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A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 35 or “It’s love.”

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.

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.

Welcome to the chapter that may be the one that breaks me. ed. —Nope, they get worse. The chapter that features every single problem with the book, Maas’s writing style, the main character, continuity, just everything, condensed into a few pages. ed.—Oh, how I wish this was the only chapter with this problem.

Feyre wakes up in a dungeon cell. She’s all banged up, and there’s blood in her mouth, her lip is split open, her nose is broken, her eyes are nearly swollen shut, she’s in bad shape, okay?

I was in a prison cell. My weapons were gone, and my only sources of light were the torches beyond the door. Amarantha had said a cell was to be where I would spend my time, but even as I sat up—my head so dizzy I almost blacked out again—my heartbeat quickened. A dungeon.

First of all, Amarantha had said I’d spend my time in a cell, there, fixed that weird fucking part of the sentence for you. Second, did you think she meant the kind of cell that’s not in a prison or a dungeon environment?

It ached—ached worse than anything I’d ever endured. I bit down on a cry as my fingers grazed my nose, flakes of blood crumbling from my nostrils. It was broken. Broken.

I’m impressed that it wasn’t broken—broken. Way to exercise some restraint.

I couldn’t panic. No, I had to keep my tears in check, had to keep my wits together.

Feyre has wits?

She starts to think about how to provide first aid to herself, like using her shirt for bandages and water to wash her injuries.

I’d violated one of Alis’s rules.

We anticipated that, Feyre.

I’d had no choice, though. Seeing Tamlin seated beside Amarantha …

Mmm, you did have a choice, though. You had the choice to warn everybody in the human world about the blight and to listen to Tamlin and not run off after him when you knew for a fact it would be certain death. You were jealous that Amarantha was stealing your man.

Feyre wonders how long she’s been unconscious, and I’m going to guess that since she hasn’t peed herself, not long. But she doesn’t know when Amarantha will ask her to do the first task.

I didn’t allow myself to imagine what she had in mind for me. It was enough to know that she expected me to die—that there wouldn’t be enough left of me for her to torture.

But don’t worry! Someone else is being tortured in the dungeon. She hears someone screaming and a whip cracking and makes it all about herself and her guilt:

Clare had probably cried similarly. I had as good as tortured her myself.

Basically, yeah.

I deserved this—deserved whatever pain and suffering was in store—if only for what she had endured.

Agreed.

But … but I would make it right. Somehow.

Nope! No, you absolutely will not make it right, at all. There is no way to make it “right.” You will find a way to make yourself feel less guilty.

I’m not a psychologist, okay? I can’t tell if this line of reasoning is narcissism or psychopathy. But I can tell you that it’s deeply, maliciously selfish to believe that you can make “getting someone tortured to death and killed because you pretended to be them to get out of a dangerous situation” right with “but at least I rescued my boyfriend and we get to be together in true love.”

Patrons, if you’ve read the other books, does Feyre give even one thought to Clare Beddor in them? I really have to know if this is something that haunts her for the rest of the series because frankly it should.

I must have drifted off at some point, because I awoke to the scrape of my cell door against stone.

Feyre bored herself to sleep with her self-centered bullshit. We have so much in common.

Someone slipped into my cell and swiftly shut the door—leaving it just a bit ajar.

Then they didn’t shut it. What is…

You know what, let’s just move on.

The person who’s come to her cell is Lucien.

[…] the hay crunched as he dropped to the ground before me.

HUGE NITPICK INCOMING: it’s straw, not hay. Hay is animal feed, you wouldn’t use it to cover floors. Straw is the nutritionally useless part of wheat that gets repurposed for bedding. Hayrides are rides taken in hay wagons, but the scratchy stuff you’re sitting on is straw.

That’s extremely picky but it’s such a common mistake in Medieval inspired fantasy.

Lucien is like, what are you doing here? And Feyre tells him about Alis giving her a bunch of exposition.

The important thing is that Lucien voices the same issues I’ve had with Feyre showing up Under the Mountain.

“You shouldn’t have come here, Feyre,” he said sharply. “You weren’t meant to be here. Don’t you understand what he sacrificed in getting you out? How could you be so foolish?”

That’s what I’m saying! I feel like Lucien is the only character who’s following the plot but nobody ever listens to him.

“Well, I’m here now!” I said, louder than was wise. “I’m here, and there’s nothing that can be done about it, so don’t bother telling me about my weak human flesh and my stupidity! I know all that, and I … ” I wanted to cover my face in my hands, but it hurt too much. “I just … I had to tell him that I loved him. To see if it wasn’t too late.”

“Louder than was wise” should be my epitaph. But the rest of it is like… am I supposed to think that because the character recognizes that what she’s done has totally negated the purpose of Tamlin surrendering and condemning his whole court, it somehow makes sense for her to have done so? Am I supposed to think she had a good reason because she realizes it was a ridiculous thing to do in hindsight? ed.—Judging from spoilers people have given me for the rest of the series, yes. This is a common thread with Maas’s writing.

Lucien has come to take care of how broken Feyre is.

Lucien glances over his shoulder, checking the door. “The guards are drunk, but their replacements will be here soon,” […]

I’m including that bit because it has bearing on something I’m going to rage about later.

To fix Feyre’s nose, Lucien has to set it, so there’s this whole Mel-Gibson-in-Leathal-Weapon-check-out-how-tough-this-character-is moment that ultimately leads to so much pain Feyre passes out. When she wakes up, Lucien explains that he only healed her a little bit, because otherwise, Amarantha would notice that someone helped Feyre.

“And my nose?” I said, feeling it before he answered.

“Fixed—as pert and pretty as before.”

It’s important to know that Feyre is still pretty.

Feyre is like, wait a minute, why didn’t Amarantha take your power away?

“She gave me back a fraction—to entice Tamlin to accept her offer. But he still refuses her. He jerked his chin to my healed face. “I knew some good would come of being down here.”

Why is Tamlin still being “enticed” to accept anything? He lost. The time ran out. He didn’t get a deeply specific type of human to say she loved him.

Whoa, hey, speaking of “deeply specific,” isn’t it odd that Tamlin only searched for human women to try to romance? I don’t remember the curse saying anything about Tamlin having to love the person back or want to bone them or anything. What if he broadened that search and maybe there’s some guy out there who would have fallen in love with him. Or an enby person.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL what am I saying. There’s no fucking way gay people exist in this book. Not with the way Sarah wrote that Rhysand thing. Gay people were total non-entities in her thoughts when she wrote this. The very notion that a human man or enby might have broken the curse absolutely never crossed her mind. Never. Because if she had even the slightest gay awareness, she would have known how Diet Dom Rhysand came across.

But back to the curse. Tamlin already lost. What does Amarantha need to get his consent for? The entire deal was that she was basically gonna take him Under the Mountain and force him into sexual slavery or something.

Also, if Lucien can use magic to “entice” Tamlin, why can’t Amarantha do the same thing?

But now we’ve reached a point where a character is like, at least I’m being held prisoner as long as I can help Feyre, which… I guess I find anyone caring about Feyre’s well-being a stretch of imagination far beyond that which I can comprehend. It’s the most unrealistic thing in this whole book to me.

A grim nod. “She’s summoned all the High Lords to her now—and even those who swore obedience are now forbidden to leave until … until your trials are over.”

All Amarantha ever does is summon people, it seems like. And they keep returning, every single time, even though she keeps doing shit like imprisoning them and stripping them of their power and cursing them with bejeweled masks.

You know what, Prythian High Lords? You’re too gullible to rule a country. You don’t deserve to have it because you don’t have the good sense the Cauldron gave you to keep it. ed.—This is what I still find so frustrating about this book. We’re told again and again how smart and tricky the fae are, but all Amarantha has to do to get the High Lords to come to her is to be like, “I promise, this time I’m not going to curse you all or steal your magic,” and they’re like, “We see no reason to not trust her. Get in the car.”

Feyre asks Lucien if Jurian’s eye is really in that ring, and that leads to Lucien telling Feyre, IN A PAGE LONG BLOCK PARAGRAPH, the entire story of what happened after Jurian killed Amarantha’s sister, which let’s be honest, none of us are interested in. Like, the idea of killing a guy in revenge for murdering your sister and like, laying waste to his army and taking this horrible revenge is definitely a much more exciting story than the one in this book, but I don’t want to have to hear about this elaborate backstory that I know, deep in my heart, probably won’t have any bearing over the rest of this book. ed.—I’m not sure why THAT isn’t the book Maas decided to write, in the first place. It’s certainly a more interesting concept.

IDK, maybe it’s in here because we’ll need it for the rest of the series or something but I’m looking at the fact that we have 73% of the book remaining AND three tasks AND a fucking riddle to go. Plus, when I look at the table of contents, after the forty-sixth chapter (jfc forty-six chapters) it’s like:

AcknowledgmentsPronunciation GuideA Court of Mist and Fury TeaserDon’t miss any of this epic series from Sarah J. MaasPraise for the Throne of Glass seriesPraise for Court of Thorns and RosesAbout the AuthorBooks by Sarah J. MaaseCopyright

So that’s gotta take up at least ten percent of what’s left.

Also, aside, why is praise for this book in the book? I already have the book. Who are you trying to convince that it’s good? And it’s like, at the end of the book, so maybe they’re saying, “Oh, you didn’t like it? Well, here’s a review that compares it to A Song of Ice and Fire, so who’s stupid now?” And I’m like, IDK, whoever the fuck wrote that review comparing her to George R.R. Martin? ecause the only thing they have in common is that their books are too fucking long.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. Feyre has a problem with Amarantha because:

A huntress—she was little more than an immortal, cruel huntress, collecting trophies from her kills and conquests to gloat over through the ages.

This entire book.

The defining thing about Feyre.

(Besides whether the fuck or not she can paint something)

Is that she can hunt.

I’m sorry, I must be suffering from slow carbon monoxide poisoning that’s affecting my memory, I really must. Because I remember, OBVIOUSLY INCORRECTLY, Feyre being a hunter and considering keeping the pelt of the wolf she skinned to make a cloak. ed.—And remember how hunting was supposed to be the key to Feyre being able to navigate this tricky situation?

But now, a “huntress” is the worst thing a person can be, I guess.

Hey, another cool, totally not misogynist thing to note: Feyre is a hunter, but Amarantha is a huntress, the girl version and therefore the more evil kind.

The rage and despair and horror Jurian must endure every day, for eternity … Deserved, perhaps, but worse than anything I could imagine.

Yeah, well, you’re not reading this fucking book.

The thing is, I don’t really think it’s all that monstrous of Amarantha to eternally punish the guy who tricked her sister and then CRUCIFIED HER. If someone crucified someone I loved after betraying them, there wouldn’t be a terrible enough punishment. I’m #TeamAmarantha on this one.

But what a seasonally appropriate tale, huh?! ed.—It was near Easter.

 Feyre finally asks about Tamlin, by the way. She’s come all the way Under the Mountain, got her ass beat, and made this deal, but she had worldbuilding questions before she thought to ask about the guy she did all that shit for in the first place.

And guess what? Lucien doesn’t have time to give Feyre an answer! Wow, this is going to conveniently manufacture some drama, isn’t it? Feyre will be constantly pointing out to us that she doesn’t know anything about Tamlin and how he’s feeling or if he’s under a spell or what’s going on with him, and I bet she’ll continually miss opportunities to find out, only to say, “I needed to gather more information” or something like that.

Hey, if a conflict isn’t strong enough to survive asking a question like, “how is this person?” then it’s not a strong enough conflict.

Lucien vanished—just vanished into the dim light.

You saw someone do this already—saw them do it. Remember when Rhysand—Rhysand did it? And it makes just as much sense now as it did then. Both Rhysand and Lucien took the risk of walking into a dangerous situation, only to poof away from it.

Why? Why did Lucien have to sneak down to the dungeon if he can poof there? Why did Rhysand stroll into the dining room that morning if he could magically appear?

Because Sarah needs to make her characters make an entrance. Feyre needs to be able to hear footsteps because footsteps are ominous and her author is addicted to The Big Reveal.

There’s a section break:

I dozed on and off for what could have been hours or days.

OMG are they torturing her by forcing her to read this book? That’s diabolical.

Some red-skinned fairies come to get her because I guess we’re going for demons and hell and stuff, idk, but the main point is that we have to know that the subservient fairies are any color other than white.

Oh, you thought I didn’t notice that? You thought I didn’t see that all the fairy gardeners and maids and shit at the manor were explicitly described as not looking like white people? You thought I missed that?

I did not.

Anyway, the red fairies take Feyre to the throne room.

I marked the path, picking out details in the hall—interesting cracks in the walls, features in the tapestries, an odd bend—anything to remind me of the way out of the dungeons.

Because you’re going to escape? Now that you’ve doomed the whole Spring Court and then threw away their sacrifice to come their rescue, you’re going to just keep escape in your back pocket?

I observed more of Amarantha’s throne room this time, too, noting the exits. No windows, as we were underground. And the mountain I’d seen depicted on that map  at the manor was in the heart of the land—far from the Spring Court, even farther from the wall. If I were to escape with Tamlin, my best chance would be to run for that cave in the belly of the mountain.

What the shit is this even about? What cave? I spent a lot of time going back over and back over the scenes where Feyre looked at the map or they talked about Under the Mountain and not one single fucking time did anyone mention that there was some kind of cave in the mountain that wasn’t Under the Mountain. Is she talking about the little side cave shortcut? How was it “in the belly of the mountain” when she couldn’t even see the fucking mountain when she went into it?

This could honestly be the worst fantasy novel I’ve ever read. And I had to proofread the fantasy novels I wrote.

And let’s go back over this whole thing where if she escapes with Tamlin. Up to this point, Tamlin hasn’t expressed any interest in being saved or escaping. At all. Like, he made some meaningful eye contact that Feyre interpreted the way she wanted to, but he just kinda sits there doing nothing when she’s around and he didn’t make any effort to see her or get any messages to her, even though we know Lucien can poof in and out of dungeons.

Sorry, he can poof out of dungeons, he has to get the guards drunk and do this whole elaborate sneakery to enter the dungeons.

And she’s like, it’s far from the Spring Court, even farther from the wall… the Spring Court wasn’t far from the wall at all. She went through the wall and was immediately in the Spring Court’s lands. We just read that.

The thing that pisses me off is that I know in my heart there’s a map in this book. I didn’t look for it, but there’s no fucking way there isn’t a map.

BUT DOES THE AUTHOR BOTHER TO USE IT?! NO.

And finally, since I have paragraphs to say about every damn thing in this chapter, Feyre is willing to escape with Tamlin. Not a damn thought for the rest of the Spring Court or what will happen to them if Tamlin escapes. Not a damn thought about Lucien and what will happen to him. Feyre is very boyfriend-focused at this point and fuck everything and everyone else.

STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER!

A bunch of people are in the throne room, all looking fancy.

Dispersed among them were faeries with masks. The Spring Court. If I had any chance of finding allies, it would be with them.

If I were a member of the Spring Court and Tamlin had doomed me to living in a hole as a prisoner for the rest of my immortal life to save Feyre, and Feyre came back and was like, no, I can fix this, I’m your only hope? I wouldn’t be her ally. I would sock her so hard in the tit.

They throw Feyre on the ground in front of Amarantha’s throne.

“I couldn’t sleep last night, and I realized why this morning.” She ran an eye over me. “I don’t know your name. If you and I are going to be such close friends for the next three months, I should know your name, shouldn’t I?”

Watch out, literally anybody Feyre has ever known for her entire life. She’s about to sell you out to save her own ass.

There was something charming and inviting about her—a part of me began to understand why the High Lords had fallen under her thrall, believed in her lies. I hated her for it.

Yeah, you’re going to have to explain to me what about her is so charming and inviting, Ms. Maas. Show your work. Because so far, all we’ve really gotten out of her is over-the-top villainy and paragraphs about her beauty.

But to be honest, maybe that really is all it takes to trick the High Lords? Since they kept coming back over and over to get imprisoned or have their magic taken away or their eye plucked out. They just keep going back like, okay, this time she says it’s in good faith. This time, we believe her.

