you’re still talking about your family.

“My sister and her mate were murdered nigh on fifty years ago, leaving two younglings behind. Everything I do, everything I work for, is for those boys. So you don’t get the right to give me that look and ask me if I would do anything different, girl.”

The message here seems to be family = children. Charming.

Now, having been told this by Alis, does Feyre say, “I’m sorry,” or “I understand what it’s like to be left responsible for the lives of others?” Of course not. She just asks if they live at the manor and wonders how they’re still children if it’s been fifty years, and the conversation moves on to an info-dump about how faeries age. Spoiler alert, some slowly, some not slowly, and High Fae aren’t born very often.

Finally, Feyre does say, yeah, I understand what you mean, and sorry for implying that you don’t have a family or whatever. Except for the word “sorry” never actually shows up.

Alis’s lips thinned, but she said, “The next time that fool Lucien gives you advice on how to trap the Suriel, you come to me. Dead chickens, my sagging ass. All you needed to do was offer it a new robe, and it would have groveled at your feet.”

What? Did you mean that Lucien, a fairy, whom we have been told over and over again could not lie, lied to you?

But I’m glad to know that Alis has a sagging ass. I was worried for a minute she might be pretty somehow and it would take the shine off Feyre.

Feyre was bathed and brushed like a prized horse, so what could the next scene possibly be? If you guessed, “Dinner, again” then you’re absolutely right. 

Look, it’s not that I hate dinner scenes in books, okay? I don’t. Lots of stuff happens around a dinner table. Have you ever seen Hereditary? The dinner scene in that movie is pivotal, as it is the exact moment Toni Colette was robbed of an Oscar. ed.—every time I think about that Oscar snub, I am more furious. “Don’t you swear at me, you little shit! Don’t you ever raise your voice at me! I am your mother! You understand? All I do is worry and slave and defend you, and all I get back is that fucking face on your face! So full of disdain and resentment and always so annoyed! Well, now your sister is dead! And I know you miss her and I know it was an accident and I know you’re in pain and I wish could take that away for you. I wish I could shield you from the knowledge that you did what you did, but your sister is dead! She’s gone forever! And what a waste… If it could’ve maybe brought us together, or something, if you could’ve just said ‘I’m sorry’ or faced up to what happened, maybe then we could do something with this, but you can’t take responsibility for anything! So, now I can’t accept. And I can’t forgive. Because… because nobody admits anything they’ve done!“ Like, come on. She did not “eat.” She devoured that scene.

But the dinner scenes in this book are so predictable. Feyre sits down, thinks of how she needs to make a plan, talks about how dangerous Lucien and Tamlin are, then someone gets mad and leaves. That’s it.

So, she strides into the dining room, where Tamlin and Lucien are already waiting.

Lucien cocked his head in a silent inquiry, and I gave him a subtle nod as I sat. His secret was still safe, though he deserved to be walloped for sending me so unprepared to the Suriel.

Then why are you keeping it secret? What loyalty do you owe to a fairy who just tried to get you killed?

Lucien slouched a bit in his chair. “I heard you two had a rather exciting afternoon. I wish I could have been there to help.” A hidden, perhaps halfhearted apology, but I gave him another little nod.

You were supposed to be there, remember, Lucien? It’s almost like he…lied. And how is this any kind of apology? He tried to get you killed, didn’t show up for you when he said he would, and you’re acting like, well, it’s cool, he kinda apologized.

He said with forced lightness, “Well, you still look lovely, regardless of your Hell-sent afternoon.” 

Not only does Maas use “Hell” in a fantasy world where there is no indication whatsoever that Christianity or Islam exists, but she also paraphrases a common idiom about heaven.

I snorted. I’d never looked lovely a day in my life. “I thought faeries couldn’t lie.”

YOU DON’T KNOW YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL/THAT’S WHAT MAKES YOU BEAUTIFUL

This is such a huge missed opportunity, IMO. At some point between the forest and now, Feyre needs to have had the thought that Lucien, despite what she thought she knew about the High Fae, lied to her. And then this line would have had a double meaning. She would be calling him out at dinner in front of Tamlin, and Tamlin would have no idea. And she would have leverage over Lucien.

I mean, that’s the kind of thing a good writer would have done but this book wasn’t written by a good writer. Instead, Feyre kind of vaguely wonders about everything else they’ve told her that she’s believed.

Lucien leaned back in his chair, smiling with feline delight. “Of course we can lie. We find lying to be an art. And we lied when we told those ancient mortals that we couldn’t speak an untruth. How else would we get them to trust us and do our bidding?”

Now, at this point you’re probably thinking, “surely, Feyre now realizes that Lucien set her up and lied to her about the Suriel, what with Alis straight up saying that he did.”

Perhaps the Suriel had been lying today, too, with that long-winded explanation about the politics of the faerie realms. About staying with the High Lord, and everything being fixed in the end.

Yup. She jumped straight past, “Lucien lied to me and tried to get me killed,” to, “this must mean the fairy whose one defining characteristic is that it must tell you the truth when you ask it questions is the liar.”

And then she looks at Tamlin and thinks about how he’s exactly like what that cult in her village think the High Fae are like and I’m not sure why that’s important at the moment.

“Even though Lucien revealed some of our closely guarded secrets,” Tamlin said, throwing the last word at his companion with a growl, “we’ve never used your misinformation against you.”

Google says that, too.

I ate in silence, so busy trying to decipher every word I’d overheard since arriving that I didn’t realize when Lucien excused himself before dessert. I was left alone with the most dangerous being I’d ever encountered.

Are we going to hear about how dangerous Tamlin is every single time she’s alone with him? Because she’s been alone with him a lot, and every single time we have to be reminded that he’s dangerous.

WE. GET. IT. SARAH.

Tamlin asks Feyre if she’s feeling better and asks her what she was doing in the western woods. She tells him she heard a legend about a creature you can catch and it’ll tell you what you want to know.

Tamlin flinched as his claws shot out, slicing his face. But the wounds closed as soon as they opened, leaving only a smear of blood running down his golden skin—which he wiped away with the back of his sleeve. “You went to catch the Suriel.”

I know this book gets “spicy” (to use the parlance of Booktok) so all I’m gonna say is, Feyre, do not let this man fingerblast you. But more importantly, yeah. He can heal himself. Sometimes? When it’s convenient? But not when it gives Feyre a chance to touch him and see his abs through his shirt or something.

Feyre is like, no, I caught the Suriel, and Tamlin is like, a human girl captured a Suriel, and then Feyre turns into Elle Woods:

Despite myself, despite the afternoon, my lips twitched upward. “Is it supposed to be hard?”

And of course, Tamlin laughs because this is so charming. Then he’s like, hey, do I need to trap a Suriel to find out about this list of words I found? And he has the piece of paper Feyre threw away.

“Unusual? Queue? Slaying? Conflagration?” He read the list. I wanted to curl up and die. Words I couldn’t recognize from the books—words that now seemed so simple, so absurdly easy as he was saying them aloud. “Is this a poem about murdering me and then burning my body?”

Ah, yes. Conflagration. I remember that on all my third grade spelling tests, that’s how simple they are. 

Damn, the literacy snobbery is beyond the bounds of what any page should hold.

So, because Feyre feels inadequate, she blames Tamlin for her feelings of inadequacy and just gets up to leave. But, as is standard in this book, as she walks away, Tamlin makes a remark that causes her to stop and turn to him.

Seriously. It’s happened a lot.

What he says this time is, “You love them very much, don’t you?” followed up with:

The list of malformed words was still clutched in his hand. “I wonder if your family realizes it,” he murmured. “That everything you’ve done wasn’t about that promise to your mother, or for your sake, but for theirs.” I said nothing, not trusting my voice to keep my shame hidden.

SHAME OVER WHAT DO YOU KNOW WHAT SHAME MEANS, SARAH? OR DO YOU JUST PULL EMOTION WORDS OUT OF A HAT?! 

Maybe that part about her shame would make more sense if it somehow connected to anything else in the paragraph. Shame that her family mistreated her so badly? Shame that she’s no longer taking care of them? WHAT SHAME?!

All of the contradictions in this book make it so tedious. I don’t care about anything going on in the plot. I don’t give a shit about any of the characters. This book is obnoxious.

Tamlin once again offers to help Feyre write a letter to her family and she tries to angrily storm away.

So, true story: in high school I had this friend who always had resting bitch face, so whenever she left a room we’d go, “Anna got mad and left.” She didn’t ever actually storm off angrily, it just looked like she was angry and leaving the room. For almost thirty years we’ve been making that joke whenever Anna leaves a room.

Feyre has ruined it for me. Because nobody, absolutely nobody, gets mad and leaves as much as Feyre does.

Tamlin moves vampire-fast to block her from leaving.

“I don’t need your help.” 

“Clearly not,” he said with a half smile. But the smile faded. “A human who can take down a faerie in a wolf’s skin, who ensnared the Suriel and killed two naga on her own …” He choked on a laugh, and shook his head. The firelight danced along his mask. “They’re fools. Fools for not seeing it.”

Well, Tamlin, it’s a good thing that you and your probably human-compatible genitals showed up to remind us how tough and not-like-other-girls Feyre is.

He gives her back her list of words and says:

“You gave up so much for them.” He lifted his other hand as if to brush my cheek. I braced myself for the touch, but he lowered it before making contact. “Do you even know how to laugh?”

No, Tamlin. Teach me. Teach me to live, laugh, and love.

SO BORING.

I shook off his arm, unable to stop the angry words. High Lord be damned. “I don’t want your pity.”

 His jade eyes were so bright I couldn’t look away. “What about a friend?” 

“Can faeries be friends with mortals?”

This is another passage that I’m pretty sure is lifted wholesale from another book or a movie. Possibly about vampires. But it leads us into another excruciating info dump about the history of fairies and their fairy lore. During the war, some fairies were pro-humans and some were anti-humans, and the human-likers fought with humans against the human-haters and that’s the only reason the treaty ever happened in the first place because otherwise it would have just been a slaughter.

He also mentions that this happened five hundred years before, when he was a child.

“But had I been old enough, I would have. Against slavery, against tyranny, I would gladly go to my death, no matter whose freedom I was defending.”

He would have voted for Obama a third time, if he could have.

I wasn’t sure if I would do the same. My priority would be to protect my family—and I would have picked whatever side could keep them safest.

Make America Great Again

Then, there’s more info dump to totally clean up what’s going on with her family:

“For what it’s worth,” Tamlin said, “your family knows you’re safe. They have no memory of a beast bursting into their cottage, and think a long-lost, very wealthy aunt called you away to aid her on her deathbed. They know you’re alive, and fed, and cared for. But they also know that there have been rumors of a … threat in Prythian, and are prepared to run should any of the warning signs about the wall faltering occur.”

And these greedy, lazy, awful people wouldn’t seek out the long-lost relative to squeeze her for as much cash as possible?

Also, this is another really convenient moment where the author can just abandon all those “plans” Feyre was vaguely making for so many chapters and focus on whatever shiny new conflict pops into her head.

Feyre is super pissed off about the fact that Tamlin altered their memories and he says he did it because he was afraid her father would come after her or get a rescue party together and they would violate the treaty again.

“You don’t know him. My father wouldn’t have bothered to do either.”

Tamlin looked at me for a long moment. “Yes, he would have.”

But he wouldn’t—not with that twisted knee. Not with it as an excuse.

Oh.

OH.

We’re doing “disabled people are selfish and lazy” again.

Wow.

Yeah, it’s not a total slap in the face to read something like that when you’re a disabled person. Do ableds really not understand that being thought of as lazy or selfish for having physical limitations and extra care needs is like, our number one fear and something used to justify caregivers murdering their disabled relatives? Because we talk about that a lot.

At this point, Tamlin has done every single thing Feyre has set out to do from the start of the book. Her family is taken care of, she’s not having to provide for them anymore, he warned them about the blight…so end of book, right? That was all the goal/motivation/conflict Feyre has ever had. The story is finished.

But it’s not, so I figure Feyre is now going to just kind of drift through the rest of this book making a mission out of whatever the male characters find important.

Had I known he possessed those abilities, I might have even asked the High Lord to glamour their memories if he hadn’t done it himself.

Oh, really, Feyre? Because this was your reaction just one page ago:

Faerie arrogance, such faerie arrogance to change our minds, to implant thoughts as if it wasn’t a violation—

ONE PAGE YOUS ALL. ONE PAGE. I turned the page from “violation” to Feyre just being like, oh, if I’d known, I’d have had him do it. Violation of the mind is only allowed if Feyre says it’s allowed? I guess?