Feyre won’t speak, so Rhysand gets called in. Amarantha asks Rhysand if Feyre is the girl he saw at Tamlin’s manor.

“But did you or did you not tell me that girl,” Amarantha said, her tone sharpening as she pointed to Clare, “was the one you saw?”

He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Humans all look alike to me.”

Okay but like, what about timelines, Rhysand? Because we’ve already established that there was no conceivable way for Clare Beddor to be at the manor at lunchtime and at the Beddor house later that night.

Amarantha gave him a saccharine smile. “And what about faeries?”

I read that line and I was like, you’ve got to be shitting me. Feyre is a fairy, isn’t she? And then the next line happened:

Rhysand bowed again—so smooth it looked like a dance. “Among a sea of mundane faces, yours is a work of art.”

and for a second I was like, oh, okay, it’s just a setup to show how good Rhysand is at playing this role for Amarantha. And then I was like, no. There’s no way we don’t somehow find out that Feyre is a fairy. I’m guessing that by the end of this series, she’ll not only be a fairy, but like, a super special, once-in-an-eternity, prophecies fairy who ends up ruling over all Prythian for reasons that don’t approach continuity for even a second.

I’m not going to read any further in this series to find out. I have more self-esteem than that. But I’m guessing that’s how it shakes out. ed.—I hate how good am I at guessing.

Humans all look alike … I didn’t believe him for a second. Rhysand knew exactly how I looked—he’d recognized me that day at the manor.

This might have been a good point if he had recognized her out of several other humans, but he just recognized her as being the human at Tamlin’s manor. Maybe he really couldn’t pick Feyre out from a line-up.

But he damn sure knew Clare Beddor wasn’t Feyre because the timeline makes it impossible.

Amarantha asks Rhysand what Feyre’s name is and Rhysand says:

“How would I know? She lied to me.”

As I pointed out before, he could have gotten the name from her when he went digging around in her mind. The only reason he didn’t was because it would have ruined the whole tragic mistaken identity thing the author was going for, as well as the opportunity to write vague sex stuff that makes this book “spicy.”

The weird thing is, Amarantha doesn’t call Rhysand on that. She’s not like, uh, you could have used your mind-reading powers, duh. And it’s not like she doesn’t know that he has these powers because she orders him to use them on Lucien.

I mean, Tamlin is right there, too, but sure.

The Attor drags Lucien out of the crowd, and his four brothers are there to watch and enjoy seeing their brother tortured. I assume all this stuff about the side character’s family history comes up in a later book, and I’m not just reading it for no reason. But I did appreciate this description:

Behind them, pressing to the front of the crowd, came four tall, red-haired High Fae. Toned and muscled, some of them looking like warriors about to set foot on a battlefield, some like pretty courtiers, they all stared at Lucien—and grinned. The four remaining sons of the High Lord of the Autumn Court.

I like that she mentions that there are four of them, twice. Four, four sons, ah ah ah. And the choice of “some of them” when you’re talking about four people. Like, you can’t easily divide that up? Maybe one of them looks like a warrior and the other three look like courtiers? Maybe two of them are courtiers and the other two are warriors? The use of “some” here really tickles me because it implies that Feyre can’t count higher than two.

Ready—he was ready for Rhysand to wipe out everything he was, to turn his mind, his self, into dust.

This book—this book is going to wipe out everything I am, to turn my mind, my self, into dust.

Amarantha asks Tamlin what Feyre’s name is, and with Lucien right there with Rhysand about to claw up his brain, Tamlin doesn’t say anything. Amarantha asks Lucien’s brothers if they know Feyre’s name and they’re like, no but we’d totally tell you if we did.

Here’s a description of one brother:

He was lean, well dressed, every inch of him a court-trained bastard.

How much time has Feyre spent at royal courts that she can empirically state this? 

Probably the eldest, given the way even the ones who looked like born warriors stared at him with deference and calculation—and fear.

Again, it sounds like we’re talking about way more than four people here, but sure, let’s groove with it.

Rhysand starts to shred into Lucien’s mind, and Feyre has no choice but to reveal her name to save him.

“An old name—from our earlier dialects. […]”

God damn it. She’s a fucking fairy, isn’t she?

Remember in the last chapter when Amarantha said she’d give Feyre a riddle to solve?

“Solve this, Feyre, and you and your High Lord, and all his court, may immediately leave with my blessing. Let’s see if you are indeed clever enough to deserve one of our kind.”

She’s not.

Here it is, folks. This is the moment when this book scattered my marbles—scattered all of them.

There are those who seek me a lifetime but we never meet,
and those I kiss but who trample me beneath ungrateful feet.

At times I seem to favor the clever and the fair,
But I bless all those who are brave enough to dare.

By large, my ministrations are soft-handed and sweet,
But scorned, I become a difficult beast to defeat.

For though each of my strikes lands a powerful blow,
When I kill, I do it slow …

LOVE.

The answer is LOVE.

You know how I know?

BECAUSE IT’S NOT A PARTICULARLY CLEVER RIDDLE AT ALL.

There must be someone you can hire to write good riddles for your books if you’re not smart enough to come up with something decent on your own. And this is written like it’s supposed to be in some kind of poetic rhyme scheme… try to read it out loud. Just try to read it with some sort of rhythm.

SPOILER ALERT IT SOUNDS DOOFY AS FUCK.

8,100 people have highlighted that passage. That’s almost ten thousand people who read that and went, ooh, definitely want to come back and re-read this. This is some top-tier riddling, right here.

There are better riddles on popsicle sticks and Laffy Taffy wrappers.

I’m not even going to look ahead in the story and see if the answer is love. I knew it was love the moment I read the fucking riddle and went, oh, right, because the heroine has to learn how to love and express her love and the whole point of the book so far has been that Feyre’s been falling in love, love, love, love.

It’s love. There’s no other possible answer. It’s love, it’s obvious, and we’re going to have to read what, like ten more chapters of this shit because she won’t be able to figure it out or something.

My mind was void, a blank mass of uselessness.

We were already aware, I assure you.

Could it be some sort of a disease?

No, I think it’s just who you are as a person, Feyre.

Oh, wait, she’s talking about the answer to the riddle.

My mother had died of typhus, and her cousin had died of malaria after going to Bharat … But none of those symptoms seemed to match the riddle. Maybe it was a person?

Remember how this entire book we’ve been told Feyre is so, so clever? Just incredibly intelligent and clever, clever, clever?

IT’S LOVE YOU FUCKING DUNKSHART.

The answer was so close—one little answer and we could all be free. Immediately, she’d said—as opposed to … wait, had the conditions of my trials been different from those of the riddle? She’d emphasized immediately only when talking about solving the riddle.

Editor: You know, you never mentioned if the riddle worked the same way as the trials. When she finishes the trials, are they all immediately free?

Sarah:

No, I coudln’t think about that right now. I had to solve this riddle. We could all abe free. Free.

But the riddle is too gosh darn hard, too diabolically clever.

I’d be better off slitting my own throat and ending my suffering there, before she could rip me to shreds.

I think that every time I sit down to read the next chapter of this book. That I’d be better off if Feyre slit her own damn throat and ended my suffering there.

They take Feyre back to the dungeons, where there’s a section break and she tries to work out how many days she’s been down there (she thinks it’s two), and she spends the whole time thinking about the riddle.

The more I thought about it, the less sense it made.

See also: the world-building, characterization, and continuity of this fucking book.

Not to mention the nagging feeling that she might have wound up tricking me with this bargain when she’d emphasized immediately regarding the riddle. Maybe she meant she would not free us immediately after I finished her trials. That she could take however long she wanted.

I really, really like fairy tales and to be honest, that wording didn’t ping anything for me. Do the tasks over three months, or solve the riddle and not stay for three months. That’s not to say that Feyre shouldn’t have paid better attention when making the deal and explicitly said, like, we walk out of here that exact night. Just that to me, it doesn’t feel like there’s any kind of hole in the deal as written.

I mean, if there’s really a hole in the deal, it’s the concept of “freeing” them. Because remember, Amarantha “freed” her slaves by killing them.

Anyway, Feyre has nightmares about Jurian’s eye and what might happen to her, and THANK. GOD. the full moon happens at the end of the chapter.

The Creepy Forest Story

As promised in my ACOTAR recaps, here is my spooky forest story. Now, if you believe in spirits and fairies and whoo hoo, as I do, then I have no disclaimer for you. However, if you don’t believe in all that stuff, feel free to read this as fiction. However, it is not fiction.

Another disclaimer: I was smoking weed when this happened, but I’m always smoking weed and this is the only time this has ever happened to me. This type of thing is not a usual occurrence triggered by weed. I have never experienced hallucinations or out of body experiences from weed.

My cousin has a cabin in the Upper Peninsula, and this cabin is amazing. It’s on a lake in the middle of nowhere, in a huge forest. There are other cabins on the lake, but they’re not always occupied, as most people can’t live year-round in this particular location. Once it snows (and in the Upper Peninsula, it most assuredly does), the road to the lake is inaccessible to anything other than snowmobiles (or sleds or snow machines, depending where in the midwest you’re from and what you call them). Even in the summer, the “roads” in this forest are not what most people would call roads. They’re sandy paths carved through the forest floor, with hip-high banks in some spots and deep gouges from storm run-off. It is a bumpy and exciting ride, but should you meet someone traveling the opposite direction, you have to do some fancy maneuvering. This hardly ever happens, though; on a recent week-long stay, we saw one human being unaffiliated with our party. We’re talking a sense of true isolation, here.

The forest itself is pure magic. It’s on top of an enormous network of fungus that grows and lives and dies rapidly. You can take a walk in the morning and see all the mushrooms and toadstools and witch butter that popped up overnight, only to return after lunch and see an entirely different fungal landscape. The birds have no fear; they’ll whizz directly past your face and light on branches close enough that you can see their individual feathers. There are times when the woods are alive with their chatter, and times of eerie stillness. The roads wind vaguely around the edges of land parcels, like a labyrinth.

It’s my favorite place to walk. It’s so peaceful. Sometimes, I put on the Stardew Valley soundtrack and pretend I’m the farmer walking through Cindersap Forest. And I was out for a walk when the spooky forest happenings occurred.

After gorging myself on pasties, I decided to take a little stroll and enjoy my dessert: a fat joint and little apple hand pie. As I wandered around, enjoying the light filtering through the trees and feeling a general sense of peace, I noticed something interesting just a couple of feet off the path. It was a dead tree. Not unusual in a forest. Just the rotting stump of a tree that had died and fallen over, about six feet tall, jutting up from the side of a perfectly round mound of earth. Beside it was a young birch tree, exactly the same height and thriving. Red bark was strewn like a path up one side of the mound, through the space between the two trees, and out the other side.

I wanted to go to these trees so. badly.

The thing is, when you’re in a forest, it’s best not to go off the trails. It’s so super easy to get lost. But this was maybe ten footsteps. There was no chance I would lose the road, and there was really nothing between me these trees but forest detritus and a few may apples. I stubbed out my joint, slipped it behind my ear, and headed toward these weird trees.

The second I stepped off the path, all the birdsong stopped. Not just in the area. There was no sound whatsoever. There was, however, a weird, creepy feeling. Curiosity with underlying dread. I was right, though; the trees weren’t that far off the path. The birch was in front, the dead tree behind. I munched on the hand pie as I scoped everything out. The thing that puzzled me most was the red bark. None of the surrounding trees had red bark. Birch has red heartwood, but the birch wasn’t wounded or anything, and the other tree, which I guessed might have once been a maple, was already completely hollowed out, with no red material inside it at all.

Just as I finished my last bite, something snapped loudly in the trees. At this point, I was standing in front of the birch. I turned my head, just my head, in the direction of the noise, and when I looked back, the path between the trees was in front of me.

So I walked around it again. I stood in front of the dead tree, looked away, looked back, and I was in front of the red bark path. No matter how often I walked around the trees, the moment I turned my head or closed my eyes, I was in front of the path, with the dead tree on the right and the birch on the left. Even if I intentionally faced the path with the birch on the right and the dead tree on my left, if I looked away and looked back, the trees switched.

I have no explanation for this phenomenon, but I know it wasn’t the weed. I have never in my life smoked weed so strong that it made the world around me defy all known laws of physical space. I wasn’t on anything like mushrooms or acid. Just a single joint I only smoked halfway. And a little apple pie that I was eating when I walked up to this anomaly.

The apple pie part is important.

It was at this point that I spotted something I hadn’t seen on my walk from the path to the trees: a ring of white mushrooms, completely surrounding the mound of earth. And despite being superstitious and having no intention of doing so, I felt deeply compelled to walk between those trees. It really took a lot of effort to get that thought out of my mind. Totally freaked out, I backed out of the ring of mushrooms and decided to head back to the road.

And the road was now much further away than the distance I had originally walked. And instead of just the usual sticks and leaves and may apples on the forest floor, I was surrounded by brambles with big thorns.

I just started walking. I kept the road in sight and went straight through the brambles. And they put up a fight. And there were so many of them, I started to think of the end of Sleeping Beauty, when Prince Phillip had to fight his way through the thorns to get to the castle. They were ankle high, then knee high, then waist high, and when I made the mistake of looking back to see my progress, I hadn’t moved away from the trees at all.

“You were just high, Jenny. You said so.” At that point, my friends, I was no longer high. I was clear-headed and fully panicked. And there is no weed on this earth so strong that half a joint of it would create a prolonged hallucination so powerful it could rip pants and snag skin. You’re going to go back to the cabin and eat another one of those apple pies and feel much better.

I just kept pushing through and finally, I was on the road again. It felt like I had walked miles, but the trees were exactly where they had been when I first approached. There were no thorns, just the may apples and forest carpet. And I stood there, fully terrified, not really wanting to move or really look at the trees.

I walked away from the area, back toward the cabin, consumed by how weird this whole experience was, and I started noticing trash along the road. It looked like someone had tossed those little single-serving applesauce containers, still sealed, into the edge of the woods, just far enough you’d have to step off the path to retrieve them. I could clearly see the top of one, where a label should have been, but it was totally blank. No brand name, no indication of the contents, though it was visibly applesauce.

Who the hell would have so many misprinted applesauces out there, and why would they toss them into the woods? And how did they do it without passing where I’d been, because the applesauce wasn’t there when I’d started out on my walk.

My walk with an apple pie in my hand.

I looked down the road with a sense of dread like something invisible was chasing me. The anonymous applesauces lined the road on both sides, leading right back to the trees I’d just escaped.

I ran. And I can run fast. You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I can really haul ass. I got back the cabin, told my husband he needed to come see something, and we took back off into the forest.

All of the applesauce was gone. The trees were still there, but without the red bark path between them, and no compelling power to go and check them out. I was freaked, Mr. Jen was freaked, but for a different reason. He worried I hadn’t been taking my epilepsy meds and had suffered a seizure and some kind of post-ictal hallucination all by myself in the woods. But I knew what I saw and experienced, and I stuck to my guns.

Nothing weird happened on the rest of our daily walks, though I chose a different direction to wander rather than pass those trees again. Mr. Jen never saw any of the applesauce cups on his solo walks in that area. I was beginning to think his hallucination theory might have been correct.

On the morning we left, as we pulled out of the driveway, Mr. Jen noticed something at the mouth of one of our walking routes. “Looks like somebody dropped their lunch,” he said.

There, in the middle of that path, was an applesauce cup.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 34 or “Feyre gets her shit rocked and I experience true catharsis”

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.

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.

The Attor has Arya Stark in his clutches:

Tamlin. Alis and her boys. My sisters. Lucien. I silently chanted the names again and again as the Attor loomed above me, a demon of malice.

The Attor hasn’t taken any of Feyre’s weapons away because “we both knew they were of little use.”

Well, Feyre, you knew they were “of little use” when you left the house but we still had to hear about how tough you were for toting them along.

The Attor just tugged me onward with that slithering gait, its clawed feet making leisurely scratches on the cave floor. It looked unnervingly identical to how I had painted it.

Painted what, the cave floor?

In case you don’t remember what Feyre painted in chapter twenty, she describes it as:

[…] a tall, skeletal thin gray creature with bat ears and giant, membranous wings. Its snout was open in a roar, revealing row after row of fangs as it lept into flight.

At the end of chapter thirty-three, she described the Attor as having a “pointed” face, which doesn’t strike me so much as a description of a “snout” but if I hadn’t flipped back to check out the description in chapter twenty, I wouldn’t have that gripe.

 This leads me to two points: one, this was a great way to avoid re-describing the Attor and slowing down the action, and two, it would have worked better if the earlier description of the Attor hadn’t happened over ten chapters ago because I can’t be the only reader who totally forgot that she painted what she thought the Attor would look like.

Oh, and on the last chapter, Rachael commented that the description of the Attor invokes the image of Batty from FernGully: The Last Rainforest. I, however, have been imagining Bartok from Anastasia, and will continue to read all of his lines in my head in Hank Azaria’s pathetic attempt at a Russian accent (that sounds almost identical to his El Salvador accent from The Bird Cage.)

I encourage you all to pick a Don Bluth animated bat and join Rachael and I.

The Attor takes Feyre straight to the throne room.

Leering faces––cruel and harsh–– […]

Thanks for defining “leer” for me, it’s such an uncommon word and I am unfamiliar with words in general, being a reader.

[…] watched me go by, none of them looking remotely concerned or disturbed that I was in the claws of the Attor.

Why would they? I love that Feyre just knows she’s the main character of this universe and how shocked she always is to discover other people might not be thinking about her.

We strode through two ancient, enormous stone doors––taller than Tamlin’s manor––and into a vast chamber carved from pale rock, upheld by countless carved pillars. That small part of me that had again become trivial and useless noted that the carvings weren’t just ornate designs, but actually depicted faeries and High Fae and animals in various environments and states of movement. Countless stories of Prythian were etched on them. Chandeliers of jewels hung between the pillars, staining the red marble floor with color. Here––here were the High Fae.

This gives real Hellboy 2: The Golden Army vibes, doesn’t it?

There’s a party going on in the throne room and people are wearing masks so idk, if they fell for that shit twice I really don’t know. I don’t know, y’all. Maybe they still have their masks on from the first time and are still cursed to leave them on?

The cold marble floor was unyielding as I slammed into it, my bones groaning and barking.

No one. Not one single damn reader would have been confused by the idea of marble being hard. Not. One. But we need that unyielding here just in case.

This is the sort of petty shit that bugs the hell out of me.

There, lounging on a black throne, was Amarantha.

Though lovely, she wasn’t as devastatingly beautiful as I had imagined, wasn’t some goddess of darkness and spite.

Because…she’s not pretty enough? Like, every single thing we’ve heard about her is that her two main character traits are darkness and spitefulness. Is the notion here that she must be ethereally beautiful to be truly evil? As beauty increases, does the evil increase, too? How does that work? And what level of vanity and self-consciousness does it require to make that link?

But let’s all stop and appreciate that while we’ve heard all the High Fae are preternaturally gorgeous, the one who is Feyre’s romantic rival is the only one who’s just kinda meh.

It made her all the more petrifying.

I don’t see how, when you’ve been terrified of and unnerved by the beauty of every High Fae you’ve encountered so far, and it’s specifically their beauty that has made them seem dangerous to you.

But while her ebony eyes shone, there was … something that sucked at her beauty, some kind of permanent sneer to her features that made her allure seem contrived and cold.

I guess I’m just interrogating the text from the wrong perspective here. I can’t figure out how oh, she doesn’t look like she’s spiteful and dark but she does have a sneer and seems super evil, works.

But Feyre. Feyre, we have to know…

Can you paint her?

To paint her would have driven me to madness.

Great, now I can move on comfortably with that knowledge.

There’s a paragraph that repeats, again, all of the information we know about Amarantha: she worked for the King of Hybern, she killed her slaves rather than free them, she killed humans during the war, she took over Prythian.

Sarah, for fuck’s sake. Trust that your readers don’t have the attention span of me scrolling TikTok on the toilet. We just suffered through an entire chapter of a character telling us all that information several times. We didn’t forget.

Then she sees Tamlin sitting on a throne beside Amarantha.

He was still wearing that golden mask, still wearing his warrior’s clothes, that baldric––even though there were no knives sheathed along it, not a single weapon anywhere on him.

First of all, that you can see. Second, have we ever seen him with knives in the baldric? I feel like that was a complaint I’ve made before, that he wears a baldric for no reason.

He just stared at me, unfeeling––unmoved. Unimpressed.

Why should he be impressed? He literally sacrificed his entire court and everyone in it to save you from Amarantha and you came and presented yourself to her. If I were him, I’d be so pissed off at you, I’d never speak to you again.

There’s more description of Amarantha and a finger bone necklace she’s wearing.

If I shifted my arm, I could draw my dagger––

And do what?

By the way, when I typed that, I sang it to my Kindle.

Feyre is constantly telling us that her weapons won’t work against the High Fae, that she doesn’t have a chance, that’s she’s as good as dead. Then she’s like, ooh, I’m so badass, I could grab my dagger, I’m so ready to fight. And this is apparently a common problem with Maas’s books; the kickass heroine is always almost ready to fight. I may have mentioned this in an earlier recap, but someone recently told me that the Feyre has a higher body count in this book alone than the heroine of Maas’s other series so far. I don’t know if that’s true, but I have seen people mention that in the first book of that series, Throne of Glass, the heroine doesn’t kill anybody.

Why is that a problem?

The heroine of Throne of Glass is a powerful assassin.

I feel like a lot of authors want their female main characters to be these badass warrior women but they give them no common sense, fighting skills that suddenly disappear in battle, and conveniently positioned male characters who do the actual dirty work of killing. Then, they use Girl Power as a marketing point, like being a killer is a strong and positive feminist character trait in the first place. ed.—Reading Modelland has given me new perspective on strong female characters and how the concept went grotesquely wrong somewhere, so expect a blog post about that at some point soon.

The Attor calls Feyre a “human thing” he found, and Amarantha is like, so what?

The Attor chuckled, the sound like sizzling water on a griddle, and a taloned foot jabbed my side. “Tell Her Majesty why you were sneaking around the catacombs––why you came out of the old cave that leads to the Spring Court.”

This implies that the Attor knows why Feyre was sneaking around in there. When did she tell him? Because in the second paragraph of this chapter, Feyre says she can’t speak without screaming, so she hasn’t asked the Attor any questions.

Would it be better to kill the Attor, or to try to make it Amarantha?

You’re not going to kill anybody, Feyre. Sit down.

Feyre figures that since Tamlin isn’t reacting to her presence, he must be under a spell. I’m not sure what she expected him to do in this huge throne room jam-packed with other powerful fairies. Is he supposed to kill Amarantha and then get killed? Is he supposed to run to Feyre and embrace her and give away the fact that she’s the correct human target, not Clare?

Maybe, idk, Feyre, maybe he’s mad that he threw away any hope of defeating Amarantha’s curse just to save you, and then you were like, nah, rather die, thanks.

But Feyre starts making this plan about how badass she’s going to be, like, okay, I need to “figure out my surroundings” and then keeps her hands “within casual reach of my daggers,” and thinks about how since Tamlin might be under a spell, she’ll have to grab him and physically haul him to safety herself.

Shut up, Feyre. You’re not going to do any of that and there’s no indication whatsoever that you could pull it off. Especially not when you’re outnumbered what sounds like hundreds to one.

“I came to claim the one I love,” I said quietly. Perhaps the curse could still be broken.

Right, because curses have a grace period like a credit card bill.

Amarantha laughs at her and says to Tamlin:

“You certainly were busy all those years. Developed a taste for human beasts, did you?”

Does she… does she not remember that humans were part of the curse that she cursed him with? Why is she suddenly surprised about this?

He said nothing, his face impassive. What had she done? He didn’t move––her curse had worked, then. I was too late. I’d failed him, damned him.

Again, maybe he’s protecting you by not acknowledging you, Feyre. Or, here’s a wild thought we haven’t explored yet, MAYBE HE’S MAD THAT HE SACRIFICED EVERYTHING FOR YOU AND YOU THREW IT BACK IN HIS FACE AND MADE HIS SITUATION WORSE.

“It makes me wonder––if only one human girl could be taken once she killed your sentinel …”

We never heard anything about that condition of the curse. That’s just suddenly added to explain why Amarantha said the line about human beasts.

Her eyes sparkled. “Oh, you are delicious. You let me torture that innocent girl to keep this one safe? You lovely thing. You actually made a human worm love you. Marvelous.” She clapped her hands, and Tamlin merely looked away from her, the only reaction I’d seen from him.

At no point did they use Rhysand’s mind-reading powers to interrogate Clare? They never found out that she’s not the same human? Rhysand never saw Clare and went, “yo, I just saw that girl the other day and this isn’t the same one?” I thought he was part of Amarantha’s inner circle. Is he even at this party?

But it’s great that the love interest of this book was totally cool with an innocent girl getting tortured.

Tortured. She’d tortured––

Yes, Feyre, what a shock. The thing that you knew would happen to her happened to her.

Amarantha asks why she shouldn’t just kill Feyre, and Feyre says:

My blood pounded in my veins, but I kept my chin high as I said, “You tricked him––he is bound unfairly.” Tamlin had gone very, very still.

Wait, what?

One of my biggest pet peeves with this book is how something will just be stated as if we’ve been counting on it all along. Like we were sitting here going, yes, Feyre is going to confront Amarantha over the fact that Tamlin was bound unfairly, that’s the loophole that gets him out of this curse, obviously.

No one ever mentioned that he’s somehow “bound unfairly” because of deceit. That was never explained. It was never even proposed as a way he might be able to get out of the curse.

Things you need to know from the next couple of paragraphs: Amaranth has a ring with an eyeball in it and the eyeball can look around, and she tells Feyre, hey, look over there, see that? That was supposed to be you:

There, nailed high on the wall of the enormous cavern, was the mangled corpse of a young woman. Her skin was burned in places, her fingers were bent at odd angles, and garish red lines crisscrossed her naked body. I could hardly hear Amarantha over the roar in my ears.

“Perhaps I should have listened when she said she’d never seen Tamlin before,” Amarantha mused. Or when she insisted she’d never killed a faerie, never hunted a day in her life. Though her screaming was delightful. I haven’t heard such lovely music in ages.” Her next words were directed at me. “I should thank you for giving Rhysand her name instead of yours.”

Clare Beddor.

YES SARAH THANK YOU WE KNOW.

We have already covered that Clare Beddor is the human they took in Feyre’s place. This isn’t a BIG REVEAL. It didn’t need to be a BIG REVEAL. It was already revealed to the reader.

At least Feyre is sickened by the fact that she caused that to happen to Clare, and that she’s responsible for the death of this innocent person who was never involved in what Feyre had going on. But this line:

That rotting body on the wall should be mine. Mine.

Mine.

made me bust out laughing, because due to our experience of Feyre so far, I couldn’t help but read it as Feyre being jealous that she didn’t get murdered. It doesn’t read that way in the text if you actually care about and like Feyre (I’m sure someone, somewhere, thinks Feyre is awesome), but it’s hilarious if you’ve consistently found Feyre selfish and shitty.

Amarantha asks Feyre to respond to this whole displayed corpse thing.

I wanted to spit that she deserved to burn in Hell for eternity, but I could only see Clare’s body nailed there, even as I stared blankly at Tamlin. He’d let them kill Clare like that––to keep them from knowing that I was alive. My eyes stung as bile burned in my throat.

“Do you still wish to claim someone who would do that to an innocent?” Amarantha said softly––consolingly.

There’s that burning in Hell thing in a world without Christianity or any other hell-having religion. But that’s not the biggest problem here.

Tamlin, the love interest of this book, has committed an act so reprehensible that it can’t be forgiven. He watched as an innocent human was tortured to death and nailed to a wall. He sat there and let it happen, knowing that Feyre gave Clare’s name to save her own skin, and he went along with it. He and Feyre are both culpable for Clare’s death, but Feyre is culpable due to her recklessness. Tamlin is culpable due to inaction. To me, that’s fully turned him into a bad guy, in my eyes. All he had to do was say, “That’s not her, the real human’s name is Feyre, Rhysand got it wrong.”

“But Amarantha might not have believed him!” Okay, but when Feyre returned from Prythian, she was glowing. It was commented on, and Feyre noted it, herself. She looked different after Prythian. If Clare didn’t have that glow, they would have known that she was the wrong person, because it would have been proof that she had never set foot in Prythian. And even if Tamlin did fail in convincing Amarantha, at least he would have tried.

But he didn’t.

I snapped my gaze to her. I wouldn’t let Clare’s death be in vain. I wasn’t going down without a fight. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

Clare’s death is going to be in vain because from spoilers people have told me, Feyre doesn’t even end up with Tamlin. And her death was always going to be in vain because she had nothing to do with this fight, anyway. Feyre’s thought here is, well, if I get Tamlin free, Clare didn’t die for no reason, but she absolutely did. She died for Feyre’s cause, and she died because Tamlin let her die. There’s no way to redeem that, even if Feyre gets her boyfriend back. ed.—I never want to be a side character in any kind of fantasy novel, but I would be extra pissed off if I was a side character in a fantasy novel and I died for someone else’s not-true-true-love.

Back to Amarantha, though:

Her lip curled back, revealing too-sharp canines. And as I stared into her black eyes, I realized I was going to die.

Again, not a BIG REVEAL, doesn’t build any suspense. Feyre has been talking for four chapters now about the fact that she’s on a suicide mission. At this point, Feyre thinking she’s going to die isn’t a big shocker or stakes raiser.

Amarantha asks Tamlin what he thinks about all this.

I looked at the face I loved so dearly, and his next words almost sent me to my knees. “I’ve never seen her before. Someone must have glamoured her as a joke. Probably Rhysand.” Still trying to protect me, even now, even here. 

But…he was presumably “here” when he tried to protect you by letting a serial killer torture your friend? And why couldn’t he say that about Clare Beddor? 

Because he viewed Clare Beddor’s death as a means to an end. Amarantha would stop looking for the girl Tamlin loved if she believed that girl was dead. Tamlin is just as culpable for Clare’s murder as Amarantha is and, in my opinion, more culpable than Feyre, even though she’s the one who dragged Clare into this mess.

“Could it be––could it be that you, despite your words so many years ago, return the human’s feelings? A girl with hate in her heart for our kind has managed to fall in love with a faerie. And a faerie whose father once slaughtered the human masses by my side has actually fallen in love with her, too?” 

If Amarantha didn’t know this or didn’t find it believable that it could happen… why capture and murder Clare? Why did Clare need to be disposed of if Amarantha didn’t know that Tamlin was about to break the curse? What was the motive?

There doesn’t have to be a motive. Sarah wrote it, so it makes sense. She says so.

“I suppose if anyone can appreciate the moment,” she said to the ring, “it would be you, Jurian.” She smiled prettily. “A pity your human whore on the side never bothered to save you, though.”

So, this is actually pretty cool. She has Jurian bound to the finger bone necklace and the eyeball ring. That’s one hell of a punishment. Not only did Jurian have to be tortured to death, but his consciousness also doesn’t get to die. And she made him into cool jewelry.

Just another really awesome idea that proves Maas can write cool stuff, but consistently refuses to do so.

Since Tamlin still isn’t like, gazing fondly at Feyre or whatever, Feyre decides that he’s been potentially glamoured to have his memory wiped. Which is it, book? Is he trying to protect Feyre by playing it cool, or is he under a spell?

My bowels turned watery––I couldn’t help it.

Is Feyre some kind of marsupial whose only threat defense behavior is to spray shit everywhere? Why does this keep happening?

“But I’ll make a bargain with you, human,” she said, and warning bells pealed in my mind.

What did I say in the last chapter? What did I say?

Unless your life depends on it, Alis had said.

Conveniently, it does! This makes me wonder why it was even a condition Alis set out in the first place. Maas knew this was where the story was going, right? Then what’s the point of setting a “don’t make deals” clause if your character is going to have to make a deal right away? It’s not like there’s been any time to build suspense or show us the consequences of making a deal before she goes through with it, and it just makes Feyre look, well, dumb.