Feyre gets hypnotized by how gorgeous Tamlin’s mask is, which leads her to ask him for paint. He’s surprised that she likes art and even mentions that there’s a gallery in the castle, but he can’t show it to her until it gets cleaned up.

What, did you go through there and slash all your portraits in a fit of Disney?

He also tells her she can paint whatever she wants and he’ll give her all the supplies but it will take a while to “track them down,” which is another fantastic inconsistency brought to you by the dude who can conjure flame and create whole banquets with a wave of his hand but who apparently needs Majykyl Hobby Lobby to ship art supplies to him. Sure. I give up looking for consistency in the plot. I’m just letting it sweep me downriver like an inexperienced kayaker.

Tamlin asks Feyre if she’d want him to show her the gallery and she accepts because the paintings in there must be really, really good.

Uh-huh.

He smiled at me still, broadly and without restraint or hesitation. Isaac had never smiled at me like that. Isaac had never made my breath catch, just a little bit. 

Oh wow, he smiles at you in the way the dude who didn’t want to marry you but would still fuck you in a barn when he got bored never smiled at you? Shoot for the moon, Feyre. This is Prince God Damn Charming.

The chapter hook is Feyre walking away so he won’t see her smile back. Such suspense. I wonder what will happen.

At least this recap has finally, FINALLY gotten it through my head that I need to stop looking for mainstream success, if this is what delights the mainstream.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 15, or “That scene in Beauty and The Beast with the wolves but now the wolves are racism”

As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.

At the end of the last chapter, I predicted that there would be something racist happening in the next chapter.

AND I WAS CORRECT.

This is how Naga are described in ACOTAR:

Covered in dark scales and nothing more, they were a horrendous combination of serpentine features and male humanoid bodies whose powerful arms ended in polished black, flesh-shredding talons.

Here were the creatures of the blood-filled legends, the ones that slipped through the wall to torment and slaughter mortals. The ones I would have been glad to kill that day in the snowy woods. Their huge, almond-shaped eyes greedily took in the Suriel and me.

Now, go look at the Wikipedia entry for Naga. Go on.

Okay, I know you’re not going to. So to sum up, I read the Wikipedia page, I clicked some of the sources, I didn’t do like a super deep dive BUT. I haven’t found evidence of Naga being monsters. I have found evidence of heroic love stories, snakes who reach enlightenment, beings that control rain and fertility, are worked into architecture, and are generally thought of as divine beings by several cultures across Asia.

But Maas has decided they’re blood-thirsty, inhuman monsters with “almond-shaped” eyes, the #1 choice of fanfic writers trying to relay the Asianness of their OC. And then has written that these are the bad fairies that Feyre won’t mind killing. Oh, and she’s chosen not to capitalize the name of the only creature so far to have come from non-European mythologies.

You know. Just real subtle racist stuff.

“The Dark Mother has sent us a gift today, brothers,” he said, gazing at the Suriel, who was clawing at the snare now. The naga’s amber eyes shifted toward me again. “And a meal.”

“Not much to eat,” another one said, flexing its claws.

Hey, were yous all aware that Feyre is skinny? Like, real, real skinny? It’s important to know that even though she’s been eating rich foods and sweets at these huge banquets every single night, she’s still very, very skinny.

The problem Feyre’s got now, aside from her author, is that the Suriel is still tied up.

I had ten arrows—nine, once I fired the one nocked in my bow. None of them ash, but maybe they’d keep the naga down long enough for me to flee.

Yes, Feyre, that’s very good. Ten minus one is nine.

I had three heartbeats to make up my mind. Three heartbeats to execute my plan.

The plan to escape this situation. Not any of the nine hundred other plans we’ve heard about. This “plan” is to draw her bow, scream her head off, and fire an arrow through the rope holding the Suriel. Which she pulls off, and it buys her some time as the Naga are blown back.

No chance of my movements being considered an unprovoked attack anymore—not now that they’d seen my aim. They still wanted to kill me.

Um. What does this mean? She was hoping they’d think she’d attacked the Suriel? And that the attack was unprovoked? But the Naga for sure provoked this whole thing? I’m sorry, but was everyone’s reading comprehension just total shit when this book came out? That sentence means absolutely nothing. It makes no sense. It’s just words that sound like maybe they should be in a fight scene.

So, Feyre jumps over a stream, but that doesn’t work on the Naga. This chapter is almost exclusively her running from and fighting with the Naga, by the by. Now, she shoots one, but:

I didn’t know if it was a killing shot. I was already gone.

So, we’re possibly down to three Naga? Maybe?

Lucien had said he’d be nearby—but I was deep in the woods, too far from the manor and help.

Those two clauses don’t work with that conjunction. Lucien said he’d be nearby. Her being far from the manor doesn’t really matter. He told her that he’d be in the woods. Being far from the manor doesn’t cancel out Lucien being in the woods.

So, we’re running and running and her thinking is that if she runs far enough maybe she’ll run into Lucien. But she doesn’t run back toward the manor. She runs off into the woods to look for Lucien on the slim chance that she’ll survive the forest long enough to track him down.

Feyre ends up surrounded by three Naga.

“Scrawny human thing,” he spat to the others, whose smiles grew sharper. “Do you know what you’ve cost us?”

I guess that means the fourth one died? But they’re smiling about it? Whatever. The important thing for you to know is that Feyre is skinny.

I wouldn’t go down without a fight, without taking some of them with me.

Got any more cliches you want to throw in there, Sarah?

“Go to Hell,” I said, but it came out in a gasp.

“Hell,” I say, taking a long drag off my cigarette. In my contemplation, it has accumulated a column of ash as long and gray as the sky above the coast. There’s a storm crossing the channel, a storm to rival the tempest in my mind. I exhale a nicotine phantom, grit my teeth against the October cold. “Hell is Maas’s world-building.”

THERE CAN’T BE HELL UNLESS YOU HAVE HELL AS A CONCEPT IN YOUR WORLD, SARAH.

So, remember how she had ten arrows, nine after she fires one? Well, she fired two. How many arrows are left, students? That’s right, eight. Eight arrows, ah ah ha. So obviously the only solution is to use her bow as a striking weapon the entire rest of the time.

They laughed, stepping nearer. I swung the bow at the closest. He dodged it, chuckling. “We’ll have our sport—though you might not find it as amusing.”

IDK, I feel like maybe she should have at least tried to get another shot off. She’s freaking Legolas most of the time. We just saw her shoot an arrow through a rope and cut it clean in half, then immediately shoot a Naga.

But now they’re too close, so it doesn’t matter.

Let’s talk about this “have our sport” sentence, though. I assume this is an …or worse situation? Like, they’re going to rape her? What kind of sex organs do snakes even have? Would it even be possible? ed.—I have since learned, against my will, what snake sex organs are like. This is the kind of information that teenagers just drop on you with, “Wanna hear something weird about snakes?”

A Naga breaks her bow and pins her to the ground, but she has a knife in her boot. She stabs the Naga in the neck and:

Blood rained down onto my face, into my mouth as I bellowed my fury, my terror.

I know for a fact I’ve seen this in a movie before. Like, this exact “what a badass” moment. I wish I could remember. If you know what movie the author was watching while writing this, leave it in the comments. ed.—Someone did leave this in the comments, but when Patrons are no longer subscribers, Patreon removes their comments. I am once again begging someone to remind me which movie this is.

Now, time for a quick writing tip:

One of them lunged for me, and I dodged aside.

I have such a bad habit of doing this, myself. You don’t have to put “aside” after dodged. It is implied. There are so many words that don’t need adverbs or prepositions because they kind of already have them. The problem is, we add them in casual speech so often. If someone “lies down,” they could just “lie.” If they “sit down,” they could just “sit.” Same with “stand up,” etc.

IT HAUNTS ME.

I’ll probably never get out of the habit, but you can save yourselves!

The wolves are just about to pounce on Belle when:

He opened his mouth again, and a bone-shattering roar sounded through the clearing.

Only it hadn’t come from the creature’s throat.

That’s right! The Beast has arrived to save Belle from the wolves!

The noise hadn’t finished echoing before the naga went flying off me, crashing into a tree so hard that the wood cracked. I made out the gleaming gold of his mask and hair and the long, deadly claws before Tamlin tore into the creature.

Well, I guess he’s not a beast at this point. He’s fighting these super dangerous creatures in his hot guy form. That makes plenty of sense, doesn’t it?

Tamlin let out another roar that made the marrow of my bones go cold and revealed those lengthened canines.

Or not. I mean, he’s roaring? He’s got elongated canines? Did that happen before when he wasn’t in beast form? Is he in his beast form but still wearing the mask and the hair for some reason? What the hell is going on?

If I cared deeply, I would be upset right now.

At this point, Tamlin kills all the Naga and Feyre is like, oh wow, he’s so dangerous and scary because he’s a High Lord (who deserves capitalization consistency).

Feral rage still smoldered in his gaze, and I flinched as he knelt beside me. He reached for me again, but I jerked back, away from the bloody claws that were still out. I raised myself into a sitting position before the shaking resumed. I knew I couldn’t get to my feet.

That paragraph would be more powerful, I think, if we didn’t see her in a gripping panic over shit like…candles. And books.

“Feyre,” he said. The wrath faded from his eyes, and the claws slipped back under his skin, but the roar still sounded in my ears. There had been nothing in that sound but primal fury.

I guess this establishes that Tamlin can make scary animal noises in his regular form, right? Eyebrows eyebrows.

I’m so pissed off because I know they’re gonna bang but Feyre is gonna be thinking about her plan or something the whole time, probably, instead of grabbing onto those antlers and losing herself in the moment.

Tamlin says he was tracking the Naga and heard her scream.

So he didn’t know about the Suriel. And he—he’d come to help me.

I wonder how fast she snitches out Lucien now. She’s like, oh, he saaaaaaaaaaved me.

Prediction: At some point, Feyre will compare Tamlin rescuing her from the wolves to Tamlin “rescuing” her from her terrible family. If it doesn’t happen, I’ll be relieved.

He reached a hand toward me, and I shuddered as he ran cool, wet fingers down my stinging, aching cheek.

Here’s another writing tip: pairs of adjectives aren’t better in pairs. This is another one that I struggle with, too. It’s really easy to be like, “Oh, more adjectives means more vivid! Yay, I so good writer!” But re-read that sentence and remove “cool” and “aching”.

See? Then, when she goes on to realize that the reason his hands are wet is that they’re covered in blood, “wet” hasn’t been buried.

Again, this is such a super common, easy, obnoxious mistake that a lot of people struggle with, so the sooner you can catch it in your own work, the sooner you can fix it and be a better writer than me or Maas.

Tamlin heals her wound with magic and explains how he came looking for her when he found one of his own arrows in a dead Naga.

“I found one dead half a mile away,” he went on, his hands leaving my face as he unbuckled his baldric, then shucked off his tunic and handed it to me. The front of my own had been ripped and torn by the talons of the naga.

Couldn’t he just magically fix the clothes she’s wearing? He magically fixed her body. He makes food appear from nowhere. He conjures fire.

Oh, no, you’re right. He can’t because if he did, Feyre wouldn’t have an excuse to check him out:

I pulled on Tamlin’s tunic over my own, ignoring how easily I could see the cut of his muscles beneath his white shirt, the way the blood soaking it made them stand out even more.

She ignores it before describing it in detail. Again, an easy mistake a lot of people make. But at some point, it goes from “mistake” to “pattern of infuriating and disturbing behavior” and I think I’m ready to say we found the line.

I had this hilarious mental image of Tamlin standing under a waterfall of blood, smoothing his hair back in slow motion like a cologne commercial or something.

A purebred predator, honed to kill without a second thought, without remorse.

Except for how he didn’t want to kill you because he felt enough blood had been spilled already or whatever.

I shivered again and savored the warmth that leaked from the cloth.

Is that the verb we’re going with? Leaked? For heat.

Sure, let’s keep going.

Tamlin helps Feyre stand up, but she’s all wobbly and such.

I stared at our linked hands, both coated in blood that wasn’t our own.

How romantic.

No, he hadn’t been the only one to spill blood just now. And it wasn’t just my blood that still coated my tongue. Perhaps that made me as much of a beast as him. But he’d saved me. Killed for me.

Yeah, we were there. Like, we’re aware that you killed things and that the blood is on you because of that. Anyway, yeah, he killed for you, swoon.

He asks her if he “wants” to know what she was doing in the woods.

No. Definitely not. Not after he’d warned me plenty of times already. “I thought I wasn’t confined to the house and garden. I didn’t realize I’d come so far.”

She wasn’t confined, no, but Alis told her not even to go into the garden or onto the grounds.