“You complete three tasks of my choosing––three tasks to prove how deep that sense of loyalty and love runs, and Tamlin is yours. Just three little challenges to prove your dedication, to prove to me, to darling Jurian, that your kind can indeed love true, and you can have your High Lord.”

…Is that…it?

I mean, that doesn’t sound like it’s gonna be it, right? The last time she did a curse or whatever, it was so painfully specific and riddled with conditions that I assume it took three or four days for her to explain it to the people she cursed. And at some point, I think she probably had to use slides.

“I complete all three of your tasks, and his curse is broken, and we––and all his court––can leave here. And remain free forever,” I added. Magic was specific, Alis had said––that was how Amarantha had tricked them. I wouldn’t let loopholes be my downfall.

Amarantha didn’t “trick” them. She invited them to a party and they went, knowing that the last time she threw a party she stole everybody’s powers. It’s not a trick if you’re just gullible.

But I like that Feyre is so cautious about loopholes when her terms explicitly leave no room for Lucien’s freedom. He’s from the Autumn Court, genius.

Amarantha agrees but says:

“I’ll throw in another element, if you don’t mind––[…]

Of course, you will. We all knew your first answer was way too straightforward.

“[…]––just to see if you’re worthy of one of our kind, if you’re smart enough to deserve him.” 

Oh, it’s gonna be based on whether or not Feyre is smart? Bad luck, Tamlin. I am so sorry about that, bro.

“I’ll give you a way out, girl,” she went on. “You’ll complete all the tasks––or, when you can’t stand it anymore, all you have to do is answer one question.”

The question is, unfortunately, “How many em dashes are in this book,” and we all know that counting them will only lead to madness.

“A riddle. You solve the riddle, and his curse will be broken. Instantaneously. I won’t even need to lift my finger and he’ll be free. Say the right answer, and he’s yours. You can answer it at any time––but if you answer incorrectly …” She pointed, and I didn’t need to turn to know she gestured to Clare.

Magic is specific, but you’re totally cool with letting Amarantha vague up those consequences? You don’t need them stated explicitly?

You’re crushing this, Feyre. You’ve made a deal when you were warned not to. You set the terms of the deal in such a way that you can’t rescue Lucien. And now you’re like, meh, I don’t need the specific consequences of failure even though I know I need to be very specific about all of this due to trickery.

Crushing it.

A chill slithered down my spin. Alis had warned me––warned me against bargains.

You just mentioned that––mentioned it on the last page. We talked about this––talked about it a few paragraphs up.

Feyre asks what the tasks are and Amarantha says:

“Oh,  revealing that would take all the fun out of it. But I’ll tell you that you’ll have one task every month––at the full moon.”

Magic is specific, right? Feyre just let us know she’s super smart because she’s being so specific (despite forgetting Lucien not being part of Tamlin’s court) so you’d think she’d be all, yeah, no, don’t think so.

You’d think that. But she just blazes past it and asks what she’s going to do while she waits for these unspecified tasks. Amarantha is like, oh, you’ll just have to work for me.

“If you run me ragged, won’t that put me at a disadvantage?” I knew she was losing interest––that she hadn’t expected me to question her so much. But I had to try to gain some kind of edge.”

“Nothing beyond basic housework. It’s only fair for you to earn your keep.” I could have strangled her for that, but I nodded. “Then we are agreed.”

Despite the fact that only Feyre’s actions are mentioned in the middle of that dialogue, it’s Amarantha saying it.

Note, please, that Amarantha doesn’t say she won’t run Feyre ragged or give her work that puts her at a disadvantage. She simply says it’ll be basic housework. She never promises not to sabotage Feyre.

I knew she waited for me to echo her response, but I had to make sure. “If I complete your three tasks or solve your riddle, you’ll do as I request?”

“Of course,” Amarantha says. “Is it agreed?”

His face ghastly white, Tamlin’s eyes met with mine, and they almost imperceptibly widened. No.

Because he’s seeing the same thing we are, Feyre. He’s sitting there going, don’t trust that she’s not going to fuck with you, ps. you’re doing this whole thing wrong.

But it was either this or death––death like Clare’s, slow and brutal.

Yeah, babe, I hate to tell you, but you’re still facing death if you fail the tasks. Amarantha has never indicated that if you fail at the tasks, you’ll just go home without freeing Tamlin. Just because she only said she’d kill you if you got the riddle wrong doesn’t mean she won’t kill you if you fail. Again, Feyre knows that magic demands specificity and she keeps saying she’s concerned with making sure this shit is iron-clad, no take-backsies, but she’s failing spectacularly.

But she feels she has no other choice because:

Because when I looked into Tamlin’s eyes, even now, seated beside Amarantha as her slave or worse […]

Oh, how I would have dearly loved for this white author to tell us what’s worse than slavery. She’s written so sensitively about the subject so far.

Thankfully, she doesn’t opine further on that.

Feyre thinks about how it’s her only hope to believe she might be able to beat this ancient queen.

She’d tricked them all, but I hadn’t survived poverty and years in the woods for naught. My best chance lay in revealing nothing about myself, or what I knew. What was her court but another forest, another hunting ground?

What the fuck are the deer and rabbits like in this world? Were they trying to make tricky deals with her? Were they desperately trying to learn all about her, therefore she had to play things close to the vest? I don’t understand the part about her best chance being to reveal nothing, because Amarantha isn’t asking Feyre anything about herself. She’s just asking Feyre to agree to the deal.

If the author is asking me to believe that hunting animals for food in the woods is on par with making deals with the fae, well… she’s not going to. Because this whole “I used to hunt, therefore I’m in a unique position to best the most dangerous, evil, horrible queen Prythian has ever seen” isn’t gonna wash. It’s just silly and it makes Feyre look goofy at best, narcissistic at worst.

Feyre agrees to the deal and hey, remember when Amarantha said she wasn’t going to do anything to put Feyre at a disadvantage? Right away, Amarantha commands some fairies to beat the ever-living shit out of Feyre.

And I have to be honest, I’m a little jealous of the evil fairies who rinse her ass out and hang it on the line to dry.

Blood sprayed from my mouth, and its metallic tang coated my tongue before I knew no more.

Okay, I’m also jealous of Feyre. At least she gets to lose consciousness during the course of the book. I’d pay someone to knock me the fuck out while I’m reading it.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 33 or “The selflessness of twu wuv”

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.

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.

Remember how long the last chapter was?

This chapter isn’t like that, so please don’t be too disappointed in the length of this recap. There’s nothing here to really recap, as you’ll see at the end, which I assume will be like five hundred words from now.

I might have been going to my death, but I wouldn’t arrive unarmed.

She’s got a bow and arrows and two daggers. For some reason, Maas is sure to explain that there are other weapons in the manor, but Feyre doesn’t know how to use them. Like, at this point, we know that she fights with a bow and arrows and daggers. No reader, at nearly seventy percent into the book, is going, “Why didn’t she take the mace?”

Better than nothing, even if I was up against faeries who’d been born knowing how to kill.

Now that some fairies have done something bad to someone she knows, Feyre is back to her hardline “all faeries are cold-blooded killers” stance from earlier in the book. Except, of course, for the nice, helpful fairies she knows.

You know. The ones who are “the good ones”?

I’m just saying, as someone who wrote a super racist fantasy series due to sheer ignorance of how my words looked outside of the lens of a white person? It’s really easy to make your book about warring races…racist.

Alis leads Feyre through the woods, sniffing the air to make sure they’re safe. It’s weird how the sniffing power didn’t come up for Alis until it was time to throw it in there to make the situations seem tense and scary. In fairness, we have seen pretty much every single other fae creature sniff Feyre or find Feyre by her smell, but I honestly just assumed that Feyre stinks.

Stay with the High Lord, the Suriel had said. Stay with him, fall in love with him, and all would be righted.

The Suriel never implied that Feyre should fall in love with him. Just that she should stay with him. But whatever, we’ll just go with it at this point.

They walk until nightfall.

I was beginning to wonder whether I should have brought more than a day’s worth of food when she stopped in the hollow between two hills.

Or the top of a mountain, or a municipal fish ladder, who can say at this point, the way geography has been handled so far?

The air was cold—far colder than the air at the top of the hill, and I shivered as my eyes fell upon a slender cave mouth. There was no way this was the entrance—not when that mural had painted Under the Mountain to be in the center of Prythian. It was weeks of travel away.

IDK, the manor was basically right up against the human world, so who’s to say if the mural means anything at all?

And what a fucking strange way to phrase that. “[…]that mural had painted Under the Mountain to be in the center of Prythian.” The mural didn’t paint anything. What was wrong with just saying, “Not when the mural had depicted Under the Mountain as the center of Prythian?”

Hey, just a quick question here… why did the mural depict Under the Mountain as a seat of huge importance at all, when it’s basically the military base of an opposing force? Why is that something Tamlin would have had commissioned at all? “Because Sarah needed to show us the exposition, dummy!” is not an answer I am accepting at this time.

All dark and miserable roads lead Under the Mountain,” Alis said so quietly that her voice was nothing more than the rustling of leaves.

I appreciate that Alis is a tree person and all the little tree-adjacent words Maas has used in conjunction with that. I would enjoy it a lot more if that had been sprinkled in consistently with Alis from the very beginning or even, idk, before chapter thirty-two, when Maas apparently remembered Alis is a tree person. But as I’ve mentioned before, I suspect Maas has no idea you can scroll up in a Word .docx to revise literally anything.

She pointed to the cave. “It’s an ancient shortcut—once considered sacred, but no more.”

This was the cave Lucien had ordered the Attor not to use that day.

I honestly looked back to make sure Tamlin mentioned the cave at all and it wasn’t just something Maas decided to throw in right now for the hell of it. Good news, it’s there.

But if the cave is how Amarantha is getting her evil faeries into the Spring Court…why not just brick it up?

I loved Tamlin, and I would go to the ends of the earth to make it right, to save him, but if Amarantha was worse than the Attor … if the Attor wasn’t the wickedest of her cronies … if even Tamlin had been scared of her …

Did you know … that using a bunch of ellipses … doesn’t make your story … more suspenseful? That it just makes you sound like you can’t breathe—like you can’t breathe … because you’re having an asthma attack?

IDK what is up with the formatting of this book with the space before and after the ellipses but it’s been bugging me for a while, now. And it’s not like it’s a font thing; I checked.

But all that aside, why am I supposed to be like, oh no, so scary, spooky spooky Attor? We never saw him do anything. We heard about how oh, he’ll definitely kill you, Feyre, but Tamlin and Lucien said that shit about every single other fairy creature. First, it was, oh, the Bogge is so dangerous, it would have killed you! Then, oh, be careful of the Suriel, the Suriel is the most dangerous thing ever! But wait, Naga! They’re so dangerous! And the Attor is the scariest of all, except for Rhysand, he’s really scary, but don’t forget Amarantha, etc.

You can’t make every single creature the scariest creature in the book, Sarah. That’s now how books work. It’s not how creatures work.

And again, I must ask, why is the Attor so scary? What has happened in the book so far that should have us frightened so badly? Because all he did was show up and shit talk Tamlin a minute and leave without a fight or anything. If we’d learned that the Attor, idk, is the one who took Lucien’s eye or ripped the wings off that fairy, or if the Attor put the head on the statue in the garden, he might be scary. At this point, he’s just a random being that showed up to build some kind of suspense and not actually reveal anything.

Oh, that’s right. We know the Attor is a scary thing because the author told us the Attor is a scary thing. Well, that clears it all up, no further demonstration is needed and how dare I question her.

Although, when I read that scene again for any clue that the Attor is somehow worse than, say, the Naga, who we saw be scary and strong and violent, he did mention that Amarantha was unhappy that Tamlin “dispatched” his men over the wall. Remember when in chapter thirty-two it was implied that Amarantha had to allow fairies to go over the wall? I do. I remember that.

Alis is like, yeah, bet you’re scared now, and Feyre is like, I’m gonna free Tamlin, and Alis is like, sure you are, anyway, hope you die quick.

“A few rules to remember, girl,” she said, and we both stared at the cave mouth. The darkness reeked from its maw to poison the fresh night air. “Don’t drink the wine—it’s not like what we had at the Solstice, and will do more harm than good. Don’t make deals with anyone unless your life depends on it—and even then, consider whether its worth it. And most of all: don’t trust a soul in there—not even your Tamlin. Your senses are your greatest enemies; they will be waiting to betray you.”

Ooh, see how she changed it up there? You thought she would go for an em dash and she hit you with a semi-colon.

Anyway. Flashforward to Feyre doing absolutely all that stuff in the next few chapters. I haven’t read them, but any time anyone tells Feyre, “Feyre, no,” she goes, “Feyre, yes,” and does it because she’s somehow figured out that they’re wrong and she knows better. I will be astonished if the next few chapters don’t have her guzzling down wine at a contract negotiation with a bizarro Tamlin who’s wearing an eyepatch and a black goatee. ed.—This is basically exactly what happens, but without the eyepatch and goatee.

Then Alis tells Feyre that by the way, those weapons are all shit, and oh, also?

“There was one part of the curse. One part we can’t tell you. Even now, my bones are crying out just for mentioning it […]

My bones are crying out at the fact that there’s yet another condition of this inexplicably detailed curse.

“[…] One part you have to figure out … on your own, one part she … she …” She swallowed loudly. “That she she still doesn’t want you to know, if I can’t say it,” she gasped out. “But keep—keep your ears open, girl. Listen to what you hear.”

The curse ended after forty-nine years. It’s over. Why is the magic still preventing Alis from talking about just one part of it? The curse is over. It’s finished, Tamlin lost.

Feyre thanks Alis for the help and Alis is like, sure, but you’re really gonna die, but good luck. And Feyre is like:

”Once you retrieve them, if you and your nephews need somewhere to flee,” I said, “cross the wall. Go to my family’s house.”

You told your family to flee, assjob. What’s she gonna do, tree-people her way into an empty palace and claim squatter’s rights? That sounds like it’ll go great.

Feyre goes into the cave and there’s a section break and she’s trying to inch her way through the cave in the dark. That’s right. Miss badass survivor? She doesn’t try to make a torch or anything. They’re in the woods with like, branches and tree sap but she just plunges into a dark cave without anything to light her way. But that’s okay because she sees light up ahead finally. But also…voices.

Hissing and braying, eloquent and guttural—a cacophony bursting the silence like a firecracker.

They have firecrackers in Feyre’s world.

So, they have gun powder.

But they all fight and hunt with swords and bows and arrows and shit.

Sure.

When the voices move on, she goes to investigate a crack in the wall, where the light is coming out, and she knows she has to go through it, even though she’s afraid, because she knows Tamlin is being held captive and she needs to find him.

And hopefully not run into anyone in the process. Killing animals and the naga had been one thing, but killing any others …

Please note: Feyre also killed a High Fae. But High Fae are different from Naga. But also, Naga are the only non-western European myths presented in this book so far, and they were described as having dark skin. And she’s fine with killing them, they’re in the same category for her as animals are.

I’m just pointing it out.

I took several deep breaths, bracing myself. It was the same as hunting. Only this time the animals were faeries. Faeries who could torture me endlessly—torture me until I begged for death. Torture me the way they tormented that Summer Court faerie whose wings had been ripped off.

The torture. The torture for Feyre.

Keep your chin up, Boo-berry. You don’t have wings for them to rip off, and you’re not immortal, so they can’t torture you endlessly. The way that this book is torturing me.

Feyre goes through the crack and gets into a hallway. This is kind of a Labyrinth thing, I guess, where if she had gone through the wall, she would have gone straight to the castle. I can think of a few fantasy books that could have used similar magic shortcuts, so I am not mad. I’m so glad that we don’t have to travel with Feyre for weeks.

So, she’s sneaking along this hallway.

This was a mistake––only an idiot would come here.

It’s not mean if I’m not the one saying it.

The thing is, Feyre is making the most foolish choice possible. She had an opportunity to go back and tell everyone in the human world that Amarantha is coming. She could have rounded up a bunch of fighters or something. Instead, she chooses what she knows is a suicide mission. Feyre has come here expecting to die. Not knowing that it’s a danger, just expecting to die and hoping she’ll get to tell Tamlin she loves him before that happens.

It’s not her fault, though:

Alis should have given me more information.

How could she possibly have given you more information, Feyre? The entire previous chapter was just her talking at you and telling you all the exposition that should have been in the book up until that point in one enormous lump.

Feyre does, however, note that she could have bothered to ask for that information or just not have gone on the journey in the first place.

She’s still creeping through the hallways, thinking about how she might need to wait to “gather information” about where Tamlin is and I’m so thankful she decides otherwise because I don’t want to read anymore fucking block paragraphs of “this is why things are the way they are.”

No. A second opportunity might not arise for a while. I had to act now.

Why? Because she’ll be too scared to try again, is her reasoning.

And then, something grabs her.

A pointed, leathery gray face came into view, and its silver fangs glistened as it smiled at me. “Hello,” it hissed. “What’s something like you doing here?”

I knew that voice. It still haunted my nightmares.

So it was all I could do to keep from screaming as its bat-like ears cocked, and I realized that I stood before the Attor.

Oh no, spooky Attor, who’s tied with the Suriel for having the least amount of times trying to kill Feyre. Good thing that’s used as a chapter hook, so we know it’s suspenseful.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter (god help us all) 32 or “The entire plot of Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses, performed by a minor character”

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.

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.

This chapter is hell on earth. And I can say that because I’m from a world where hell is considered a thing. This thing.

You may recall that at the end of the last recap, I talked about how the next chapter would be a twenty-page long info dump. That’s not an exaggeration. Please grab a bottled water so you can stay hydrated. Stretch, potentially.

Feyre walks around the manor, being a crime scene investigator.

It had been a vicious fight––and from the blood patterns, most of the damage to the house had been done during the fight, not afterward.

Okay, Dexter. I’m sure you can just look around and know exactly what happened.

The crushed glass and footprints came and went from the front and back of the house, as if the whole place had been surrounded. The intruders had needed to force their way in through the front door; they’d just completely shattered the doors to the garden.

This is my design.

(I’ll stop making Hannibal references when NBC comes to its senses, thank you for asking.)

Feyre goes into the dining room.

The giant table was in pieces, […]

The giant table was magically smaller when she left. It’s mentioned in the scene with Rhysand.

I studied the trail across the floor. It had been disturbed, but I could make out two sets––large and side by side––leading from where the table had been. As if Tamlin and Lucien had been sitting in here as the attack happened, and walked out without a fight.

That, dear reader, is how boring this book is. An epic fight scene happened off the page and the main characters still weren’t involved.

Which, by the way, means that all the blood in the house is from other fairies. Which would mean that Tamlin and Lucien abandoned all those innocent servants to be slaughtered.

Feyre is using her previously unmentioned tracking skills and blood spatter analysis techniques to tell the reader what happened in the scene that would have been much more exciting if we’d just seen it. And it had been written by a different author. But then:

Something limped into the room and sniffed. I could only see its back––cloaked in a plain cape, medium height … All it had to do to find me was shut the door.

The figure turns out to be Alis, who I guess smells Feyre’s presence because it’s something Alis can do and we never heard about it before. That tracks.

Alis reminds Feyre that she’s not supposed to be there. Alis also has a limp, but Feyre doesn’t give a shit about the injured person who’s been taking care of her for months. She doesn’t even ask if Alis is okay.

“Is he alive?”

“Yes, but––”

My knees buckled at the onslaught of relief. “And Lucien?”

“Alive as well. But––.”

“Tell me what happened––tell me everything.“

She’s clearly trying to but you won’t stop fucking interrupting her.

She didn’t speak as we hurried through the empty, too-quiet halls––all of them wrecked and bloodied, but … no bodies. Either they’d been hauled away, or––I didn’t let myself consider it as we entered the kitchen.

What, you think they’ve been eaten? That’s all I can think of, considering you just walked into the kitchen. Is this some unintentional wink to the camera, Mads?

(I’LL STOP MAKING HANNIBAL REFERENCES WHEN NBC COMES TO ITS SENSES, THANK YOU FOR ASKING.)

The kitchen is all burned up and Alis is here to loot it. I’m just leaving that as a blanket description of her actions throughout the scene because anything she does is just a dialogue tag to break up her monologues of exposition.

“She took him,” she said, and my blood went cold. “She took him to her court Under the Mountain.”

“Who?” But I already knew the answer. 

Then why did you ask, jackass?

Feyre begs Alis to tell her the truth about Amarantha and good news! Alis is apparently the foremost historian/political analyst in Prythian!

“You want the truth, girl? […]

I full expected her to say, “You can’t handle the truth, girl!”

[…] Then here it is: she took him for the curse––because the seven times seven years were over, and he hadn’t shattered her curse. She’s summoned all the High Lords to her court this time––to make then watch her break him.”

Just say forty-nine, for fuck’s sake. Seven times seven, ooooh numbers, spooky numbers. Forty-nine is easily a more terrifying way of putting it than “seven times seven” because what kind of psychopath picks forty-nine instead of just fifty? That shit would keep me up at night. “Why did she choose that number? Fifty was right there? Was it to get in my head?”

“What is she––wh-what curse?”

A g-g-g-ghost!

A curse––the curse she had put on this place. A curse that I had failed to even see.

The poison. The poison for Kuzco. The poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco. Kuzco’s poison.

Also, the c-c-curse you didn’t see? Was the fucking masks. Just because he never said, “I’m cursed,” it’s pretty clear that they were fucking cursed.

“Amarantha is High Queen of this land. The High Queen of Prythian,” […]

The poison. The poison for Kuzco.

“But the seven High Lords rule Prythian––equally. There’s no High Queen.”

You just asked Alis for answers, and you’re going to correct her? Shut your mouth and listen. Nobody wants to hear your bullshit, Feyre.

Alis is like, yeah, no shit?

Actually, she’s like:

“That’s how it used to be––how it’s always been. Until a hundred years ago, when she appeared in these lands as an emissary from Hybern.”

Do you remember there’s a place called Hybern? I didn’t. Because it’s only ever been mentioned in one scene, over a hundred pages ago. The Suriel told Feyre about the king in Hybern, and after that, it’s never mentioned again. Any time the Suriel is brought up, it’s about what it told her about Tamlin and that’s it. We never get any reminder about Hybern until right now, when Feyre acknowledges that the Suriel told her about it and summarizes everything she knows about the king.

Alis explains (to Feyre and to the reader) that Amarantha showed up out of nowhere and was like, yeah, Hybern is really sorry for all the shit we did in the war, let’s talk about trade and let me dazzle you with my beauty. She proposes trade between Hybern and Prythian.

And then Alis gives like, interminably long backstory on Amarantha, who’s apparently a legend. She fought in the war against humans and she had a younger sister named Clythia who was also a fighter but who gave it up because she fell in love with a human. Amarantha knew that the human was just using her sister, but Amarantha wouldn’t kill him because it would cause Clythia pain.

Which really backfires when the human crucifies Clythia and cuts her to pieces while she’s still alive.

So, now Amarantha just fucking hates humans.

Hey…is that backstory for why the villain is totally justified in enslaving and brutalizing people? ed.—It’s also part of what makes this book not High Fantasy; the villains in High Fantasy stories are just evil. High Fantasy villains don’t have relatable qualities, and the evil and corruption of the villains are motivated by a lust for power. “Avenging a brutally murdered loved one” is a relatable motivation, even if that motivation turned the villain evil. Maybe if people didn’t shit on every other fantasy subgenre, correctly categorizing this book wouldn’t be such a controversial thing.

Anyway, for fifty years she’s sneaking people from Hybern into Prythian on trade ships. She did this without the king of Hybern knowing.

What’s the motivation?

“[…]But we all soon learned that, in those fifty years she was here, she had decided she wanted Prythian for her own, to begin amassing power and use our lands as a launching point to one day destroy your world once and for all, with or without her king’s blessing. So, forty-nine years ago, she struck.

Now, at this point, nobody knows Amarantha is evil, right? So, she throws this big ball and invites all the High Lords (including Tamlin), and puts a potion in the wine that’s served. They end up paralyzed, it’s like the Red Wedding but without so much moving around.

“[…]Once they drank, the High Lords were prone, their magic laid bare––and she stole their powers from where they originated inside their bodies––[…]

I choose to believe Alis means, “out their butts.”

Hey, do you notice how often I’m having to […] here? It’s because we got over a full page of just Alis talking in block paragraphs, telling the whole backstory of the entire Prythian deal to the main character OVER HALFWAY INTO THE FUCKING STORY.

At least I don’t have to do math anymore:

“[…] For forty-nine years, we have been her slaves. For forty-nine years, she has been biding her time, waiting for the right moment to break the Treaty and take your lands––and all human territories beyond it.”

So, the idea is that Amarantha snuck her guys in, stole the High Lord’s magics, conquered Prythian, and now she’s like, ah, I will bide my time before attacking.

I’m still so confused about the Treaty. The very existence of the Treaty suggests that the High Lords reached a point where the cost of war outweighed the benefit of victory, right? We’ve heard about how they’re so dangerous and tear through humans like tissue paper, but humans must have been strong enough that fighting against them was no longer feasible and an agreement had to be reached to end the war, right?

So, Amarantha is going to somehow continue to keep Prythian under her control while also invading and conquering a people Prythian didn’t manage to put down before, and she’s going to do this all on her own without backing from either Prythian or Hybern? I mean…I guess.

 And then there’s this absolute bombshell:

“But … the sickness in the lands … Tamlin said that the blight took their power––”

“She is the sickness in these lands,” Alis snapped, lowering her hands and entering the pantry. “There is no blight but her. The borders were collapsing because she laid them to rubble. She found it amusing to send her creatures to attack our lands, to test whatever strength Tamlin had left.”

So…Tamlin made up the blight. The whole thing. Feyre has been worried about this made-up sickness the whole time and Tamlin knew it didn’t exist. And later on, we’ll find out that he was mystically bound from telling her about the curse Amarantha put on him, but let’s wait to pick that apart when we get to it.

“You could have been the one to stop her.” Her eyes were hard upon me, and she bared her teeth. They were alarmingly sharp. She shoved the turnips and beets into the bag.  “You could have been the one to free him and his power, had you not been so blind to your own heart. Humans,” she spat.

“I––I …” I lifted my hands, exposing my palms to her. “I didn’t know.”

“You couldn’t know,” Alis said bitterly, her laugh harsh as she entered the pantry again. “It was part of Tamlin’s curse.”

That’s two people now to blame Feyre for not seeing through the lie they were all in on.

Alis launches into this whole thing about how Tamlin and Amarantha knew each other since they were children.

“Amarantha eventually grew to desire Tamlin––to lust for him with her entire wicked heart. But he’d heard the stories from others about the War, and knew what Amarantha and his father and the Hybern king had done to faeries and humans alike. What she did to Jurian as punishment for her sister’s death. He was wary of her when she came her, despite her attempts to lure him into her bed––and kept his distance, right up until she stole his powers. Lucien … Lucien was sent to her as Tamlin’s emissary, to try to treat for peace between them.”

Isn’t it awesome how Alis just knows all this shit about her boss and his personal life and how he feels about politics and stuff? It’s great that this information is so easily accessible to everyone in Prythian.

Kinda makes one wonder why Feyre never ran into any of this totally common knowledge, despite allegedly having worked so very hard to get answers.

But the important thing to remember here is that Amarantha is motivated by revenge and wanting Feyre’s man. Barf.

Anyway, Lucien went to Amarantha and told her off on Tamlin’s behalf, and that’s how Lucien lost his eye and got his face carved up so bad, Tamlin barfed when he saw what happened.

“After that, she hosted a masquerade Under the Mountain for herself. All the courts were present. A party, she said––to make amends for what she’d done to Lucien, and a masquerade so he didn’t have to reveal the horrible scarring on his face. The entire Spring Court was to attend, even the servants, and to wear masks––to honor Tamlin’s shape-shifting powers, she said. He was willing to try to end the conflict without slaughter, and he agreed to go––to bring all of us.”

The last time she had a “party” she stole the entire fucking kingdom. Like, just drugged everybody and stole their power and seized the entire realm. Then, she carved up Lucien’s face. And Tamlin is just like, “Okay, I’m sure that this time she’ll be nice.”

And the unnecessary em dashes are a weight upon my very soul. None of those were necessary. “A party, she said, to make amends for what she’d done to Lucien […]” Oh look, that one was so easy to eliminate. “[…]and to wear masks to honor Tamlin’s shape-shifting powers, she said.” Wow, they’re dropping like flies here! “[…]and he agreed to go and to bring all of us.” Did I just use a conjunction in a place where a conjunction was warranted and an em dash was superfluous? IT’S MAGIC, YOUS ALL!

“When all were assembled, she claimed that peace could be had––if Tamlin joined her as her lover and consort. […]”

It’s not enough for Amarantha to be evil and all-powerful. She has to be evil and all-powerful and want to fuck Tamlin because that, dear reader, makes her a real villain. Her vagina hungers and she’s going to interfere with the central love story about it.

Tamlin rejected Amarantha, though, telling her he’d rather fuck a human than her, and given how she feels about humans, that wasn’t the smart way to go. Hence, everyone gets cursed to wear their masks and stuff. Why masks?

I’m sure we’ll find out by the end of the chapter, right?

Amarantha decides that instead of punishing Tamlin outright, she’s gonna curse him. He has “seven times seven” years to break the curse or he has to become her lover.

“[…]If he wanted to break her curse, he need only find a human girl willing to marry him. But not any girl––a human with ice in her heart, with hatred for our kind. A human girl willing to kill a faerie.[…]”

Okay. I kind of get this. Her sister was killed by a heartless, cruel human, Tamlin just threw that in her face, I get Amarantha’s angle here. Except for the part where it has to be a human who hates faeries because it sounds (from our limited experience with Amarantha, which is just like, this chapter of Alis talking to Feyre) like Amarantha thinks all humans are that way. But whatever.

There are more conditions:

“Worse, the faerie she killed had to be one of his men, sent across the wall by him like lambs to slaughter. The girl could only be brought here to be courted if she killed one of his men in an unprovoked attacked––killed him for hatred alone, just as Jurian had done to Clythia … So he could understand her sister’s pain.”

Now, this is starting to get a little complicated. If Amarantha wanted to cause Tamlin this kind of pain, why not just kill Lucien outright? Why not slaughter the entire Spring Court except for Tamlin? That’s what I would have done.

Yeah, I’m a monster. I’m comfortable with that.

But what about the treaty that prevented humans from killing faeries?

“That was all a lie. There was no provision for that in the Treaty. You can kill as many innocent faeries as you want and never suffer the consequences. […]”

WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF THE FUCKING TREATY?! WHY DID THE FAERIES SIGN THE TREATY IF THE TWO WARRING SIDES KILLING EACH OTHER DIDN’T HAVE TO STOP? WHAT IS THIS BOOK? WHERE AM I? I SMELL HOT PENNIES.

When Tamlin said that Andras was out looking for a cure for the blight, what he meant was that Andras had been out looking to get murdered so the curse on the Spring Court would be broken.

You know, the curse that makes everybody wear masks for some reason?

We get to that reason after Alis repeats the entire curse like she didn’t just tell Feyre about it: humans hate faeries, they have to find a girl who would kill one in cold blood, she would have to say she loved Tamlin before the forty-nine years were over, etc.

No, seriously. In a chapter that is twenty pages long and just one character telling the entire backstory of the plot in these huge block paragraphs, Maas thought, you know, I’m being too subtle. Better just real quick recap.

Finally, she gets to the part about the masks:

“[…]Amarantha knows humans are preoccupied with beauty, and thus bound the masks to all our faces, to his face, so it would be more difficult to find a girl willing to look beyond the mask, beyond his faerie nature, and to the soul beneath. […]”

I call what is perhaps the most bullshit anyone has ever called since the beginning of time. Bullshit, I say! And shall say it until the very end of my days.