He dropped my hand. “On the days that I’m called away to deal with … trouble, stay close to the house.”

stay in the houseokay, go out of the house but only with Tamlin and only to the gardenall right, it’s fine for you to go out in the woods with Lucien, toofine, at least bring one of Lucien’s knivesstuff is only dangerous at night, anywayyou know what, go where you want so long as mom’s home

This is the most ridiculous… how do people gloss past this shit and not see it? And I’m sorry, I know some of you did read this and didn’t notice this stuff. It’s not your fault. I’m pretty sure there must be some kind of subliminal message coded into this shit and I somehow, miraculously, am not susceptible to it.

Look at me.

Look at me.

*extreme Robin Williams drama voice* It’s not your fault.

I wanted to tell him how much that meant—that the High Lord of the Spring Court thought I was worth saving—but couldn’t find the words.

Everybodies and otherfolks, we’ve found it. The lowest ever bar for a love interest. “He doesn’t think I’m disposable.”

I know Feyre is straight now. I know it in my heart. She is straight as an ash arrow.

Love yourself, Feyre.

Tamlin is like, let’s get back home and Feyre thinks about how it’s not really her home, she doesn’t have a home anymore, etc. The walk gives Feyre time to reflect on what she learned from the Suriel.

Stay with the High Lord. Fine—easy enough. But as for the history lesson it had been in the middle of giving me, about wicked kings and their commanders and however they tied into the High Lord at my side and the blight … I still didn’t have enough specifics to be able to thoroughly warn my family. But the Suriel had told me not to go looking for further answers. 

Super convenient way to get around that pesky need for a well-developed plot. “A magical being told me not to be curious about anything happening in the book” is a great fucking dodge. Now, we can just enjoy endless retellings of how Feyre got up, had breakfast, walked around, almost died, went to dinner, blood somehow became involved, and she went to bed.

The chapter hook is meh. It’s about how Tamlin looks ashamed of himself. And like, I care so little for Tamlin at this point, I’m not invested enough to jump into the next chapter right away, the way a hook should feel.

So, a full chapter of damsel in distress from strong, kick-ass Feyre, ending in the irresistible hotness of a blood-soaked underwear model. This was worth our time. We have been in no way robbed.

STATE OF THE TROUT: A new Abigail Barnette book, in wildly different formats!

Let’s do this the TL;DR way first, and if you have further questions, you can read on.

Abigail Barnette is writing Fantasy Romance nowIt’s a brand new, interconnected series of stories with varying spice and plot scope, all set in a fantasy world called Fablemere.It’s starting out in serial format and the first book will be in paperback and e-book next yearYou can read the five chapter premiere on Ream, Patreon, or Kindle Vella on October 5New chapters will post every Tuesday and Thursday. (But no faster than that, because this is meticulously timed).You’ll be able to sign up for Ream and the new Patreon tier (both $3 USD per month) on October 1The first book is The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride. The protagonist is a fat, non-binary, over-forty human with epilepsy. BECAUSE I’VE EARNED THIS.The cover looks like this:

I’ve been busy for the past six or so months developing this project: writing, map-making, outlining seven books, watching nonstop fantasy movies from my childhood, and developing a business and release plan that will get this book in front of as many eyeballs as possible. This system will allow me to attract new Abigail Barnette readers, broaden my revenue stream, and serve readers multiple formats to choose from.

So… what the hell is Fablemere?

Fablemere is the fantasy world of our fairy tales, a setting with limitless potential for anything from monster romance to cozy fantasy love stories. Every story will be set in the world of Fablemere, featuring new characters and settings for readers to explore, each informed by today’s most popular fantasy romance tropes.

And, of course, all the scorching sex that Abigail Barnette is known for.

The first book, The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride, introduces us to the world of Fablemere through the eyes of Vanessa, a forty-something non-binary human who accidentally falls through the pages of an enchanted book. When she’s captured by ogres, her epilepsy is mistaken for a supernatural gift—one that the ruthless vampire, Baron Aerrax Scylas, would pay handsomely to exploit.

Vanessa finds a protector in Droguk, a gruff and grumpy ogre who’s just trying to support his widowed sister and two nieces and has no time for a human making outlandish claims about magical books. Although Vanessa and Droguk start out repulsed by each other, a grudging friendship eventually blossoms into an attraction they both struggle to deny. With her supply of crucial medication running out, they undertake a dangerous journey to save her life…and escape the Baron’s relentless pursuit.

If you enjoyed The 10th Kingdom, Labyrinth, Legends & Lattes, Once Upon A Time, or Bound to the Battle God, or you’ve just always wished that Inkheart and The Never-Ending Story were geared towards adults with filthy minds, you’re going to love the stories I have planned for Fablemere.*

*I wanted to add, “If you’ve ever jerked off to Fern Gully” to that list, but I thought better of it. Until I typed that just now.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 14, or “Wait, did Feyre just shit her pants?”

As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.

You know that feeling when we’re reading this book and we’re like, damn, this could have been good? This is a whole chapter of that. Prepare yourself.

The chapter opens with Feyre remembering Lucien’s instructions for finding a Suriel.

I repeated Lucien’s instructions as I walked out of the manor, through the cultivated gardens, across the wild, rolling grassy hills beyond them, over clear streams, and into the spring woods beyond.

I hate to keep bringing this up but the inconsistency of the worldbuilding demands it. Hungers for it.

WHAT HAPPENED TO CERTAIN DEATH IF YOU LEAVE THE MANOR GROUNDS?

The answer is: consistency in worldbuilding would be disastrous to the plot.

The lands were as empty as the manor itself, though I occasionally glimpsed something shining in the corner of my eye. Every time I turned to look, the shimmering transformed into the sunlight dancing on a nearby stream, or the wind fluttering the leaves of a lone sycamore atop a knoll. As I passed a large pond nestled at the foot of a towering hill, I could have sworn I saw four shining female heads poking up from the bright water, watching me. I hurried my steps.

The lands were empty except for all the fairies.

Night was the dangerous time, I reminded myself. I had only a few hours until sunset.

Since when is the forest safe during the day? Because the impression we, the readers, were given is that the forest is especially dangerous at night. Not that it was totally safe during the day.

Probably comment from editor in the margin: Earlier, it’s dangerous in the day, too. That’s when the Bogge was after them.

Sarah Maas, probably, who refuses to scroll up in the document to correct any inconsistency in the book she’s about to make millions, literally millions, of dollars from:

Even if the Bogge had stalked us in the daylight.

The Bogge was dead, and whatever horror Tamlin was now dealing with dwelled in another part of these lands.

There. Problem solved. There was one dangerous fairy in the whole of the forest, and Tamlin killed it, and all the other bad fairies are now somewhere else and Prythian is safe, at least the places where Feyre must be able to traverse alone for purposes of the plot.

Here’s a writing tip: if your worldbuilding and your plot clash, you need to change one or the other. Because not everyone is going to end up with a PR blitz and nonstop social media hype. Some of us actually have to write well. Please plan on being the latter.

Feyre wonders if Tamlin is having to face the High Lord and if the High Lord is the one who took Lucien’s eye, and then she’s like, ope, wait, there’s a woman I can blame. She brings up the High Lord’s consort then “pushed away the thought,” meaning I guess she doesn’t want to think of Lucien or Tamlin talking to anyone with she/her pronouns.

Lucien had said to find running water, and this was close enough to make escape possible. If I needed to escape. Hopefully I wouldn’t.

He said you would need to escape. He straight up told you to be prepared to run when the thing gets loose. Escaping was part of the instructions.

So, Feyre puts down her snare and goes up a tree.

From my spot up a nearby tree—a sturdy, dense oak whose vibrant leaves hid me entirely from anyone below—I waited.

POV is a thing, right? I mean, not in this book but definitely in other books. Feyre cannot possibly know if someone on the ground can see her. She can know that she can’t see the ground. She can’t know if someone below can see her.

Feyre wonders if Lucien and Tamlin get bored of living constantly in one season. She thinks this kind of year-round-spring set-up would have been fine for her when she was trying to feed her family through frozen winters, which leads us into a new plan Feyre has that she won’t share with us because simply withholding information is what passes for plot twists, I guess.

I’d just settled in again when a ripple of silence came toward me. As if the wood thrushes and squirrels and moths held their breath while something passed by.

While I enjoy the “ripple of silence” part, I have to use this opportunity to again point out that everything but the weather is exactly the same as the human world, it seems. The fauna is exactly the same on both sides of the wall. How does living in one eternal breeding season affect their population? How do animals adapt to something like that? Wouldn’t it make more sense for there to be, I don’t know, fantastical animals in this fantasy setting you’ve created?

My bow was already strung. Quietly, I loosely nocked an arrow.

Remember a few chapters ago when her bow wouldn’t protect her from anything in Fairysville or whatever? I do. I wish the author had. But it’s hard to make your character Not Like Other Girls and a Kick-Ass Heroine if you can’t show her using a weapon.

Maybe this had been a very bad idea.

Siri, show me the definition of “duh.”

Maybe Lucien had overestimated my abilities. Or maybe he had been waiting for the chance to lead me to my doom.

You didn’t think of this before? You didn’t just go, hmmm, Tamlin, the guy who says they can’t kill me, is gone and this dude, who has said numerous times that he’d rather you were dead, is all, “go into the woods and piss off some fae,” and only now, when you’re in the fucking tree, do you think, huh. This seems fishy.

Okay, as long as we’re here, let’s just slog ahead.

 I’d laid my snares carefully, making the chicken look as if it had wandered too far and snapped its own neck as it sought to free itself from a fallen branch.

Fairycide Hunter with Lt. Joe Kenda

I was originally gonna go with “Fairytale Forest CSI” but I just like that Joe Kenda dude and his half-awake commentary.

If you have Discovery+, you know what I’m talking about.

ed.—For the first time, I’m wondering why, exactly, Feyre used a chicken to bait her snares to catch a sentient fairy thing that probably is aware that chickens don’t live in forests. I’m truly confused as to how I didn’t catch this before.

Her snare trap catches something that shrieks and fights and Feyre gets down from her tree, assuming it’s the Suriel. Good for her, it is.

Lucien, I decided as I crept up to the faerie in the birch glen, really, truly wanted me dead.

Oh, no shit? The guy who has said a couple times by now that if it were up to him, he’d have you killed? What a weird vibe you’re picking up there, Feyre, I don’t get where that’s coming from.

I hadn’t known what to expect as I entered the ring of white trees—tall and straight as pillars—but it was not the tall, thin veiled figure in dark tattered robes. Its hunched back facing me, I could count the hard knobs of its spine poking through the thin fabric. Spindly, scabby gray arms clawed at the snare with yellowed, cracked fingernails.

So like, a Dementor.

But I guess I don’t get how it can’t escape the snare. As the scene goes on, the Suriel proves to be highly intelligent. At least, as intelligent as a character in this book can be. Surely, it could figure out how to untie a snare. ed.—but not intelligent enough to not pick up a dead chicken in the forest to eat it.

Before we go on, let’s briefly discuss how a snare works. A lot of people confuse ground snares and noose traps. A spring trap or a noose trap are the kinds that drag prey off the ground. That’s not what Feyre made, so don’t imagine a Dementor hanging by one ankle from a tree limb, its robes flipped over its head, Dementor willie just flopping around. Don’t you dare imagine that.

Imagine that.

 A ground snare, which is what Feyre set, catches around some part of the animal (usually the head or a limb) and as the creature keeps on moving, the wire or twine you’re using cinches around them. Because they’re animals, they don’t stop and go, “Hmm, what an interesting predicament, but easily escapable if I simply don’t pull.”

But why doesn’t this Suriel do that? Remember, this a creature she can ask anything and get an answer. “How do I get out of a snare?” is apparently like, the one question it can’t? A question that I can’t answer is, why didn’t it see the snare in the first place? ed.—Or, why didn’t it realize that a chicken in a forest is a trap?

Another question I have to ask is, why does “snare” go from singular to plural to singular again? Yes, laying snares, you absolutely want to lay as many as possible in the area you’ve baited. But first, Feyre talks about laying her snare. Then, when the thing is snared, her “snares” hold. And then she comes up on the Dementor and it’s back to one snare.

Feyre approaches the Suriel with her bow drawn because again, no consistency, let’s just forget that only ash arrows kill fairies, this is all fine.

The faerie went rigid. And sniffed. Once. Twice. 

Then slowly, it turned to me, the dark veil draped over its bald head blowing in a phantom breeze.

Right, so. Like a Dementor.

A face that looked like it had been crafted from dried, weatherworn bone, its skin either forgotten or discarded, a lipless mouth and too-long teeth held by blackened gums, slitted holes for nostrils, and eyes … eyes that were nothing more than swirling pits of milky white—the white of death, the white of sickness, the white of clean-picked corpses.

Okay, still a Dementor but damn, look at that descriptive imagery. Bravo, but also oh, no, because again this is a spot where the book really shows that the author can write well but simply chooses not to.

It goes on to talk about how the Suriel looks just like a Dementor some more, and then it starts talking to Feyre.

 My bowels turned watery.

Um. So.

Uh.

You know what? Tamlin can just magic her up some new pants when she gets back to the house or whatever. That’s not our problem to solve nor dwell upon.

The Suriel calls Feyre’s trap “clever” because of course, it is, she’s Not Like Other Girls and everyone knows that when you’re Not Like Other Girls it’s because you’re “clever” and “brave” and “surprising”.

And I guess you also get diarrhea in the forest like a sick bear.

The Suriel wants to know who the fuck ratted it out, and doesn’t believe Feyre when she says she learned about them from her mother.

“Lies—I can smell the lies on your breath.”

Look, if that’s all you’re smelling right now, be thankful.

It sniffed again, 

Don’t do it, bro!

its fingers clacking together. It cocked its head to the side, an erratic, sharp movement, the dark veil snapping with it. “What would a human woman want from the Suriel?”

“You tell me,” I said softly.

For the past eleven chapters, all we’ve heard about is how Feyre needs information, no one will tell her what she needs to know, she has to capture a Magic 8-Ball in Harry Potter cosplay, and finally, finally she’s on the precipice of getting the answers she wants and…

she plays it cagey.

Come the fuck on.

Even the Suriel is like, ma’am, this is bullshit, you were desperate enough to catch me so obviously you want answers just ask the damn question.

But, you know, not in those words.

Hey, wanna know why I lost my shit on my private FB the other day and passed holy judgment upon friends and/or family who have contributed to the popularity of this book or this particular “brand” of fantasy as a whole?

I swallowed hard. “Is there—is there truly no way for me to go home?” 

“Not unless you seek to be killed, and your family with you. You must remain here.” 

Whatever last shred of hope I’d been clinging to, whatever foolish optimism, shriveled and died. This changed nothing. Before my fight with Tamlin that morning, I hadn’t even entertained the idea, anyway.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME EVERY SINGLE CHAPTER SINCE CHAPTER THREE HAS BEEN YOU “ENTERTAINING” THE THOUGHT OF GOING HOME IT’S LITERALLY BEEN THE ENTIRE PLOT THIS WHOLE TIME

Deep breath. Calm down, Jenny. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s nobody’s fault but Booktubers. Fucking. Booktubers. ed.—and now, BookTokers. Fucking. Booktokers.

Perhaps I’d only come here out of spite.

Putting herself in a dangerous and entirely unnecessary position in order to spite someone? That doesn’t sound like Feyre, at all.

Yeah, so that “whatever last shred of hope” paragraph up there? That’s the end of her acceptance that she’ll never get back home. Like…the entire acceptance. She immediately moves on like, oh well, guess I’ll ask for a bunch of clunky exposition then. She asks the Suriel to tell her about Tamlin and the Suriel is like, oh yeah, the High Lord of the Spring Court, sure, what do you want to know? Then it’s basically a page full of the Suriel reiterating that there are seven courts and the courts are about seasons and times of day, you know, shit we already learned from the mural. It’s also reiterated for us that Tamlin is “deadly,” so like, thanks for the refresher course in that.

Feyre is all like, hey, what about this blight I’m hearing about? as if the Suriel is a god damn Amazon Echo, and the Suriel is like, wtf do you think you’re going to do about it, human?

“Stay with the High Lord, human,” the Suriel said. “That’s all you can do. You will be safe. Do not interfere; do not go looking for answers after today, or you will be devoured by the shadow over Prythian. He will shield you from it, so stay close to him, and all will be righted.”

Hang on, let me make a mental note here of the fact that the Suriel, who knows the answers to all questions or whatever, has explicitly stated, in its preternatural wisdom, that if Feyre tries to meddle with blight stuff, she’s gonna get her ass killed. I’ll need to remember this passage when Feyre immediately runs back and starts poking her nose in shit that’s not her business and doesn’t get killed. I haven’t read ahead at this point, I’m just assuming this is what’s going to happen. ed.—That is exactly what happens.

You know, like IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE SURIEL TELLS HER TO STOP ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT IT:

That wasn’t exactly an answer. I repeated, “Where did the blight come from?”

At this point, I don’t know why it surprises me that the creature described as being compelled to answer any and all questions has now sidestepped a question. I’m sorry, I guess I just assume authors read their first draft over and make corrections. If we’re not doing that anymore, I’ll just save myself some time.

“The High Lord does not know that you came here today, does he? He does not know that his human woman came to trap a Suriel, because he cannot give her the answers she seeks. But it is too late, human—for the High Lord, for you, perhaps for your realm as well …”

Again, the creature compelled by magic, by its very nature, to answer questions is evading questions.

Why would an author do that? Because she’s trying to keep her heroine from having to engage with the plot. Maas doesn’t actually want to write any of this fantasy stuff here. She has to write it in order to get to the parts where Feyre, who just so happens to match Maas’s physical appearance exactly, gets sympathy from the audience and attention from the men in the story.

Oh, I’m sorry. Was I not supposed to notice that? Was I not supposed to notice that aside from a servant (who has been described as short and fat and wearing a bird mask) and an evil, looming she who is the root of all evil (and who will probably turn out to be Tamlin’s consort now that we know he’s a High Fae) there are no other women in this story at all once we get to Prythian? Was I not supposed to notice that the only women in the first three chapters were either vain, selfish, ditzy, murderous, or cult members? Even the dead mom is a bitch.

Look, I’m calling this what it is: self-insert Beauty and The Beast fanfic that somehow succeeded against the odds set by its author’s low standards. She just had to add that pesky plot she doesn’t care about.

So, years ago, I was on a plane, sitting next to an author who was about to have her debut YA high fantasy novel come out. She was talking about how great Sarah J. Maas is and how Maas personally helped her on her career path, which was cool. I hadn’t read any Maas so I just assumed she was super skilled and a great mentor to have as a result. Then the newbie author’s book came out and it was ten-thousand times better than this.  Like, so, so much better. Now, reading this, I’m like, wow, that was a close fucking call for that author. Phew. ed.—that author has since had a very public falling out with Maas.

Were you hoping that this whole Suriel thing would turn into an info dump so huge, Staten Island would build a park on top of it?

“Across the violent western sea, there is another faerie kingdom called Hybern, ruled by a wicked, powerful king. Yes, a king,” he said when I raised a brow. “Not a High Lord—there, his territory is not divided into courts. There, he is law unto himself. Humans no longer exist in that realm—though his throne is made of their bones.”

It’s a super good thing that Feyre studied that map mural so she can tell us exactly which island the Suriel is talking about.

The Suriel goes on to tell Feyre the history of the treaty and the war and the Hybern guy and how he sent his trusted inner circle out to fuck up Prythian.

As spies and courtiers and lovers, they infiltrated the various High Fae courts and kingdoms and empires around the world for fifty years, and when they had gathered enough information, he made his plan. But nearly five decades ago, one of his commanders disobeyed him. The Deceiver. And—” The Suriel straightened. “We are not alone.”

Whoa, how weird that danger showed up just as the Suriel was about to reveal what I can only assume is a heavily telegraphed plot twist about Tamlin or Lucien being “The Deceiver” that we’ll probably find out about after a billion more hints.

“Human, you must free me and run,” it said, those death-filled eyes widening. “Run for the High Lord’s manor. Do not forget what I told you—stay with the High Lord, and live to see everything righted.”

I mean, it’s still Stockholm syndrome even if you’re staying for your own safety, Feyre.

Feyre asks what they’re supposed to run from.

“The naga—faeries made of shadow and hate and rot. They heard my scream, and they smelled you. Free me, human. They will cage me if they catch me here. Free me and return to the High Lord’s side.”

The Naga, huh? Like, the snake demigods from Hindu mythology? I can’t wait to see how this plays out. I am not going to scroll forward, but I bet this is gonna be super racist. Especially considering they’ve already been described as being “made of shadow and hate and rot,” which is not what the Naga are.

Can’t help but notice that all of the creatures from European mythology are capitalized. High Fae. Suriel. Bogge. But then we get to “naga” and suddenly the shift key just busted and sprang right off the keyboard.

Feyre tries to set the Suriel free, but it’s too late, the shadowy figures are already closing in on them, and that’s the chapter hook.

I once again walk away at the end of a recap with the most enraged feeling over all this wasted potential. These are interesting mythology components, there are pieces of interesting worldbuilding, but none of them adhere to each other. Why write fantasy if you’re not interested in worldbuilding? Why? This makes zero damn sense. We get it. You’re horny for fairies. So is Tori Amos. Just write some Rise of The Guardians fanfic or hump a piano bench about it and get past it, Sarah.

I just keep hearing the Tenth Doctor shouting, “I could do so much more!” before entering that radiation chamber, except now he’s screaming it while pounding on the windows of Sarah J. Maas’s office.

For god’s sake, why didn’t she let him in?

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 13 or “Nothing means anything anymore”

As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.

Okay. We gotta do this. We gotta rehash the last line of chapter twelve before we move forward because I read both chapters back-to-back in the same night and I laughed. Like, out loud. At a book.

That hardly ever happens.

The chapter hook was:

I saw what lay beyond him and my stomach twisted.

Now, refresher: Feyre specifically requested to see the study. And it has been revealed. And that was her reaction.

What to?

My palms began sweating as I took in the enormous, opulent study. Tomes lined each wall like the soldiers of a silent army, and couches, desks, and rich rugs were scattered throughout the room. But … it had been over a week since I left my family. Though my father had said never to return, though my vow to my mother was fulfilled, I could at least let them know I was safe—relatively safe.

There are BOOKS! In the STUDY!

Oh, and also, this isn’t at all Disney.

And let’s talk about that “But…” and how it has absolutely nothing to do with the sentence before it. Rich rugs were scattered through the room, but it had been over a week since Feyre saw her family? Does the existence of rugs in the known universe depend on whether or not Feyre’s family spends quality time together? Is that what the “but” is about?

Now, lest I am accused of misrepresenting the text (not by any of yous all, yous all knew what you were getting into when you entered your credit card info), there is a paragraph just above the one I started with, but I didn’t excerpt it because it’s just Tamlin lighting candles with a wave of his hand and Feyre realizing for approximately the forty-ninth time in the book so far that wow, Tamlin is powerful. I haven’t read past chapter thirteen, but I’m sure we’ll get another explanation of how powerful he is before too long.

Anyway, back to Feyre wanting to let her family know she’s okay. The family that she has spent most of the book insisting doesn’t care about her at all and is probably happier without her.

There was only one method to convey it.

Writing, right? The thing that we’ve just heard you can’t do? So, yeah, you’d assume the fact that Tamlin already knows she’s illiterate would mean that she asked him to write this letter for her?

Nope! She wants him to leave her alone. She’s a strong, independent girl who doesn’t need anybody!

Also, she’s still like, whoa, mind blown about the candle thing:

I couldn’t think about the casual power he’d just shown—the graceful carelessness with which he’d brought so many flames to life.

After seeing him

turn from a giant beast into a dudefight a monstermake her sleep for several daysmake a whole damn feast vanishrandomly have claws

the candle thing is a shock.

Look, just trust your readers to remember stuff about your characters. Stuff like, you know…who the main character is afraid of and why.

It wasn’t entirely my fault that I was scarcely able to read. Before our downfall, my mother had sorely neglected our education, not bothering to hire a governess. And after poverty struck and my elder sisters, who could read and write, deemed the village school beneath us, they didn’t bother to teach me. I could read enough to function—enough to form my letters, but so poorly that even signing my name was mortifying.

Honestly, Feyre, I wasn’t going to blame you for not being able to read until you started blaming everyone else. Now, I’m suspicious.

Now, we’ve gone from “must write notes to self in symbols” to “reads and writes enough to function,” so at least the inconsistency is consistent.

It was bad enough that Tamlin knew. I would think about how to get the letter to them once it was finished; perhaps I could beg a favor of him, or Lucien.

So glad that this book is going in so hard on “illiteracy is shameful, even if you didn’t have good educational resources” implications. ed.—especially after learning that Maas herself had an incredibly privileged upbringing that included expensive private schools and an elite university.

Asking them to write it would be too humiliating. I could hear their words: typical ignorant human. And since Lucien seemed convinced that I would turn spy the moment I could, he would no doubt burn the letter, and any I tried to write after. So I’d have to learn myself.