She wants to make Tamlin ugly to a human, so she lets him stay super hot and built, but GASP, he has to wear an exquisitely beautiful, bejeweled mask on part of his face. Yes, how one would recoil from such a horror.

This is like in The Phantom of the Opera where Gerry Butler is supposed to be hideously ugly but he takes off the mask and he’s just got like, alopecia and pink eye and the rest of him is still Gerry Butler. And I know, I know deeply that I make that reference a lot but that’s just because (extremely Sally Fields at the end of Steel Magnolias voice) I wanna know why!

What’s the point of Tamlin being able to turn into a beast, by the way? What’s the point of him being able to shape-shift? We’ve seen him use it one time. 

Why write a “Beauty and the Beast” retelling if you don’t like the part where he’s made into a beast? Maas is like, you know what the problem with every single retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” is? The Beast part. What if we made him beautiful and fancy?”

AUUUUUUGH THIS BOOK IS SO FUCKING BAD WHY DOES IT EXIST?!

Honestly, yous all, I might hate this one more than Fifty Shades of Grey, because even though the plot of Fifty was super basic, at least it made some kind of narrative sense.

“[…] Then she bound us so we couldn’t say a word about the curse. Not a single word.[…]”

FALSE! FALSE FALSE FALSE! Page motherfucking seventy-god-damn-two! Tamlin says:

“[…] These masks”––he tapped on his––”are the result of a surge of it that occurred during a masquerade forty-nine years ago. Even now, we can’t remove them.”

He can’t say a single word about the curse, but he can tell Feyre about the masks, where everybody was when they got the masks stuck on their faces, and exactly how long ago it was.

Oh, but I guess since he didn’t say, “It’s because of a curse,” then it somehow doesn’t count? As being a “single word?”

I HAAAAAAAATE IT. I HAAAAAAAATE IT.

Here’s my theory about the dumbass mask part of the curse, okay? Tamlin did this:

“When she first cursed him, Tamlin sent one of his men across the wall every day. To the woods, to farms, all disguised as wolves to make it more likely for one of your kind to want to kill them. […]”

Now, if Tamlin were doing that because he was trying to save his own ass, that would be unacceptable, right? If the curse was just, “You better have a human fall in love with you or you have to fuck me, but if you break the curse, you get your power back,” then it would be unconscionable for Tamlin to sacrifice so many lives to fix his own problem, right? Alis says that he does this for two years, so assuming their years are 365 days, that’s roughly seven hundred fairies he sent to die.

But if he did that to save everyone from their mask fate…

The mask part of the curse is there only so Tamlin doesn’t look like a selfish monster as he tries to navigate Maas’s needlessly complicated curse.

You know, one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned about painting is that you have to know when enough is enough. You have to stop when you get to the point where you can trust the piece to be what you meant it to be. You can ruin a totally fine painting by trying to make it “more” for no reason.

Oh, hey, congrats to us, though, for reading a chapter where Feyre doesn’t mention painting. I guess I just took a little of the shine off that moment, huh?

But back to the point, that’s what Maas did with this curse plot. Amarantha could have just been like, “Oh, you’d rather fuck a human? Fine, go do that,” and make the curse happen. But Maas went, huh, you know what we need? Like, so many more conditions, to the point that the reader must pretend a bejeweled mask on a godly-hot man would be some kind of obstacle to love. And masks on everybody else so he doesn’t look selfish when he’s sending almost his entire court (“all but a dozen” according to Alis) out to die.

Maas reminds me of Stephen Moffat. That’s not a compliment. They’re both guilty of going for big twists and reveals and not caring how they get to them or if they make sense at all, just so long as there are a ton of needless elements packed into them. They’re both tragically stricken with the misconception that “complicated” automatically equals “good.”

Obviously, this is the end of the chapter, right?

HA HA HA HA HA, no, at this point there are SIX MORE PAGES OF ALIS EXPLAINING THINGS.

I’ve been summing up A LOT and I’m going to keep operating that way so we’re not still hashing out this chapter come December. The other High Lords have fought back against Amarantha and gotten murdered, the faeries tried to use the Children of the Blessed to take messages to other faerie kingdoms and got them all killed, and anyone who crosses Amarantha gets imprisoned Under the Mountain.

Then, we hear about Alis hiding her nephews and working for Tamlin for protection and whoops, she made that deal just a few days before the mask curse so fuck her life, I guess. 

Eventually, Tamlin got to the point where he was like, okay, the clock is running down, I’m out of ideas, let’s send dudes over the wall again, and bam, Feyre kills Andras.

But I had failed them. And in doing so, I’d damned them all.

I had damned each and every person on this estate, damned Prythian itself.

I didn’t realize you could have messiah complex and martyr complex at the same time.

“You could have broken it,” Alis snarled, those sharp teeth mere inches from my face. “All you had to do was say that you loved him––say that you loved him and mean it with your whole useless human heart, and his power would have been freed. You stupid, stupid girl.”

I agree with your assessment of Feyre, Alis, but why are we having to read almost identical dialogue as before?

Because I’m in hell. That’s the answer. It’s because I’m in hell.

I’m not sure why everyone is still blaming Feyre for not falling in love enough with her kidnapper. This is the weirdest fucking book and all the people in it are weird.

Feyre asks, hey, uh, what’s up with the king in Hybern while all this is happening? Because you said Amarantha did this all without him knowing and she stole his spells and junk?

Well, this is one thing Alis doesn’t know, so it gets waved away:

“If they’re on bad terms, he has made no move to punish her. For forty-nine years now, she’s held these lands in her grip. […]”

Yeah, guess he doesn’t care, please, have another repetition of information I’ve relayed probably five times already. This chapter isn’t long enough, it needs to be padded out. ed.—Maas gets way too much credit for her intricately woven plots that are so clearly, painstakingly mapped out from page one of the very first book but which somehow, for some reason, always read like she’s making shit up on the fly. The King in Hybern is clearly just tossed in there because she knows she’s writing a series and will need a villain later.

 “[…] But we know––we know she’s building her army, biding her time before launching an attack on your world, armed with the most lethal and vicious faeries in Prythian and Hybern.”

Wait. Feyre asked Alis how the king in Hybern feels about all this, and Alis doesn’t know, but she does know that Hybern’s forces are going to be used against the humans?

“In the human territory,” I said, “rumor claims more and more faeries have been sneaking over the wall to attack humans. And if no faeries can cross the wall without her permission, then that has to be mean she’s been sanctioning those attacks.”

I beg of you, dear patron, if you have a copy of this book, can you look through this chapter and find the part where it said Amarantha controls who does and doesn’t cross the wall? I’ve looked as much as I’m going to look. Because here’s the thing: if she does control who crosses the wall, why bother to allow Tamlin and his men to cross at all?

“Because of the curse” is not a good enough answer, Sarah.

Feyre has these long, overwrought thoughts about how much Tamlin loved her that he would throw away everything and make all the lives sacrificed meaningless, that he would be willing to damn Prythian for eternity, etc. just for lil’ ole her. She decides she’s got to go Under the Mountain to rescue him.

Of course, Alis is like, you’re gonna die, and Feyre is like, I don’t care, how do I get there, and they repeat the exchange in a few different variations because, again, this isn’t long enough, and we get some ableism!

Amarantha must also have taken Lucien––she had carved out Lucien’s eye and scarred him like that. Did his mother grieve for him?

You thought we were going to go a whole chapter without some disgusting ableist bullshit. Oh no, he’s SCARRED and his EYE is gone, his mom must be crying like he’s FUCKING DEAD because SCARRED is the WORST thing a person can be!

Also, super grateful for the reminder that Amarantha cut out Lucien’s eye. The big reveal was only two pages ago. I mean, probably most of us had figured out that she did that to him already, but it’s nice to be force-fed the same information over and over again like my brain is one of those geese with the fatty livers.

“You were too blind to see Tamlin’s curse,” Alis continued.

Yes, how could Feyre have not seen plainly that Tamlin was cursed to fall in love with a mortal, but not just any mortal, a mortal that killed a faery, and not just killed a faery in self-defense, a mortal who killed a faery for no reason, and that he wasn’t allowed to tell her any of that? It’s so simple and obvious! Anyone should have gotten that from context clues that weren’t provided at all!

Amarantha had taken everything I wanted, everything I finally dared desire.

Of course, she did. She’s the evil bitch who wants to fuck your boyfriend. Were you expecting some other kind of villain in this groundbreaking work of outrageous genius? ed.—Saruman. The White Witch. The Dark One. None of them were motivated by the desire to fuck the hero’s boyfriend.

Alis offers to take Feyre back to the wall so she can go home, because there’s no way of saving Tamlin now. I’m sure there is, and I’m sure Maas felt sooooo clever when she pulled the solution out of her ass while writing it. But Feyre tells Alis, no, she’s going Under the Mountain.

If Amarantha ripped out my throat, at least I would die doing something for him––at least I would die trying to fix the destruction I hadn’t prevented, trying to save the people I’d doomed. At least Tamlin would know it was for him, and that I loved him.

Now, Feyre could go back to the human realm and tell them what’s going on in Prythian. She could warn everybody, she could tell the Children of the Blessed, hey, this bad thing is happening, don’t go there. She could raise the alarm and people could prepare for the coming war without being blindsided by an attack out of nowhere.

But she’s gotta go die for love.

Alis is like, okay, and the chapter ends.

Please see the Jealous Patron’s Book Club Book Club post for more of my undiluted rage. Because I just…

This is so impossibly bad.

ed.—I am including the Jealous Patrons Book Club Book Club post here, because I’m still absolutely livid about this chapter. How this book has been included on “best of all time” fantasy novel lists is so fucking beyond me.

Not every single genre can be written with the same conventions. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but I truly, deeply believe that epic fantasy cannot be written from a single, first-person POV. This chapter is why. It always ends up with one character getting a history lesson from another character, in dialogue. It always ends up with long scenes of clunky exposition in dialogue.

Imagine you’re reading Game of Thrones. And the whole book is told from Ned Stark’s first-person POV. We never see anything else in the entire book, just Ned Stark going off to King’s Landing to serve his BFF the king, getting into some trouble there, finding out the queen and her brother are banging from pouring over birth records, then telling her what’s up and getting his head cut off. That’s all Ned Stark really does in that book. Somehow, Martin would have had to get first-person POV Ned Stark the information about the Others from the Wall somehow to reveal that plot point to the reader. I guess Ned could have read a letter from Castle Black about the fact that the dead are rising. We wouldn’t really need to see the part where it actually happens. The entire sequence at the Eyrie? Instead of reading that, we’d have just gotten a scene where someone tells Ned Stark about what happened. And Jeoffry’s cruelty? That would have been entirely off the page in that first book, until the execution scene when he would have gone from a random wimpy character who got bit by a dog to a total sadist in one scene with no explanation.

Wow. Gripping.

Now, imagine if A Court of Thorns and Roses had shown us more than Feyre’s limited perspective. What if we’d been privy to things happening to Tamlin and Lucien when they’re off in the woods? What if we’d been privy to their thoughts, and we could have seen Tamlin’s desperation to break his curse, the clock ticking down, him just hoping she’d say she loved him before time ran out, and then she doesn’t. Even at that last moment, as he’s letting her go, from his perspective… 

In a book with multiple POVs, the scenes can be depicted from the mind of the character who has the most to lose. Imagine the pathos of that sex scene in Tamlin’s head.

Imagine NOT READING A WHOLE CHAPTER WHERE ONE CHARACTER JUST MONOLOGUES ABOUT THE PLOT.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 31 or “Extreme Urkel Vibes”

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.

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.

This chapter opens at the ball in Feyre’s honor, which she isn’t enjoying because she keeps thinking about Tamlin.

I’d known something was wrong. I’d known he was in trouble––not just with the blight on Prythian, but also that the forces gathering to destroy him were deadly, and yet … and yet I’d stopped looking for answers, stopped fighting it, glad––so selfishly glad––to be able to set down that savage, wild part of me that had only survived hour to hour.

I’m not sure Feyre is living in the same book we’re all reading, because I don’t remember the part in Prythian where Feyre was “savage” or “wild” or surviving “hour to hour.” I remember her making a lot of bad choices and then just wearing pretty dresses and painting. There was never once, even with all the mentions of how the blight is going to get there soon, really soon, this is super scary, Maas promises it’s super scary, oooh, get ready for your pulse to pound, a time when Feyre’s mortality hung suspended on the whims of the moment.

And let’s discuss that sentence up above. Yes. It’s a single sentence. Go check. Writing Tip: stating something, then making an em dash, then stating the same thing again but in italics, and putting in a ellipses of suspense isn’t a substitute for paying attention to the shit you already wrote. ed.—And yet, it is now the prevailing style in the Romantasy genre.

I’d let him send me home. I hadn’t tried harder to piece together the information I’d gathered about the blight or Amarantha; I hadn’t tried to save him.

What information?! The entire time she was in Prythian we kept getting these excuses about how, well, the plot is happening over here but Feyre can’t get any answers about it, ho hum, let’s go to the magical lake of liquid mercury or whatever. Oh, now it’s time for a party. And another party. But damn, nothing about the plot because Feyre just can’t get any information on it.

And Lucien … Lucien had known it, too––and shown it in his bitter words on my last day, his disappointment in me.

Which I also do not understand. Lucien hasn’t been present for most of the book. He’s mentioned a lot, but usually in excuses as to why he’s not in a scene. There’s never really been an interaction between Feyre and Lucien that made me think he somehow believed in her or had faith that she would save them.

There’s a paragraph about how late the party goes and what time Feyre and Nesta and Elain leave and that’s a wrap on the ball. Seriously, the ball happens for no reason. There’s no dialogue there, no plot events happen, it’s just Feyre saying, this was what the ball was like, anyway, the next day…

What was the point of talking about the ball for like a whole chapter prior to this?

But whatever. It’s the next day and Feyre and her family are at lunch when her father says:

“I’m thinking of buying the Beddor land,” my father was saying to Elain, who was the only one of us listening to him. “I heard a rumor it’ll go up for sale soon, since none of the family survived, and it would be a good investment property. Perhaps one of you girls might build a house on it when you’re ready.”

I FUCKING KNEW IT! I FUCKING KNEW FEYRE WAS GOING TO GET THAT FAMILY FULL-TIME DEADED!

But what a fucking gruesome thing to say to your daughters. Yeah, you know your friend whose family burned to death? One day, you could build your home on the ashes of the place where they perished horribly.

Thanks, dad.

Feyre is like, oh no, what happened to them and like, put two-and-two together, please. You know someone’s house burned down, your dad is like hey, I’m gonna buy this specific family’s land because everyone is dead, and you can’t figure it out?

“Their house burned down, and everybody died. Well, they couldn’t find Clare’s body, but …” She looked down at her plate. “It happened in the dead of night––the family, their servants, everyone. The day before you came home to us, actually.”

“Clare Beddor,” I said slowly.

Yeah, boo, you did that.

“Our friend, remember?” Elain said.

Thanks for the reminder, Elain.

No––no, it couldn’t be possible. It had to be a coincidence––had to be a coincidence, because the alternative…

I feel like having a conversation with Sarah J. Maas would be like:

SJM: So, then I had to go stop by the bank––the bank, where money is kept––because…

You: Because… what?

SJM: Because, if I didn’t…

You: If you didn’t, what would happen?

SJM: I wouldn’t have any cash––wouldn’t have anything to pay for all these Girl Scout cookies with… Girl Scout cookies I want to buy…

You: So. Are we like, done here? Or is there more? You keep trailing off and staring into the distance.

I’ve never had a conversation with her, though, so this is all speculation. ed.—It is my deepest hope for my life that I never have to speak to her, either. Because I would not have nice things to say.

I had given that name to Rhysand.

You sure did.

And he had not forgotten it.

Well, considering he showed up and you left the next day, it sounds like he didn’t have much time to forget. It kinda sounds like he went directly from Tamlin’s house to Clare Beddor’s house and killed her whole family.