Sometimes I just get up and walk away and go into another room while I’m working on these. I just…drift off. In the last paragraph, Feyre is gonna ask them for help delivering the letter. Now, they’ll probably just burn it.

Drifting…drifting away. To the kitchen, to stare at my agave plant, which has speared itself upon its own leaves as a metaphor for how I feel when I read bad books.

Tamlin leaves and there’s a section break, after which we learn that Feyre worked until dinner time, slept, then went back to the library at dawn, where she’s using her ability to read to teach herself to read and write. She sounds out the words and writes some down. This is kinda how I remember learning to read and write in school so I guess not a bad plan, but I’m not sure how she’s choosing the words she’s writing down. If I cared, it would be an important detail.

I would look up their pronunciations later.

She can’t read very well or write very well but she can somehow use a phonetic alphabet just fine.

SO ANYHOO, Feyre gets up to wander around the library, sorry, study.

I suppose the study was more of a library, as I couldn’t see any of the walls thanks to the small labyrinths of stacks flanking the main area and a mezzanine dangling above, covered wall to wall in books.

We know. We saw the cartoon.

I found myself overlooking a rose garden, filled with dozens of hues of crimson and pink and white and yellow.

I might have allowed myself a moment to take in the colors, gleaming with dew under the morning sun, had I not glimpsed the painting that stretched along the wall beside the windows.

I almost looked at the very thing I am describing.

Doesn’t work, my friend.

Also not working for me is what the painting is for. Because it’s a full-on exposition of the type that would work just fine in a movie but which is excruciating in a book. 

It told a story with the way colors and shapes and light flowed, the way the tone shifted across the mural. The story of … of Prythian.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt the depths of love that Maas has for ellipses. Not for anyone or anything.

This section is something else. I’m skimming it because it’s just huge block paragraphs telling us everything we need to know about Prythian, accompanied by an in-depth explanation of Prythian and the war with the humans, but here are some of the points we do need to visit:

I scanned the various lands and territories now given to the High Fae. Still so much territory—such monstrous power spread across the entire northern part of our world. I knew they were ruled by kings or queens or councils or empresses, but I’d never seen a representation of it, of how much they’d been forced to concede to the South, and how crammed their lands now were in comparison.

Prediction: Feyre will at some point end up sympathizing with the Fae because of all they lost or whatever.

At the moment, though, she thinks the painter is “spiteful” for not mapping out the human realm on this map of Prythian made in Prythian by people from Prythian, and tries to Brightside Barbie the situation by going, hey, at least I’m imprisoned in a place with good weather.

I looked northward and stepped back again. The six other courts of Prythian occupied a patchwork of territories. Autumn, Summer, and Winter were easy enough to pick out. Then above them, two glowing courts: the southernmost one a softer, redder palate, the Dawn Court; above, in bright gold and yellow and blue, the Day Court. And above that, perched in a frozen mountainous spread of darkness and stars, the sprawling, massive territory of the Night Court.

There are two types of people: the ones who immediately heard the Night Court theme, or the ones who began singing “Day Court/AAAHHHHAAAAHHHHHH/fighter of the Night Court/AAAAAAHHHHHHAAAAA/champion of the sun!”

Okay, technically, three types of people, since at least one of us here did both and then wrote it down.

I might have examined the other kingdoms across the seas that flanked our land, like the isolated faerie kingdom to the west that seemed to have gotten away with no territory loss and was still law unto itself, had I not looked to the heart of that beautiful, living map.

What did I say? What did I just say? You can’t describe in-depth the thing that you didn’t look at.

More stuff to be aware of: the map shows a cauldron pouring symbols out over Prythian and in the center of everything is a big old mountain.

With that thought, I went back to my little table. At least I’d learned the layout of their lands—and I knew to never, ever go north.

Why the fuck would you?! Your home is SOUTH. THIS WAS NEVER A QUESTION FOR ANY OF US.

Maybe it was a question for the editor? And that’s bandaid Maas slapped over it? Because that is 100% what happens further down the page, when it’s revealed that Feyre is reading a children’s book:

Why did Tamlin have children’s books in his library? Were they from his own childhood, or in anticipation of children to come? It didn’t matter. I couldn’t even read them.

It takes zero imagination for me to see this conversation happening in the review panel of MS Word:

Editor: Why does Tamlin have children’s books in his library? Are they from his own childhood? Does he plan to have children?

Maas: It doesn’t matter. She can’t read them.

And let’s go back to the part where Feyre says she can’t read the books, anyway. I’m starting to feel like her inability to read is kinda like the weather. 

Feyre gets frustrated and throws away her list of words, and Tamlin startles her by showing up and offering to help her write to her family. He straight up says, “I could help you write to them,” emphasis mine.

I pushed back against the heat rising in my cheeks and ears, the panic at the information he might be guessing I’d been trying to send. “Help? You mean a faerie is passing up the opportunity to mock an ignorant mortal?”

I honestly don’t understand what the consequences of anything are, at this point. She said before that she’d considered asking them for help delivering the letter, then she was afraid they would burn the letter, she didn’t ask for help in writing the letter because she’s embarrassed and because she knows they’ll make fun of her, he rocks up like let me write this letter to your family, for you, and she’s like, oh no, he’ll find out what I’m sending.

I don’t understand. I do not understand. Can Feyre read or not? Does she trust the fairies to deliver her message or is she sure they’re going to destroy the letter? And now Tamlin has offered to write it but she’s still pretty sure it’s so he can make fun of her?

I’m astounded. I’m flabbergasted. I have no idea how so many people have read this book and enjoyed it. Did they not question any of this stuff?

 “Why should I mock you for a shortcoming that isn’t your fault? Let me help you. I owe you for the hand.” 

Shortcoming. It was a shortcoming.

I guess saying wildly ableist things about illiteracy in a book is the equivalent of mocking the Amish on TV. It’s not like either demographic is gonna see it but that probably doesn’t make it right.

Yet it was one thing to bandage his hand, to talk to him as if he wasn’t a predator built to kill and destroy, but to reveal how little I truly knew, to let him see that part of me that was still a child, unfinished and raw …

Well, I’m for sure not going to be creeped out by that line when they inevitably bone down.

“You think I’ve got nothing better to do with my time than come up with elaborate ways to humiliate you?”

Fucking thank you. Thank you, SJM, for finally including something, anything, to contradict Feyre’s insistence that the universe and everything that happens in it happens specifically for and because of her.

Although, she does, of course, figure this remark is some kind of slight against all humans but like…maybe it’s not all humans, Feyre. Maybe it’s you who sucks.

Tamlin is like, you’ll let Lucien take you hunting but you won’t let me help you with this, and Feyre is like, Lucien doesn’t pretend to be something he’s not. Raise your hand if you remember an instance in this book where Tamlin pretends to be something he’s not. Don’t worry, it didn’t really happen. About 80% of what we know about Tamlin has come from the disaster scenarios Feyre constantly runs in her head, instead of his own actions.

“How can I trust a faerie? Don’t you delight in killing and tricking us?” 

His snarl set the flames of the candles guttering. “You aren’t what I had in mind for a human—believe me.”

Not Like Other Humans.

I could almost feel the wound deep in my chest as it ripped open and all those awful, silent words came pouring out. Illiterate, ignorant, unremarkable, proud, cold—all spoken from Nesta’s mouth, all echoing in my head with her sneering voice.

This juxtaposition suggests that Feyre believes “you aren’t what I had in mind” means that Tamlin, whom she has just accused of monstrous cruelty against humans, actually believed that humans aren’t unremarkable, proud, cold, etc. but Feyre is and that’s not what he expected.

Of course, her pain can be expressed thoroughly in a single line about her pinching her lips together, at which point, Tamlin becomes apologetic and Feyre storms off.

But that afternoon, when I went to retrieve my crumpled list from the wastebasket, it was gone. And my pile of books had been disturbed—the titles out of order. It had probably been a servant, I assured myself, calming the tightness in my chest. Just Alis or some other bird-masked faerie cleaning up. I hadn’t written anything incriminating—there was no way he knew I’d been trying to warn my family. I doubted he would punish me for it, but … our conversation earlier had been bad enough.

She’s worried about incriminating herself if Tamlin reads the letter but…

Maybe I was a fool for not accepting his help, for not swallowing my pride and having him write the letter in a few moments.

I THINK YOU WOULD BE MORE LIKELY TO INCRIMINATE YOURSELF IF YOU DICTATE THE INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE TO HIM DIRECTLY BUT WHAT DO I KNOW?

Not even a letter of warning, but just—just to let them know I was safe. If he had better things to do with his time than come up with ways to embarrass me, then surely he had better things to do than help me write letters to my family. And yet he’d offered.

You were trying to hide the fact that you were writing the letter to your family AT ALL, not just about the blight. If that’s not the case and I’m misunderstanding then, IDK.

A nearby clock chimed the hour. 

Shortcoming—another one of my shortcomings.

…clocks?

I should have let his hand bleed that night, should have known better than to think that maybe—maybe there would be someone, human or faerie or whatever, who could understand what my life—what I—had become these past few years.

Is this what we’re supposed to be thinking when Feyre made the “pretending to be someone he’s not” comment earlier? Her whole problem with Tamlin is that he’s somehow deceived her by not becoming her therapist?

Faeries might not be able to lie, but they could certainly withhold information; Tamlin, Lucien, and Alis had done their best not to answer my specific questions. Knowing more about the blight that threatened them—knowing anything about it, where it had come from, what else it could do, and especially what it could do to a human—was worth my time to learn.

I don’t remember anyone ever being vague or cagey about anything. I certainly remember Feyre deciding to not ask various characters various questions, however. 

This book is making me doubt reality. Tell me in the comments, am I just imagining all those times Feyre would ask a question and get a long explanation, and then she would think about how she wasn’t going to ask more about it?

Feyre decides to track down Lucien and finds him in his bedroom.

Oh, so, remember earlier 

“Come in, human.” He could probably detect me by my breathing patterns alone. Or maybe that eye of his could see through the door.

Didn’t Tamlin establish in the last chapter that absolutely they could hear her trying to eavesdrop? I might as well stop trying to keep shit straight because it’s changing like Michigan weather.

Lucien’s room is done up in autumnal colors.

But while my room was all softness and grace, his was marked with ruggedness.

It’s been like ten years and I still have no idea if describing things like “all [adjectives]” is something I’ve always hated or just something I hate now because of how much it was used in the Fifty Shades of Grey books. Just the other day I tried to write a line about someone being “all arms and legs” and I had a physical reaction.

The thing is, it’s such a common description, I’m pretty sure every single author who has ever written anything, fiction or non-fiction, has probably used it.

Anyway, that wasn’t a critique of the book, just me wondering if I hate the line because of a different book.

In lieu of a pretty breakfast table by the window, a worn worktable dominated the space, covered in various weapons. It was there he sat, wearing only a white shirt and trousers, his red hair unbound and gleaming like liquid fire. Tamlin’s court-trained emissary, but a warrior in his own right.

Because when I see long, silky, shampoo-commercial quality hair and a dude wearing all white, I’m immediately like, “that man is a skilled warrior” and definitely not, “ugh, I bet he reads easily recognizable feminist novels in coffee shops near college campuses.”

Feyre tells him that she hasn’t seen him around and, without her even asking, Lucien is like, oh, I’ve been at the northern border on business.

How inscrutable these fairies are. How closely they guard their secrets. Or…whatever.

He goes on to mention that he heard her fighting with Tamlin and that’s why he decided to just hang out in his room.

“Well,” he went on, shrugging, “it seems that you managed to get under Tam’s fur enough that he sought me out and nearly bit my head off. So I suppose I can thank you for ruining what should have been a peaceful lunch. Thankfully for me, there’s been a disturbance out in the western forest, and my poor friend had to go deal with it in that way only he can. I’m surprised you didn’t run into him on the stairs.”

How will she ever get information out of these wily tricksters? They let nothing pass their lips.

Because Lucien mentioned earlier that Tamlin had gone off to the western lands or something, Feyre asks why he had to leave. Lucien tells her flat out that he went to exterminate some “nasty creatures raising hell” and Feyre immediately follows it with:

“I’m impressed you answered me that much,” I said as casually as I could, thinking through my words. “But it’s too bad you’re not like the Suriel, spouting any information I want if I’m clever enough to snare you.”

Remember earlier, when she asked him what a Suriel was and he told her?

THEY ANSWER ALL OF HER QUESTIONS. ALL OF THEM.

Lucien even asks her to just say what it is she wants him to tell her and she’s all:

“You have your secrets, and I have mine,” I said carefully. I couldn’t tell whether he would try to convince me otherwise if I told him the truth. “But if you were a Suriel,” I added with deliberate slowness, in case he hadn’t caught my meaning, “how, exactly, would I trap you?”