Except for Clare, who wasn’t found.

So, did they assume Clare, in the human world, was Feyre, whom Rhysand had just seen in Prythian? Remember, it takes two days to get from Prythian to where Feyre lives. Let’s say, for the sake of keeping shit straight, Rhysand was at Tamlin’s house on a Monday. Feyre then leaves on Tuesday morning and arrives at home on Thursday. That would mean the Beddors died on Wednesday…so Rhysand would have, what, departed Tamlin’s manor immediately after finding Feyre and run off to the human world to…find Feyre? This doesn’t make any sense at all. 

Oh, Jenny. Stop trying to make sense of this steaming pile. You are sorting through sewage looking for diamonds. There won’t be diamonds. There won’t even be cubic zirconia. There’s just gonna be more turds.

I pushed back against the guilt, the disgust and terror.

Must be nice to just “push back” those bad feelings after getting an innocent family killed. Which, by the way, I’m not giving her any leeway like, “but she panicked and just said a name!” or anything like that. She had time to think around for a name and she deliberately chose that one. She could have said “Val Gina” or “Dick Johnson,” literally anything but a real person’s name. To me, her inability to grasp the possible consequences of the situation is proof that Feyre is just not as clever and resourceful as the author wants us to think Feyre is.

I had to get answers––had to know if it had been a coincidence, or if I might yet be able to save Clare.

IF IT HAD BEEN A COINCIDENCE?!

Feyre comes to the conclusion that something terrible must have happened with the blight in Prythian because:

Faeries. They had come over the wall and left no trace behind.

They burned down a house and the entire town is talking about it. What the fuck do you mean, they left no trace? And this isn’t the first time. Andras was across the wall when Feyre shot him. Tamlin crossed the wall to find Feyre and drag her back to Prythian. And if we’re talking about leaving no trace, he did it and made everyone in the village forget where she went or that her family was ever poor.

Feyre tells Nesta that everything they’ve talked about with regards to Prythian has to stay secret, and of course Elain and their dad are like, come again? Because they’re still under the glamour.

I’d never learned what warning signs Tamlin had instilled in their glamours to prod my family to run, but I wasn’t going to risk relying solely on them. Not when Clare had been taken, her family murdered…because of me.

Did we even know that these flight triggers were installed in the glamour in the first place?

Feyre instructs Nesta to force the family to run away the second they hear of anything happening at the wall. Like, even if they just get a weird feeling, they’re supposed to get on a ship and go wherever it is that fairies wouldn’t want to go.

My father and Elain began blinking, as if clearing some fog from their minds––as if emerging from a deep sleep.

In other news, I used an em dash in my own writing yesterday and physically gagged. ed.—I wrote a particularly ellipses-heavy scene the other day and wanted to die, but there was no other way.

Nesta wants to know if there’s going to be an invasion, and Feyre tells her all about the blight, which I guess she omitted when she told her everything in the previous chapter? I was under the impression that Nesta had heard “everything,” since those were the words that the author used. I’m starting to get the sense that with hugely popular books like this, thinking too hard about the actual words on the page will ruin the experience.

Feyre goes to her room and changes into practical tactical man clothes, and Nesta tells her:

“Father once told you to never come back,” Nesta said, “and I’m telling you now. We can take care of ourselves.”

Shockingly, Feyre doesn’t find this insulting and we don’t have to hear about how awful Nesta is. Feyre gets her weapons and tells her sister:

“They can lie,” I said, giving her information I hoped she would never need. “Faeries can lie, and iron doesn’t bother them one bit. But ash wood––that seems to work. Take my money and buy a damned grove of it for Elain to tend.”

Remember at the beginning of the book, when Feyre said the faeries burned all the ash trees and she’s never seen one? Pepperidge Farm might remember, but Sarah J. Maas does not.

Nesta asks Feyre what she thinks she can do if the faeries can’t even fight off the blight themselves, and Feyre is like, good question, idk, but I’m still gonna go. She encourages Nesta to go out and find a better life. Then there’s a section break for no reason whatsoever and Feyre is walking out of the house. Elain tells her that the glamour is gone and she can now remember what really happened, and their father doesn’t come out to say goodbye to Feyre because he’s probably too busy being greedy and crippled.

That’s not in the book, I’m just being mean.

Then, Feyre leaves.

I had to go back––had to see what had happened, had to tell Tamlin everything that was in my heart before it was too late.

Oh, see, I thought she was riding off to help. She’s just riding off to save her relationship or whatever.

Let’s talk about horses in fantasy novels. Feyre says she “rode all day and stopped only when it was too dark for me to see.” Then:

I rode all of the second day, slept fitfully, and was off before first light.

While I am still skeptical that the author did not have a pony as a child, this is a common thing that happens with fantasy novels. People act like horses are just cars and they can keep going and going as much as you need them to. But they’re like…animals? And they have to rest? And eat? And drink water? After about eight hours with a rider on its back, on really uneven forest ground, a horse is going to be exhausted and at higher risk for injury.

I’m not saying I need to hear every little detail about Feyre watering her horse or feeding it or whatever. And I’m not saying Maas is the only person who ever did this in a fantasy novel. This is a problem across the board in most books with medieval-lite settings. Just because your main character needs to get somewhere and is willing to travel for twenty hours straight, that doesn’t mean their horse can or will do so.

And yes, horses will refuse to keep going if they’re tired. And people are not big enough or strong enough to argue with a stubborn horse. If you get a horse that will do this kind of nonstop, strenuous travel? It’s gonna work itself to death and you’ll have no horse.

In conclusion, Horses: they’re not cars

Feyre reaches the wall and it’s this invisible force, not an actual physical barrier that you can see.

But the faeries came and went through it––through holes, rumor claimed.

Not to be picky here but is it really a rumor if it’s something you have literally experienced? Or is it just what the fuck happens?

Feyre walks for two whole days testing the damn wall like she’s a velociraptor and finally, clever girl, she finds a gate formed by two stones with symbols carved into them. But what I’m thinking is, okay, once she gets into Prythian, how is she going to find the Spring Court? She doesn’t know where she––

Magic stung my nostrils, zapping until my horse bucked again, but we were through.

I knew these trees.

Oh. Well. That’s convenient. The gate leads right into the woods around Tamlin’s manor. What are the odds?

I rode in silence, an arrow nocked and ready, the threats lurking in the forest far greater than those in the woods I’d just left.

At some point, I’m going to have to stop pointing out the number of times we’ve heard that mortal weapons won’t do shit against faeries but that day…is not today.

Tamlin might be furious––he might command me to turn around and go home. But I would tell him that I was going to help, tell him that I loved him and would fight for him however I could, even if I had to tie him down and make him listen.

Tied up and forced to listen to Feyre talk? Worst. BDSM. Ever.

I became so intent on contemplating how I might convince him not to start roaring that I didn’t immediately notice the quiet––how the birds didn’t sing, even as I drew closer to the manor itself, how the hedges of the estate looked in need of a trim.

The forest is always quiet. Like, that was one of the things that was pointed out to make it scarier.

The manor is a mess, bro. The gates are all torn open and the doors are off the hinges.

I dismounted, arrow still at the ready. But there was no need. Empty––it was utterly empty here. Like a tomb.

Tombs aren’t empty. They have dead people and cool skeletons in them.

It looked as if an army had marched through. Tapestries hung in shreds, the marble banister was fractured, and the chandeliers lay broken on the ground, reduced to mounds of shattered crystal.

So, did the blight hit, or what? Feyre doesn’t even have that thought, like, oh no, is it the blight? Which was my first thought, as a reader. I skimmed the next chapter and it doesn’t look like she ever even questions whether or not it could have been the blight (but like I said, I skimmed).

Feyre calls out for Tamlin and Lucien but nobody comes.

Alone in the wreckage of the manor, I sank to my knees.

He was gone.

Hopefully for good, but whatever.

If this seems like another really short chapter, don’t worry; the next one is like twenty pages of pure info dump. No joke. It’s literally twenty pages of Alis of just telling Feyre (and the reader) every single detail that could have been slowly doled out over the rest of the god damn book when nothing was happening otherwise. You are going to be infuriated, probably. I know I am, just thinking about having to slog through it. ed.—Honestly, it’s so painful that just thinking about reposting that chapter is making tired. I’m reliving the mental hell that was navigating that chapter, so…buckle the fuck up.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 29 or “Feyre Delveigh”

I accidentally skipped this chapter when porting episodes over. Happy Monday! Here’s a bonus! Although considering the book, is more of it really a good thing?

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.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.

This is another short recap. I considered tacking it onto the next chapter, but that recap is, I think, going to be a lot longer than this one and I wouldn’t get a combo of the two done in one week, so we’re going to just do chapter twenty-nine like a shot and chase it with chapter thirty.

Wow. Chapter thirty. My soul died a little when I typed that. If you were curious, there are forty-six chapters.

Now that she’s at home with her family, Feyre has to come up with stories about her time with Aunt Ripleigh (whose name is a tragedeigh) that explain how the fuck Feyre inherited:

[…] trunks that accompanied me hadn’t contained just clothing–several of them had been filled with gold and jewels. Not cut jewels, either, but enormous, raw jewels that would pay for a thousand estates.

So, they have memories of this aunt who has this kind of massive wealth…but do they have memories about why she didn’t help them out when they were in debt before? Like, maybe before her nephew got the brakes beat off him in front of his kids? Or when they were nearly starving to death? What’s the explanation for this, and the fact that they had to mourn her? That would be a pretty complicated relationship, don’t you think?

But this chapter is about the power of money and how it makes everyone and everything better, except for Nesta, who is still a bitch, so we have to really focus on that cash:

My father was currently taking inventory of those jewels; he’d holed himself up in the office that overlooked the garden in which I was sitting beside Elain in the grass. 

What the ass is that sentence? There is way too much going on there. Why does Maas hate periods? Do they charge her extra for them or something? Is it some kind of a la carte punctuation menu where periods are ten dollars, commas are five dollars, and em-dashes are free?

Through the window, I spied my father hunched over his desk, a little scale before him as he weighed an uncut ruby the size of a duck’s egg. He was clear-eyed again, and moved with a sense of purpose, of vibrancy, that I hadn’t seen since before the downfall. Even his limp was improved—made miraculously better by some tonic and a salve a strange, passing healer had given him for free. 

You live in a world where there are fairies, sir. And some mysterious traveller just shows up like, drink this magic potion, and you did it because WHY.

I would have been forever grateful to Tamlin for that kindness alone.

It would be hilarious if literally none of this had anything to do with Tamlin at all. Like, if all these good things just randomly started happening to them and Tamlin had been sending them like, grocery money. Obviously, that’s not the case, but it would still be hilarious.

Elain still loves to garden, but now she has a much bigger garden and a wider variety of flowers to grow:

“These bulbs,” Elain said, pointing with a gloved hand to a cluster of purple-and-white flowers, “came all the way from the tulip fields of the continent. Father promised that next spring he’ll take me to see them. He claims that for mile after mile, there’s nothing but these flowers.”

Because…Holland exists, I guess? Are we in alternate universe England/Wales/Scotland, then? Because “the continent,” “chateau,” and fields of tulips kind of suggests that western Europe exists and we’re cut off from it by water. This is like getting to The Return of the King and suddenly there are “oliphaunts” and you’re like, oh, fuck me, they’re just on regular Earth, there’s no fucking middle about it, fml.

But Feyre can’t mentally let Elain have this awesome moment of having a cool little garden. Even though she doesn’t say anything about it, Feyre thinks:

She would have marveled—likely wept—at the gardens I’d become so accustomed to, at the flowers in perpetual bloom at the Spring Court.

Like, Feyre has to one-up Elain to the reader. She can’t just let it be, wow, my sister is really good at this thing. It has to be, wow, my sister is good at this thing but I’ve seen better. I’ve started reading this entire book with Julia Garner’s Anna Delvey accent because it just makes more sense that way, what with all the complaining about how nothing is as good as it could be.

She does the same thing about the food back home in the human world:

So much of it was the same—the meat, the bread, the vegetables, and yet … it was ash in my mouth compared to what I’d consumed in Prythian.

Nothing is as good as what your oppressors can give you, kids! Even when money is no object, the luxuries you can obtain are no where near the tremendous splendor of that which only the oppressive class can attain!

Feyre points out to Elain that tulip season happens at the busiest time of the social season, and Elain is like, yeah, I’d be okay missing it because this year was weird.

She shrugged her slim shoulders. “People acted as if we’d all just been ill for eight years, or had gone away to some distant country—not that we’d been a few villages over in that cottage. You’d think we dreamed it all up, what happened to us over those years. No one said a word about it.”

Feyre’s kind of like, why would they, considering they’re able to overlook the fact that we were poor now that we have money. But I think the bigger point that’s being missed here is…why would Elain or Nesta or their father want to associate with peers who abandoned them before and now won’t acknowledge that snobby behavior?

That doesn’t really get mentioned.

Elain says that being around those people made me her wish they were poor again, because now she’s lonely all the time. Their dad is obsessed with business again and Nesta is being weird.

She’d barely spoken to me the night before, and not at all during breakfast. I’d been surprised when she joined us outside, even if she’d stayed by the tree this whole time. “Nesta didn’t finish the season. She wouldn’t tell me why. She began refusing every invitation. She hardly talks to anyone, and I feel wretched when my friends pay a visit, because she makes them so uncomfortable when she stares at them in that way of hers …” Elain sighed. “Maybe you could talk to her.”

My assumption would be that she wouldn’t want to be around those people who abandoned her. I mentioned last week that I have been spoilered for something involving Nesta that we learn in the next chapter, but without mentioning that twist here? It still makes sense to me that Nesta would become hardened and bitter having gone through this traumatic poverty, then thrust back into a society that refuses to acknowledge how easily they cast her aside in the first place. ed.—Due to me accidentally skipping this chapter, some of you have already been spoilered for it.

Feyre thinks about telling Elain, duh, Nesta and I don’t like each other, but then Elain drops the bombshell that Nesta actually tried to go visit Feyre at Aunt Ripleigh’s house.

“Well, she was gone for only about a week, and she said that her carriage broke down not halfway there, and it was easier to come back. But you wouldn’t know, since you never got any of our letters.” 

I looked over at Nesta, standing so still under the branches, the summer breeze rustling the skirts of her dress. Had she gone to see me, only to be turned back by whatever glamour magic Tamlin had cast on her?

There’s an interesting twist, huh? Tamlin can control where the family goes?

IDK about any of yous all, but I kind of feel like the “oh no, we’re running out of magic!” element of the blight really isn’t ringing true. In the past two chapters we’ve learned that the fairies can glamour themselves to not look like they’re wearing masks, they can make lost ships suddenly somehow reappear, they can make an entire town forget that nearly a decade of a family’s life have happened, and now we’re learning that Tamlin can even stop them from traveling, in certain situations.

Hey, remember when making a table smaller taxed Tamlin so much his hands trembled?

But there I go again, expecting consistency.

Silly Jenny.

Feyre doesn’t question that. You know, Feyre doesn’t question a lot of super obviously contradictory stuff. But if she did, I assume she’d answer herself with some flavor of, “because he loves me so much,” and things would just move on.

Like how they move on here, with Elain telling Feyre how different she looks and sounds now.

Indeed, I hadn’t quite believed my eyes when I’d passed a hall mirror last night. My face was still the same, but there was a … glow about me, a kind of shimmering light that was nearly undetectable. I knew without a doubt that it was because of my time in Prythian, that all that magic had somehow rubbed off on me. I dreaded the day it would forever fade.

Just by being with the ruling class, she’s become more beautiful. All she had to do was embrace those who grind her people beneath their heels!

Feyre tells Elain the change is the result of being fed and well-rested, and we go to a section break because you know you were curious:

Days passed. The shadow within me didn’t lighten, and even the thought of painting was abhorrent.

She can’t even paint! Can you imagine a time when Feyre can’t even paint?!

I mean, she spends more time talking about how she can’t paint or doesn’t want to paint in this book than she does actually painting. From an artist’s perspective this is pretty accurate, but it would have made even more sense if Maas had made Feyre a writer. ed.—For those of you who’ve read the follow up books: does Feyre continue to think about painting after this? Or does that just get dropped once all the fated mates shit drops in?