Feyre has her secrets, which she will now communicate through obvious tone and, I assume, wiggling eyebrows and a nudge of her elbow.

Just so you’re aware, her “plan” isn’t something that’s known by the reader at this particular moment. As far as I’m aware, she’s never actually had a “plan” that’s been shared with us. She’s been “planning” to escape but never actually trying to escape until something spooky lures her out. She “plans” to find a loophole in the treaty but then the “plan” suddenly becomes writing to her family. Now, we’re supposed to be held in suspense that her “plan” will work when we don’t have a fucking clue what the plan is. YOU NEVER LET READERS IN ON THE PLAN, SARAH. YOU NEVER BOTHERED TO MAKE THE FUCKING PLAN AT ALL.

I really don’t mean to sound like a fantasy snob here, and I don’t believe that all fantasy fiction needs to be written with the voice and style of a white male author. But this is just terrible writing. The plan, the plan, the plan, don’t worry about what the plan is just know that I have one in my first-person pov that I’m somehow trying to hide from you. I know there must be a plan in fantasy novels, so if I keep mentioning it, people will think it’s in here.

Lucien, one of the fairies who never tells her anything, will let no piece of compromising information dance upon his tongue, tells her exactly 

where to look for them: in birch groves in the western woodshow to trap them: setting a snare with freshly killed chickenshow to escape when she sets it free: cross the nearest running waterwhat weapons to take: her bow and arrows, and a knife that he gives her.

If only she could get even the slightest hints out of these secretive High Fae.

Lucien warns Feyre that if Tamlin finds out that he told her any of this, there will be evisceration-related consequences. There’s banter about how Lucien will be able to hear her if she screams for help, and how she’s good at keeping secrets, which culminates with:

He snorted as I took the knife from the table and turned to procure the bow from my room. “I think I’m starting to like you—for a murdering human.”

Well, thank Christ somebody does because I am not qualified for the job of liking Feyre.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 12, or “Tale as old as Disney’s long history of issuing C&Ds”

As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.

Yet again, this book both impresses and deeply disappoints me. There is nothing I loathe more than wasted potential. ed.—speaking of “wasted potential,” it appears that after much speculation and rumors of Maas’s difficulty behind the scenes, the ACOTAR television show may be dead. The post announcing the show has been removed from Maas’s Instagram. Thanks to Chel from the Jealous Patrons Discord channel for the hot tip.

Feyre doesn’t want to sleep because she’s still upset about her nightmare in chapter eleven. Instead, she wanders around the castle in the dark:

A bit of paper in one hand and a pen gripped in the other, I carefully traced my steps, noting the windows and doors and exits, occasionally jotting down vague sketches and Xs on the parchment.

I’m being picky, but I would have rather seen this earlier in the book. Stealing the knife, setting up trip wires, that stuff all seemed really slipshod in terms of escape and survival. If this had happened her first night in the castle, it would have backed up all the times the author has told us, rather than shown us Feyre’s toughness and quick thinking. It’s not a fatal flaw in the narrative, it’s just something I would have pointed out if I’d been doing developmental edits on this.

Which it appears nobody actually did.

Feyre also notes hiding places and escape routes but her thinking has changed from “escape” to “have a plan for if shit goes down in the future,” which is a nice shift away from alternating between fae killer and Fae Wray for several aggravating chapters.

You know what hasn’t changed, though?

These past three days, there had been servants in the halls when I’d worked up the nerve to look at the art—and the part of me that spoke with Nesta’s voice had laughed at the idea of an ignorant human trying to admire faerie art.

That’s right! Everything is still Nesta’s fault! Even Feyre’s own thoughts! Because that’s full-on Feyre there; Nesta hated faeries. She didn’t have anything positive to say about them at all.

I get that this is incorporating a lot of Beaumont’s version of Beauty and The Beast, in which the heroine (literally named Beauty, just in case we don’t get it) has two horrible older sisters and a merchant father who loses their fortune, etc., etc. but the wicked (step)sisters trope is supposed to show us how pure, virginal, kind, and selfless the heroine of the story is, and how deserving she is of her happily ever after. Most of the time, the heroine gets her revenge at the end as a reward for her patience and humility, often in a way that protects her from the moral consequences of her tormentors’ punishment (in Beaumont’s telling, for example, a sorceress turns Beauty’s sisters into stone). 

Any patience or kindness we’ve ever seen on Feyre’s behalf toward her family has been coming from a place of selfishness. To preserve her identity, which she has built around her vow to her mother, Feyre grudgingly helped her family survive. She’s the opposite of the Polly Pureheart Princess we see scattered throughout European fairy tales, but the surrounding features of the trope have remained the same. Now, the story is demanding us to cheer for and sympathize with someone who is vastly unlikeable and has no qualities that redeem her above the family she hates, simply because there are elements of familiarity.

Like, either subvert the trope or don’t subvert the trope, but don’t just toss plot and characterization into some weird demilitarized zone between the two. Or do; it’s possible that this book hit just the right sweet spot for readers who haven’t let go of the Kick-Ass Heroine as a feminist figure but who like those same Kick-Ass Heroines explicitly helpless. ed.—following this book’s popularity, the Kick-Ass Yet Helpless Heroine has become an infestation in the fantasy romance genre. They do a lot of talking about stabbing, but are about as useful as a necktie at the guillotine.

Hey, did you want to read the novelization of Disney’s Beauty and The Beast as written by someone who saw it in the theater and kind of vaguely remembers what it looked like and what the plot was? Well, you’re in luck because there are descriptions like this:

I crept down the main staircase, moonlight flooding the black-and-white tiles of the entrance hall. I reached the bottom, my bare feet silent on the cold tiles, and listened. Nothing—no one.

and:

A breeze announced his arrival—and I turned from the table toward the long hall, to the open glass doors to the garden. 

I’d forgotten how huge he was in this form—forgotten the curled horns and lupine face, the bearlike body that moved with a feline fluidity. His green eyes glowed in the darkness, fixing on me, and as the doors snicked shut behind him, the clicking of claws on marble filled the hall. I stood still—not daring to flinch, to move a muscle.

And the fact that yup, he’s injured from going out and killing the thing that tried to kill Feyre? That’s pure Disney. That part isn’t from Beaumont or Villeneuve. I went through a pretty heavy fairy tale phase in the ’00s and I can’t remember a version with the wolf attack or any kind of rescue. There’s a Spanish version where a wolf rescues the heroine. Or maybe not. I’m getting old and I smoke a lot of pot.

But I’m sorry, you saw Disney’s Beast with his cape swirling and snow behind him bursting through some castle doors. And you saw Belle sneaking through the foyer. If you didn’t, you may be less picky and suspicious of big-name YA authors than I am.

Dripping blood all over the floor, Tamlin changes his form to the human-y one.

No sign of the baldric, or his knives. His clothes were in shreds—long, vicious slashes that made me wonder how he wasn’t gutted and dead. But the muscled skin peering out beneath his shirt was smooth, unharmed.

So, he came in limping and bleeding, he’s now transformed and his skin is smooth and unharmed. Is this an indication that transformation heals him? Or that wounds sustained in one form won’t carry over to the other form?

I bet you think that will be somehow explained, don’t you?

I admire the endurance of your hope.

“Did you kill the Bogge?” My voice was hardly more than a whisper. 

“Yes.” A dull, empty answer. As if he couldn’t be bothered to remember to be pleasant. As if I were at the very, very bottom of a long list of priorities.

When I was reading this chapter the first time, I actually got to those lines and stared out the window and just went to this totally blank, peaceful place in my mind where I transcended the limits of human consciousness just to protect my sanity and reason.

Let’s break it down:

Did you kill the monster who tried to kill me?

Could you make me feel more special and valued when you answer that question?

What the fuck does she want?! He’s bleeding! He’s bleeding so much he’s leaving trails behind him on the floor (while still having super hot, unblemished flesh beneath his shredded clothes). And Feyre feels slighted because she’s not his priority.

And because he’s not pleasant enough.

While he’s bleeding.

I was so furious just writing this that I had to take a break and go on Twitter and complain about Feyre.

And it’s not like I’m overdramatizing the bleeding thing, okay? Feyre notes yet again that there’s blood actively spattering on the floor and that his hand is covered in it. And he’s so injured and weird acting that Feyre wonders if he actually knows he’s injured. He’s supposed to be in super bad shape here. In fact, when Tamlin asks Feyre about the map she’s drawing, this line interrupts the dialogue:

Drip, drip, drip.

As in, blood audibly dripping while he talks about the map and Feyre is trying to point out that he’s losing huge amounts of blood.

But Tamlin has to do some quick thinking to throw the Mouse’s lawyers off the scent, so he talks over Feyre to point out that she can’t write. See? Sure, he’s a beautiful man cursed to be a beast and he just went out to kill the thing that almost murdered the heroine during her escape attempt and now his hand is injured but this is way different because instead of him not being able to read, it’s Feyre who can’t write.

Totally different.

I wouldn’t make fun of this section so much if it hadn’t been such blatant fanfic. I love fanfic, but it’s a totally different medium from a novel, so to have some AU just plopped into the middle of the book is jarring.

And hilarious.

Feyre asks Tamlin if she can help him with his hand and he leads her to an infirmary.

But as I followed him there, avoiding the blood he trailed, I thought of what Lucien had told me about his isolation, that burden, thought of what Tamlin had mentioned about how these estates should not have been his, and felt … sorry for him.

Wow, and only for like the third time, too. And believe me, I’m as shocked by this revelation as the ellipses demands.

There’s a section break followed by strong evidence that an editor left a note like, “Why do they have an infirmary if they can heal themselves with magic?”

The infirmary was well stocked, but was more of a supply closet with a worktable than an actual place to host sick faeries. I supposed that was all they needed when they could heal themselves with their immortal powers. But this wound—this wound wasn’t healing.

I think there’s a minimum number of ellipses and em dashes required in every Fantasy-Lite YA. I mean, I love ’em, you know I do. Use ’em all the time. But holy cow, the unnecessary drama, the unwarranted build-up of the end of that sentence. We know the wound isn’t healing. He’s been dripping blood all over the place.

Belle cleans and binds the Beast’s wound, though she’s initially hesitant to touch him. 

But his claws remained retracted, and he kept silent as I bound and wrapped his hand—surprisingly enough, there were no more than a few vicious cuts, none of them requiring stitching.

He was bleeding like a faucet but he wasn’t really hurt? And none of this is explained, by the way. There’s no, “huh, why isn’t he all slashed up where his shirt is slashed up?” or “why isn’t this wound healing,” or even, “Wait, he was literally trailing blood across the floor, how does he only have a few cuts?

Fuck worldbuilding, Feyre has to get the kind of fluttery and erotic tension Fantasy-Lite YA heroines don’t pick up on. You know, like his gaze burning her because he’s watching her every move, the room seeming too hot and too small, describing his skin as “an inferno,” but not linking any of that to being attracted to him.

Here’s a real “Uh…what?” moment for ya:

I was almost at the open door, stifling the urge to bolt back to my room, when he said, “You can’t write, yet you learned to hunt, to survive. How?” 

What does writing have to do with hunting? Is she supposed to leave a note to the animals? “Don’t run too fast, I need to shoot you. XOXO Feyre.”

I don’t recall ever even taking a pen out hunting, let alone writing anything while I was out there. What kind of “hunting” is Tamlin doing?

Anyway, Tamlin tells Feyre that she isn’t what he expected for a human and she walks out and we get to another section break. It’s the next morning, and Feyre is finally gonna be able to look at some of these amazing paintings, until she hears Lucien and Tamlin arguing and goes to snoop.

Through the space between the hinge and the door I could glimpse the two of them standing almost face-to-face. On Tamlin’s nonbandaged hand, his claws shone in the morning light.

So, things are tense. Lucien is all, what do you think you’re doing, Tamlin is all no, what do you think you’re doing?

“Me?” Lucien put a hand on his chest. “By the Cauldron, Tam—there isn’t much time, and you’re just sulking and glowering. You’re not even trying to fake it anymore.”

By the cauldron, I cannot take any more of this shitty worldbuilding. I will straight up die from shittyworldbuilditis. Throught this book, characters talk about things being hell, tell each other to go to hell, but there is no fucking concept of Christianity or Judaism or Islam anywhere in the fucking book. At all. Anywhere. But Maas throws “by the cauldron” in there so that’s good enough. No reason to think of why you’re including the fantasy elements you’ve chosen.

My brows rose. Tamlin turned away but whirled back a moment later, his teeth bared. “It was a mistake from the start. I can’t stomach it, not after what my father did to their kind, to their lands. I won’t follow in his footsteps—won’t be that sort of person. So back off.”

I guess the topic of conversation is supposed to be mysterious but I’m gonna take a wild guess here and say Lucien is probably talking about how Tamlin should kill Feyre. Maybe not, I mean, the rest of the conversation escalates into an argument in which Lucien points out that a bogge got really close to the house and the woods are full of bad fae things and there are no barriers between courts, etc. But the whole thing about “their kind” and “their lands” sounds like something to do with humans?

Look, at this point, I can’t honestly tell what’s going to happen. Not because this is a tensely plotted thrill ride but because this book is trying to be nine hundred different things at once. It’s trying to be epic fantasy and swords-and-sorcery fantasy and a fairytale all at the same time. It’s a pastiche of distinctly different subgenres that just isn’t working.

Moving on.

Feyre tries to piece together the conversation the same way I’m trying to, but like, so much of the dialogue reads so vaguely that it really just feels like the author wrote this scene and went, “eh, I’ll try to work that into the plot later.”

Which is fine like, on Wattpad or AO3. But not necessarily in a book that I’ve seen hailed as one of the greatest fantasy novels of all time.

But this is what Feyre comes up with:

The blight. Perhaps it was contained, but it seemed it was still wreaking havoc—still a threat, and perhaps one they truly didn’t want me knowing about, either from lack of trust or because … because I was no one and nothing to them.

Yup! That’s right! The entire conversation, like the entirety of the cosmos, this universe and all the infinite universes outside it, the very mind of God and the collective consciousness itself REVOLVES AROUND YOU.

I leaned forward, but as I did, my finger slipped and softly thudded against the door. A human might not have heard, but both High Fae whirled.

Then why didn’t they hear your footsteps when you came up to the door?

Feyre tries to play it off like she’d just casually been looking for Lucien. She asks if he wants to go out riding and he’s like, nah, but Tamlin does.

I bet you’re wondering what Tamlin’s baldric has been up to:

His usual baldric was armed with more knives than I’d seen before, and their ornate metal handles glinted as he turned to me, his shoulders tight.

I did a Kindle search and it looks like Tamlin’s baldric is really the star of the show here. The longest it goes between mentions is fifty pages. Then it just drops off the planet somewhere around page 296 so I’m on the edge of my seat to see what tragedy befalls it that it just vanishes from the story like 3/4 of the way in.

Tamlin is like, okay, we can leave for this ride whenever.

No. I almost said it aloud as I turned pleading eyes to Lucien. Lucien merely patted my shoulder as he passed by. “Perhaps tomorrow, human.” 

Alone with Tamlin, I swallowed hard. 

He stood there, waiting.

Ohhhhhh feeeeeeel that awkwardness. Feeeeeeeeeel it. Because then, Feyre has to admit that she doesn’t want to go hunting. And I’m like, cool, but you just asked about going for a ride, nobody said shit about hunting. Either way, Tamlin asks her what she wants to do.

After a section break, Tamlin and Feyre are walking down a hall, and Feyre notes that he’s acting differently:

No trace of the hollow, cold warrior of the night before, or of the angry Fae noble of minutes before. Just Tamlin right now, it seemed.

But Feyre’s like, nah, don’t trust that. He still killed that bogge thing and that means he’s real super extra dangerous, which is true but also it’s pretty clear that he’s severely anemic and can be killed by a papercut from a thick-enough envelope.

He flexed his bandaged hand, studying the white bindings, stark and clean against his sun-kissed skin. “I didn’t thank you.” 

“You don’t need to.”

That’s a trap. Don’t fall for it, Tamlin.

Tamlin mentions that the bogge’s bite slows healing, so that’s why his hand was still injured. Doesn’t explain the conveniently shredded clothes, but whatever. We had to know about his skin. Feyre tells him she wrapped his hand the way she would have done hers, so she could still pull a bowstring. Which is for some reason amazing to an immortal being.

He was quiet as we turned down another sun-drenched marble hallway, and I dared to look at him. I found him carefully studying me, his lips in a thin line. “Has anyone ever taken care of you?” he asked quietly. 

“No.” I’d long since stopped feeling sorry for myself about it.

HAVE YOU THOUGH, FEYRE?! HAVE YOU?! BECAUSE WE’RE AT NEARLY 30% OF THIS BOOK AND THAT IS ALL THE FUCK YOU HAVE DONE.

“I’m curious,” he said casually. The amber in his green eyes was glowing. Perhaps not all traces of that beast-warrior were gone. “Are you ever going to use that knife you stole from my table?” 

I stiffened. “How did you know?”

We just went from “they heard my fingertip nudge a door while they were shouting at each other” to “how did he realize I stole a piece of cutlery?” Okay. Let’s just ride this broken rollercoaster straight to hell at this point.

Tamlin says he figured out the knife thing because he smelled her fear. But it’s okay because her attempts to murder him are amusing. ed.—This is also a feature of several popular fantasy romance books now. The hero finds it cute and infantilizes the heroine when she threatens and/or attempts to harm him.

He gave me a crooked smile, more genuine than all the faked smiles and flattery he’d given me before. “Regardless of the Treaty, if you want to stand a chance at escaping my kind, you’ll need to think more creatively than stealing dinner knives. But with your affinity for eavesdropping, maybe you’ll someday learn something valuable.”

Probably not, because yous all are so vague when you’re talking an eavesdropper can’t get a crumb of context.

Feyre figures since he already knows she was eavesdropping, there’s no reason not to ask what Lucien meant about running out of time.

“I’m an immortal. I have nothing but time, Feyre.” 

He said my name with such … intimacy. As if he weren’t a creature capable of killing monsters made from nightmares.

I’m going to start calling this entire genre “ellipses fantasy”

Tamlin goes on to explain that some bad fairies might keep coming, since they know they can get onto his lands now.

If the borders between the courts were gone, though, as I’d heard Lucien say—if everything in Prythian was different, as Tamlin had claimed, thanks to this blight … Well, I didn’t want to be caught up in some brutal war or revolution.

Yeah, it would be fucking terrible if something exciting finally happened.

Tamlin strode ahead and opened a set of double doors at the end of the hall. The powerful muscles of his back shifted beneath his clothes. I’d never forget what he was—what he was capable of. What he’d been trained to do, apparently. 

What? Open a door?

This paragraph tripped me up because of the word “shifted.” Because he’s literally a shapeshifter-type creature, my brain thought he’d shifted back into Beast form. Something to think about when you’re writing. That was one of the hardest things to remember when I first started, that words might be perfectly fine in a sentence, but the context of the story might cause a reader’s brain to do something strange. ed.—For example, I removed a line in my werewolf book that referenced a character “knotting his tie.”

Now, I bet you can’t guess what’s behind these big doors. Because if you said, “a library”

“As requested,” he said, “the study.” 

You’d be wrong. See? Totally different.

So, Feyre requested to go into the study, I guess?

I saw what lay beyond him and my stomach twisted.

But she doesn’t want to be there?

I have to say, I read ahead because that was the chapter hook and I was like, wait a minute, is the chapter hook really just me being confused about why Feyre would be upset to find herself in a library, sorry, study, if she asked to go there?

If you haven’t read the book, I hope you come back and get as big a laugh as I did about what it is that Feyre can’t stomach about the library.

Study. 

Jealous Patrons Book Club: ACOTAR chapter 12, or “Tale as old as Disney’s long history of issuing C&Ds”

As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.

Yet again, this book both impresses and deeply disappoints me. There is nothing I loathe more than wasted potential. ed.—speaking of “wasted potential,” it appears that after much speculation and rumors of Maas’s difficulty behind the scenes, the ACOTAR television show may be dead. The post announcing the show has been removed from Maas’s Instagram. Thanks to Chel from the Jealous Patrons Discord channel for the hot tip.

Feyre doesn’t want to sleep because she’s still upset about her nightmare in chapter eleven. Instead, she wanders around the castle in the dark:

A bit of paper in one hand and a pen gripped in the other, I carefully traced my steps, noting the windows and doors and exits, occasionally jotting down vague sketches and Xs on the parchment.

I’m being picky, but I would have rather seen this earlier in the book. Stealing the knife, setting up trip wires, that stuff all seemed really slipshod in terms of escape and survival. If this had happened her first night in the castle, it would have backed up all the times the author has told us, rather than shown us Feyre’s toughness and quick thinking. It’s not a fatal flaw in the narrative, it’s just something I would have pointed out if I’d been doing developmental edits on this.

Which it appears nobody actually did.

Feyre also notes hiding places and escape routes but her thinking has changed from “escape” to “have a plan for if shit goes down in the future,” which is a nice shift away from alternating between fae killer and Fae Wray for several aggravating chapters.

You know what hasn’t changed, though?

These past three days, there had been servants in the halls when I’d worked up the nerve to look at the art—and the part of me that spoke with Nesta’s voice had laughed at the idea of an ignorant human trying to admire faerie art.

That’s right! Everything is still Nesta’s fault! Even Feyre’s own thoughts! Because that’s full-on Feyre there; Nesta hated faeries. She didn’t have anything positive to say about them at all.

I get that this is incorporating a lot of Beaumont’s version of Beauty and The Beast, in which the heroine (literally named Beauty, just in case we don’t get it) has two horrible older sisters and a merchant father who loses their fortune, etc., etc. but the wicked (step)sisters trope is supposed to show us how pure, virginal, kind, and selfless the heroine of the story is, and how deserving she is of her happily ever after. Most of the time, the heroine gets her revenge at the end as a reward for her patience and humility, often in a way that protects her from the moral consequences of her tormentors’ punishment (in Beaumont’s telling, for example, a sorceress turns Beauty’s sisters into stone). 

Any patience or kindness we’ve ever seen on Feyre’s behalf toward her family has been coming from a place of selfishness. To preserve her identity, which she has built around her vow to her mother, Feyre grudgingly helped her family survive. She’s the opposite of the Polly Pureheart Princess we see scattered throughout European fairy tales, but the surrounding features of the trope have remained the same. Now, the story is demanding us to cheer for and sympathize with someone who is vastly unlikeable and has no qualities that redeem her above the family she hates, simply because there are elements of familiarity.

Like, either subvert the trope or don’t subvert the trope, but don’t just toss plot and characterization into some weird demilitarized zone between the two. Or do; it’s possible that this book hit just the right sweet spot for readers who haven’t let go of the Kick-Ass Heroine as a feminist figure but who like those same Kick-Ass Heroines explicitly helpless. ed.—following this book’s popularity, the Kick-Ass Yet Helpless Heroine has become an infestation in the fantasy romance genre. They do a lot of talking about stabbing, but are about as useful as a necktie at the guillotine.

Hey, did you want to read the novelization of Disney’s Beauty and The Beast as written by someone who saw it in the theater and kind of vaguely remembers what it looked like and what the plot was? Well, you’re in luck because there are descriptions like this:

I crept down the main staircase, moonlight flooding the black-and-white tiles of the entrance hall. I reached the bottom, my bare feet silent on the cold tiles, and listened. Nothing—no one.

and:

A breeze announced his arrival—and I turned from the table toward the long hall, to the open glass doors to the garden. 

I’d forgotten how huge he was in this form—forgotten the curled horns and lupine face, the bearlike body that moved with a feline fluidity. His green eyes glowed in the darkness, fixing on me, and as the doors snicked shut behind him, the clicking of claws on marble filled the hall. I stood still—not daring to flinch, to move a muscle.

And the fact that yup, he’s injured from going out and killing the thing that tried to kill Feyre? That’s pure Disney. That part isn’t from Beaumont or Villeneuve. I went through a pretty heavy fairy tale phase in the ’00s and I can’t remember a version with the wolf attack or any kind of rescue. There’s a Spanish version where a wolf rescues the heroine. Or maybe not. I’m getting old and I smoke a lot of pot.

But I’m sorry, you saw Disney’s Beast with his cape swirling and snow behind him bursting through some castle doors. And you saw Belle sneaking through the foyer. If you didn’t, you may be less picky and suspicious of big-name YA authors than I am.

Dripping blood all over the floor, Tamlin changes his form to the human-y one.

No sign of the baldric, or his knives. His clothes were in shreds—long, vicious slashes that made me wonder how he wasn’t gutted and dead. But the muscled skin peering out beneath his shirt was smooth, unharmed.

So, he came in limping and bleeding, he’s now transformed and his skin is smooth and unharmed. Is this an indication that transformation heals him? Or that wounds sustained in one form won’t carry over to the other form?

I bet you think that will be somehow explained, don’t you?

I admire the endurance of your hope.

“Did you kill the Bogge?” My voice was hardly more than a whisper. 

“Yes.” A dull, empty answer. As if he couldn’t be bothered to remember to be pleasant. As if I were at the very, very bottom of a long list of priorities.

When I was reading this chapter the first time, I actually got to those lines and stared out the window and just went to this totally blank, peaceful place in my mind where I transcended the limits of human consciousness just to protect my sanity and reason.

Let’s break it down:

Did you kill the monster who tried to kill me?

Could you make me feel more special and valued when you answer that question?

What the fuck does she want?! He’s bleeding! He’s bleeding so much he’s leaving trails behind him on the floor (while still having super hot, unblemished flesh beneath his shredded clothes). And Feyre feels slighted because she’s not his priority.

And because he’s not pleasant enough.

While he’s bleeding.

I was so furious just writing this that I had to take a break and go on Twitter and complain about Feyre.

And it’s not like I’m overdramatizing the bleeding thing, okay? Feyre notes yet again that there’s blood actively spattering on the floor and that his hand is covered in it. And he’s so injured and weird acting that Feyre wonders if he actually knows he’s injured. He’s supposed to be in super bad shape here. In fact, when Tamlin asks Feyre about the map she’s drawing, this line interrupts the dialogue:

Drip, drip, drip.

As in, blood audibly dripping while he talks about the map and Feyre is trying to point out that he’s losing huge amounts of blood.

But Tamlin has to do some quick thinking to throw the Mouse’s lawyers off the scent, so he talks over Feyre to point out that she can’t write. See? Sure, he’s a beautiful man cursed to be a beast and he just went out to kill the thing that almost murdered the heroine during her escape attempt and now his hand is injured but this is way different because instead of him not being able to read, it’s Feyre who can’t write.

Totally different.

I wouldn’t make fun of this section so much if it hadn’t been such blatant fanfic. I love fanfic, but it’s a totally different medium from a novel, so to have some AU just plopped into the middle of the book is jarring.

And hilarious.

Feyre asks Tamlin if she can help him with his hand and he leads her to an infirmary.

But as I followed him there, avoiding the blood he trailed, I thought of what Lucien had told me about his isolation, that burden, thought of what Tamlin had mentioned about how these estates should not have been his, and felt … sorry for him.

Wow, and only for like the third time, too. And believe me, I’m as shocked by this revelation as the ellipses demands.

There’s a section break followed by strong evidence that an editor left a note like, “Why do they have an infirmary if they can heal themselves with magic?”

The infirmary was well stocked, but was more of a supply closet with a worktable than an actual place to host sick faeries. I supposed that was all they needed when they could heal themselves with their immortal powers. But this wound—this wound wasn’t healing.

I think there’s a minimum number of ellipses and em dashes required in every Fantasy-Lite YA. I mean, I love ’em, you know I do. Use ’em all the time. But holy cow, the unnecessary drama, the unwarranted build-up of the end of that sentence. We know the wound isn’t healing. He’s been dripping blood all over the place.

Belle cleans and binds the Beast’s wound, though she’s initially hesitant to touch him. 

But his claws remained retracted, and he kept silent as I bound and wrapped his hand—surprisingly enough, there were no more than a few vicious cuts, none of them requiring stitching.

He was bleeding like a faucet but he wasn’t really hurt? And none of this is explained, by the way. There’s no, “huh, why isn’t he all slashed up where his shirt is slashed up?” or “why isn’t this wound healing,” or even, “Wait, he was literally trailing blood across the floor, how does he only have a few cuts?

Fuck worldbuilding, Feyre has to get the kind of fluttery and erotic tension Fantasy-Lite YA heroines don’t pick up on. You know, like his gaze burning her because he’s watching her every move, the room seeming too hot and too small, describing his skin as “an inferno,” but not linking any of that to being attracted to him.

Here’s a real “Uh…what?” moment for ya:

I was almost at the open door, stifling the urge to bolt back to my room, when he said, “You can’t write, yet you learned to hunt, to survive. How?” 

What does writing have to do with hunting? Is she supposed to leave a note to the animals? “Don’t run too fast, I need to shoot you. XOXO Feyre.”

I don’t recall ever even taking a pen out hunting, let alone writing anything while I was out there. What kind of “hunting” is Tamlin doing?

Anyway, Tamlin tells Feyre that she isn’t what he expected for a human and she walks out and we get to another section break. It’s the next morning, and Feyre is finally gonna be able to look at some of these amazing paintings, until she hears Lucien and Tamlin arguing and goes to snoop.

Through the space between the hinge and the door I could glimpse the two of them standing almost face-to-face. On Tamlin’s nonbandaged hand, his claws shone in the morning light.

So, things are tense. Lucien is all, what do you think you’re doing, Tamlin is all no, what do you think you’re doing?

“Me?” Lucien put a hand on his chest. “By the Cauldron, Tam—there isn’t much time, and you’re just sulking and glowering. You’re not even trying to fake it anymore.”

By the cauldron, I cannot take any more of this shitty worldbuilding. I will straight up die from shittyworldbuilditis. Throught this book, characters talk about things being hell, tell each other to go to hell, but there is no fucking concept of Christianity or Judaism or Islam anywhere in the fucking book. At all. Anywhere. But Maas throws “by the cauldron” in there so that’s good enough. No reason to think of why you’re including the fantasy elements you’ve chosen.

My brows rose. Tamlin turned away but whirled back a moment later, his teeth bared. “It was a mistake from the start. I can’t stomach it, not after what my father did to their kind, to their lands. I won’t follow in his footsteps—won’t be that sort of person. So back off.”

I guess the topic of conversation is supposed to be mysterious but I’m gonna take a wild guess here and say Lucien is probably talking about how Tamlin should kill Feyre. Maybe not, I mean, the rest of the conversation escalates into an argument in which Lucien points out that a bogge got really close to the house and the woods are full of bad fae things and there are no barriers between courts, etc. But the whole thing about “their kind” and “their lands” sounds like something to do with humans?

Look, at this point, I can’t honestly tell what’s going to happen. Not because this is a tensely plotted thrill ride but because this book is trying to be nine hundred different things at once. It’s trying to be epic fantasy and swords-and-sorcery fantasy and a fairytale all at the same time. It’s a pastiche of distinctly different subgenres that just isn’t working.

Moving on.

Feyre tries to piece together the conversation the same way I’m trying to, but like, so much of the dialogue reads so vaguely that it really just feels like the author wrote this scene and went, “eh, I’ll try to work that into the plot later.”

Which is fine like, on Wattpad or AO3. But not necessarily in a book that I’ve seen hailed as one of the greatest fantasy novels of all time.

But this is what Feyre comes up with:

The blight. Perhaps it was contained, but it seemed it was still wreaking havoc—still a threat, and perhaps one they truly didn’t want me knowing about, either from lack of trust or because … because I was no one and nothing to them.

Yup! That’s right! The entire conversation, like the entirety of the cosmos, this universe and all the infinite universes outside it, the very mind of God and the collective consciousness itself REVOLVES AROUND YOU.

I leaned forward, but as I did, my finger slipped and softly thudded against the door. A human might not have heard, but both High Fae whirled.

Then why didn’t they hear your footsteps when you came up to the door?

Feyre tries to play it off like she’d just casually been looking for Lucien. She asks if he wants to go out riding and he’s like, nah, but Tamlin does.

I bet you’re wondering what Tamlin’s baldric has been up to:

His usual baldric was armed with more knives than I’d seen before, and their ornate metal handles glinted as he turned to me, his shoulders tight.

I did a Kindle search and it looks like Tamlin’s baldric is really the star of the show here. The longest it goes between mentions is fifty pages. Then it just drops off the planet somewhere around page 296 so I’m on the edge of my seat to see what tragedy befalls it that it just vanishes from the story like 3/4 of the way in.

Tamlin is like, okay, we can leave for this ride whenever.

No. I almost said it aloud as I turned pleading eyes to Lucien. Lucien merely patted my shoulder as he passed by. “Perhaps tomorrow, human.” 

Alone with Tamlin, I swallowed hard. 

He stood there, waiting.

Ohhhhhh feeeeeeel that awkwardness. Feeeeeeeeeel it. Because then, Feyre has to admit that she doesn’t want to go hunting. And I’m like, cool, but you just asked about going for a ride, nobody said shit about hunting. Either way, Tamlin asks her what she wants to do.

After a section break, Tamlin and Feyre are walking down a hall, and Feyre notes that he’s acting differently:

No trace of the hollow, cold warrior of the night before, or of the angry Fae noble of minutes before. Just Tamlin right now, it seemed.

But Feyre’s like, nah, don’t trust that. He still killed that bogge thing and that means he’s real super extra dangerous, which is true but also it’s pretty clear that he’s severely anemic and can be killed by a papercut from a thick-enough envelope.

He flexed his bandaged hand, studying the white bindings, stark and clean against his sun-kissed skin. “I didn’t thank you.” 

“You don’t need to.”

That’s a trap. Don’t fall for it, Tamlin.

Tamlin mentions that the bogge’s bite slows healing, so that’s why his hand was still injured. Doesn’t explain the conveniently shredded clothes, but whatever. We had to know about his skin. Feyre tells him she wrapped his hand the way she would have done hers, so she could still pull a bowstring. Which is for some reason amazing to an immortal being.

He was quiet as we turned down another sun-drenched marble hallway, and I dared to look at him. I found him carefully studying me, his lips in a thin line. “Has anyone ever taken care of you?” he asked quietly. 

“No.” I’d long since stopped feeling sorry for myself about it.

HAVE YOU THOUGH, FEYRE?! HAVE YOU?! BECAUSE WE’RE AT NEARLY 30% OF THIS BOOK AND THAT IS ALL THE FUCK YOU HAVE DONE.

“I’m curious,” he said casually. The amber in his green eyes was glowing. Perhaps not all traces of that beast-warrior were gone. “Are you ever going to use that knife you stole from my table?” 

I stiffened. “How did you know?”

We just went from “they heard my fingertip nudge a door while they were shouting at each other” to “how did he realize I stole a piece of cutlery?” Okay. Let’s just ride this broken rollercoaster straight to hell at this point.

Tamlin says he figured out the knife thing because he smelled her fear. But it’s okay because her attempts to murder him are amusing. ed.—This is also a feature of several popular fantasy romance books now. The hero finds it cute and infantilizes the heroine when she threatens and/or attempts to harm him.

He gave me a crooked smile, more genuine than all the faked smiles and flattery he’d given me before. “Regardless of the Treaty, if you want to stand a chance at escaping my kind, you’ll need to think more creatively than stealing dinner knives. But with your affinity for eavesdropping, maybe you’ll someday learn something valuable.”

Probably not, because yous all are so vague when you’re talking an eavesdropper can’t get a crumb of context.

Feyre figures since he already knows she was eavesdropping, there’s no reason not to ask what Lucien meant about running out of time.

“I’m an immortal. I have nothing but time, Feyre.” 

He said my name with such … intimacy. As if he weren’t a creature capable of killing monsters made from nightmares.

I’m going to start calling this entire genre “ellipses fantasy”

Tamlin goes on to explain that some bad fairies might keep coming, since they know they can get onto his lands now.

If the borders between the courts were gone, though, as I’d heard Lucien say—if everything in Prythian was different, as Tamlin had claimed, thanks to this blight … Well, I didn’t want to be caught up in some brutal war or revolution.

Yeah, it would be fucking terrible if something exciting finally happened.

Tamlin strode ahead and opened a set of double doors at the end of the hall. The powerful muscles of his back shifted beneath his clothes. I’d never forget what he was—what he was capable of. What he’d been trained to do, apparently. 

What? Open a door?

This paragraph tripped me up because of the word “shifted.” Because he’s literally a shapeshifter-type creature, my brain thought he’d shifted back into Beast form. Something to think about when you’re writing. That was one of the hardest things to remember when I first started, that words might be perfectly fine in a sentence, but the context of the story might cause a reader’s brain to do something strange. ed.—For example, I removed a line in my werewolf book that referenced a character “knotting his tie.”

Now, I bet you can’t guess what’s behind these big doors. Because if you said, “a library”

“As requested,” he said, “the study.” 

You’d be wrong. See? Totally different.

So, Feyre requested to go into the study, I guess?

I saw what lay beyond him and my stomach twisted.

But she doesn’t want to be there?

I have to say, I read ahead because that was the chapter hook and I was like, wait a minute, is the chapter hook really just me being confused about why Feyre would be upset to find herself in a library, sorry, study, if she asked to go there?

If you haven’t read the book, I hope you come back and get as big a laugh as I did about what it is that Feyre can’t stomach about the library.

Study.