Feyre’s been spending a lot of her time with Elain, who sounds like the character I would much rather read about:

She had come alive here, and her joy was infectious. There wasn’t a servant or gardener who didn’t smile at her, and even the brusque head cook found excuses to bring her plates of cookies and tarts at various points in the day. I marveled at it, actually—that those years of poverty hadn’t stripped away that light from Elain. Perhaps buried it a bit, but she was generous, loving, and kind—a woman I found myself proud to know, to call sister.

Wow, who knew that poverty isn’t what makes someone a whining asshole! What super power does Elain have to avoid this fate?!

Seriously, how insulting is that? The idea that if people are impoverished, they automatically become dull, mean, and stingy? Excuse the fuck out of me, Maas, but poor people are far more “generous, loving, and kind” than the super wealthy.

This really, really makes me dislike Sarah J. Maas as a human being, on a deeply personal level. She very, very clearly hates poor people. ed.—I have since learned that Maas grew up wealthy and privileged. This truly is what she thinks of poor people.

This becomes even clearer considering the fact that the very next paragraph begins:

My father finished counting my jewels and gold; I was an extraordinarily wealthy woman.

Isn’t it wonderful that poverty didn’t make my sister awful like all the other poor people? But don’t worry, I am extraordinarily wealthy.

And also, generous. More generous, even, than her generous sister, because Feyre immediately sets out with bags of cash. As she walks to their old cottage, she thinks about how much she wishes she was back in Prythian, with Tamlin, and how they boned down and how maybe he’s in danger. Then, she arrives:

So small—the cottage had been so small.

Maybe I’m just at the point with this book where I hate it all and it all seems terrible (spoiler alert: I am at that point), but it seems like we read a lot of sentences like this, where something is stated, then there’s an em-dash and it’s stated again with more of a flourish. I mean, earlier on this same page was:

I could almost hear the words—almost hear him saying them, could almost see the sunlight glinting in his golden hair and the dazzling green of his eyes.

Twice on one page with that concept–concept but with more words pattern. After a brief description of the now-abandoned cottage, she does it again, twice in a row:

The forest—my forest. 

It had seemed so terrifying once—so lethal and hungry and brutal. And now it just seemed … plain. Ordinary.

What about this style is so compelling that one would want to use it this much? Especially when it sounds so much smoother with commas instead of hard stops like that. And the ellipses. Every time I get worried that I’m using too many em-dashes and ellipses, I think of Maas and E.L. James and I’m like, you know? I’m probably fine.

I mean, Maas does it AGAIN in the next paragraph, as Feyre tries to figure out why Elain has nostalgia for their old life :

If she beheld not a prison but a shelter—a shelter from a world that had possessed so little good, but she tried to find it anyway, even if it had seemed foolish and useless to me.

What is the point?! Why not just, “If she beheld not a prison but a shelter from a world that had possessed so little good,” and leave it there? Was the author desperately trying to “win” NaNoWriMo? Because this sounds like the “writing advice” people will give you so that you can “win” that has now become hellishly enmeshed with actual rules of grammar.

You know earlier when I was like, fuck you, Maas, with your bullshit about how it’s surprising that someone didn’t become a cruel monster because they didn’t have money? I take it back because you also wrote:

She had looked at that cottage with hope; I had looked at it with nothing but hatred. And I knew which one of us had been stronger.

See? It’s NOBLE to not let poverty make you a monster. But you have to be STRONG or else you’ll become bitter and horrible. Oh, if only Feyre were so simple and pure and able to simply embrace poverty.

Ever read a book and just know, deep in your bones, that you and the author have had wildly disparate experiences?

Anyway, that’s how this chapter ends. Tune in next time for more “oh look…poverty,” from our heroine.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 30 or, “Look, darling…paaaaaaaaahhhhhverty”

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.

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.

As Stormy K and a couple others pointed out on the chapter twenty-nine recap, “Look, darling….paaaaaaahverty,” is a thing that one of my friends said on a trip to, I wanna say it was Costa Rica? They were on a tour bus with a bunch of people who, let’s just say they’re not used to anything beyond gated community living, okay? And this friend and her companion were making fun of how those people were reacting to a village they were driving through. In her best impression of Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island, she goes, “Look, darling…paaaaaahverty,” but that just happened to be the moment the entire motor coach went totally quiet, and nobody but her and her companion knew it was a joke at the expense of the other people on the tour and not like, an actual observation made in the most ridiculously offensive way possible.

And it’s the PERFECT story to open this chapter’s recap.

I had one task left to do before I returned to my father’s manor. The villagers who had once sneered at or ignored me instead gaped now, and a few stepped into my path to ask about my aunt, my fortune, on and on.

So, it’s not just Feyre’s family that’s been glamoured about her being missing. It’s the entire village. But remember, making a table short is so taxing upon Tamlin’s dwindling magic that it exhausts him. But why has Feyre gone to the village?

The impoverished of our village didn’t ask questions when I handed them the little bags of silver and gold. They tried to refuse, some of them not even recognizing me, but I left the money anyway. It was the least I could do.

I grudgingly admit that Feyre’s got a good heart when it comes to this. Remember, the community is so poor, it’s every man for himself. She even worried that someone would kill her for the animals she’d killed, at one point. Rather than thinking, pff, why should I help people who never helped me, she puts that aside and tries to make things better for these poor villagers.

But that gets pretty much obliterated for me in the next paragraph.

As I walked back to my father’s manor, I passed Tomas Mandray and his cronies lurking by the village fountain, chatting about some house that had burned down with its family trapped inside a week before and whether there was anything to loot from it.

Watch, that family will end up being the family whose name Feyre gave to Rhysand. But for now, let’s focus on the notion that this village is so desperately impoverished, it’s every man for himself, someone once seemed ready to murder her because she was carrying a dead rabbit, but looting? The line has been drawn there.

Like, wtf is the dead family gonna do with their burned up shit, Feyre? You’ve got too much money to mind other people’s business.

He gave me a too-long look, his eyes roving freely over my body, with a half smile I’d seen him give to the village girls a hundred times before. Why had Nesta changed her mind?

Yeah, why? When you make it clear that he’s so appealing.

Feyre then runs into her barnyard booty-call, Isaac Hale and

[…]a pretty, plump young woman who could only be his new wife.

Reader, it is important for you to know that Isaac did not get an upgrade from Feyre because while his wife is pretty, she is also fat. And he’s, ugh, gross, a human.

Human––he seemed so human, with his gangly limbs, his simple handsomeness, but that smile he’d had moments before had transformed him into something more.

More of that super weird, “gross, he’s not like our oppressors” stuff happening there.

The smile Isaac had was about being in love with his wife, but when he saw Feyre, he stopped smiling. And Feyre can tell, just by looking at her, that his wife is super threatened.

His wife looked between us, perhaps a bit nervously. As if whatever she felt for him––the love I’d already seen shining––was so new, so unexpected, that she was still worried it would vanish.

They have not spoken a single word to each other. Like, none of them have. Isaac’s wife just sees a woman and has a relationship crisis, Feyre can tell.

He’d been a boy when I left, and yet this person who now approached me … whatever had blossomed with his wife, whatever it was between them, it had made him into a man.

That’s great but I don’t care. Nobody cares. Not a single person who read this book thought, “I wonder what Isaac Hale is up to.” He’s only been mentioned because we need to see that while he’s hot now, his wife is “plump” and insecure, and Feyre doesn’t want him anymore.

Nothing––there was nothing in my chest, my soul, for him beyond a vague sense of gratitude.

A few more steps had us passing each other. I smiled broadly at him, at them both, and bowed my head, wishing them well with my entire heart.

So, this is nice and all. But what is the point? We already know she didn’t love Isaac and that she’s fallen in love with Tamlin. Why do we need this, when we’ve been in her head the whole time?

This is what happens when people write their book while envisioning the inevitable movie version. This is a scene straight from a Masterpiece Theater adaptation of a Regency-era story. It’s probably four seconds of the characters looking at each other, and the audience being able to tell that the heroine is unbothered by this one-time love interest moving on to someone new.

The only reason this scene exists is to show us that Feyre’s replacement is fat and jealous of Feyre. Isaac had already been written off by the scene where Feyre shows Tamlin the paintings.

There’s a section break and we hear about how busy the house is because Feyre’s father is throwing this huge ball that’s super expensive and huh, I wonder how he ended up so badly in debt in the first place. And that’s kind of Feyre’s attitude, as well. She sees the ball as a total waste.

I would have begged him not to host it, but Elain had taken charge of planning and finding me a last-minute dress, and … it would only be for an evening.

How selfless of you, to let your family throw an enormous party in your honor. And how not hypocritical of you, to criticize your father’s spending and then turn around and buy a new dress when we’ve already heard about the chests and chests of clothing you brought back from Prythian. You’re not like other girls, Feyre.

An evening of enduring the people who had shunned us and let us starve for years.

Right, like…wtf is going on with that? Did Tamlin use the magic he doesn’t have much of to glamour the rich people, too? On the other hand, I assume rich people actually could be dicks like that and feign selective amnesia, even in a fantasy book. ed.—I was way too gracious here, assuming this was not a massive plot hole. This book didn’t deserve my grace.

Feyre notes that she does menial tasks in the garden because all she can do is sit around worrying, otherwise.

I hadn’t felt like painting since I’d arrived––and that place inside me where all those colors and shapes and lights had come from had become still and quiet and dull. Soon, I told myself. Soon I would purchase some paints and start again.

Tamlin sent you home with chests of gold and jewels and frilly finery, but not those paints.

JFC this book is painfully, painfully bad. ed.—This keeps me awake at night. How did she not take the paint? Painting is supposedly the most important thing in her life, the one joy she has, her entire reason for being, but SHE DIDN’T PACK THE FUCKING PAINTS?!

When Nesta sees Feyre’s hands, she makes a remark about how Feyre will never fit in unless she wears gloves, and Feyre is like, I don’t want to fit in with these people. Nesta asks why the heck Feyre is bothering to stay with them, then, and Feyre says it’s because it’s her home. And then while they’re arguing, Nesta throws this absolute bombshell twist at her sister:

“There is no Aunt Ripleigh.” Nesta reached into her pocket and tossed something onto the churned up earth.

It was a chunk of wood, as if it had been ripped from something. Painted on its smooth surface was a pretty tangle of vines and––foxglove. Foxglove painted in the wrong shade of blue.

That’s right. Nesta has, gasp, a reason for being a cold bitch.

“Your beast’s little trick didn’t work on me,” she said with quiet steel. “Apparently, an iron will is all it takes to keep a glamour from digging in. So I had to watch as Father and Elain went from sobbing hysterics to nothing. I had to listen to them talk about how lucky it was for you to be taken to some made-up aunt’s house, how some winter wind had shattered our door. And I thought I’d gone mad––but every time I did, I would look at that painted part of the table, then at the claw marks farther down, and know it wasn’t in my head.”

This is honestly a great twist. I can’t wait for Feyre to explain how it’s somehow worse for her, personally, and that Nesta has no right to be upset or whatever will inevitably happen. ed.—I’m actually shocked that there wasn’t a page and a half long explanation about how actually, Feyre’s will is much stronger than Nesta’s, but the magic was just like, afraid of how strong Feyre’s will is and it worked extra super hard on her because she matters more.

Nesta snorted, her face grave and full of that long-simmering anger that she could never master. “He stole you away into the night, claiming some nonsense about the Treaty. And then everything went on as if it had never happened. It wasn’t right. None of it was right.”

My hands slackened at my sides. “You went after me,” I said. “You went after me––to Prythian.”

“I got to the wall. I couldn’t find a way through.”

So far, Nesta is the only character in this book that I care about or can tolerate. She doesn’t get along with her sister, but she knows for a fact that it’s not cool to just kidnap people.

Oh god, is that how low the bar is set for this one?

So, Nesta went out and found that mercenary from the earlier chapter as a guide to the wall, because that’s the only person who believed the story about Feyre being kidnapped.

Nesta’s eyes––my eyes, our mother’s eyes––met mine. “It wasn’t right,” she said again. Tamlin had been wrong when we’d discussed whether my father would have ever come after me–he didn’t possess the courage, the anger.

He was also physically disabled and under a spell that made him think you were totally safe but yeah, fuck that guy, amirite?

My hateful, cold sister had been willing to brave Prythian to rescue me.

I still haven’t figured out why Nesta is hateful. I really haven’t. The only examples we’ve been given are that she doesn’t particularly enjoy hard work, but she does it, and she wasn’t thrilled that Feyre painted all over their last remaining bit of stuff. I guess just not celebrating Feyre every second of every day is aggressive hatred.

“What happened to Tomas Mandray?” I asked, the words strangled.

What does that have to do with the current conversation like…at all?

“I realized he wouldn’t have gone with me to save you from Prythian.”

And for her, with that raging, unrelenting heart, it would have been a line in the sand.

This makes Feyre realize that hey, Nesta really doesn’t revel in this new life and she has zero patience for anyone who would hurt her family but maybe, just maybe, she had other emotional shit going on.

Who had shrouded the loss of our mother, then our downfall, in icy rage and bitterness, because the anger had been a lifeline, the cruelty a release.

Oh wow, now imagine if you’d even considered the possibility that other people have feelings and deal with them differently than you, even once in that decade of poverty. Once in, what, eight years? Just one time, you needed to think to yourself, wow, maybe Nesta is cold and closed off because she’s just been through THE SAME GOD DAMN CIRCUMSTANCES THAT I DID.

Nesta asks Feyre to tell her the story of what happened in Prythian. We are spared a full recap, Cauldron bless, but just before the section break, Feyre notes that Nesta asks for painting lessons.

Supplies were easy enough to come by, but explaining how I painted, convincing Nesta to express what was in her mind, her heart …

Supplies were easy to come by? You just said, in this chapter, that you were going to have to buy some new paints.

Meanwhile, Elain has been decorating for the ball, with so many garlands of flowers she might as well be Isabela Madrigal.

Nesta and I slipped up the stairs, but as we reached the landing, my father and Elain appeared below, arm in arm.

Nesta’s face tightened. My father murmured his praises to Elain, who beamed at him and rested her head on his shoulder. And I was happy for them––for the comfort and ease of their lifestyle, for the contentment on both my father’s and my sister’s faces. Yes, they had their small sorrows, but both of them seemed so … relaxed.

Suffer more, father who was beaten nearly to death and sister who powered through tragic circumstances with toxic positivity. You’re not as sad and broken as Nesta and Feyre and it’s obnoxious.

“There are days,” Nesta said as she paused in front of the door to her room, across from mine, “when I want to ask him if he remembers the years he almost let us starve to death.”

The ableism in this book is such that I hope I never meet the author in person. Because I will not be able to stop myself from screaming in her face until blood comes out of my mouth and every vessel in both my eyes are exploded. How fucking dare this person. How fucking dare she. What a fucking waste of life she is. ed.—I believe this may have been before I knew that she’d used Breonna Taylor’s death as an Instagram publicity stunt with absolutely zero consequences. Sarah J. Maas is just one of the most selfish people I’ve ever heard of. A real life, grown-up Veruca Salt.

Feyre points out that Nesta spent a lot of their money, too, and Nesta is like, meh, I knew you could get us more, which. Nesta. Come on. Do your part and stop buying shit, but turns out that she held a grudge against their father for much longer than Feyre has. Nesta believes that her dad should have scoured the world for a cure to their mother’s illness, and because he didn’t, their mother died. She even thinks he should have gone to Prythian to beg for help.

So.

Are the fairies like.

The Godfather?

Because seriously, we’ve heard all along that the humans the fairies don’t hang together and that humans don’t want to interact with fairies at all, unless they’re totally out-there cult members who are never heard from again once they get to Prythian. But here, Nesta is like, dad could have just gone off and asked the fairies for help, if he really wanted to. Is this because it’s a possibility or just this expectation that Nesta has that her dad could have found a way to save their mom if he’d just braved breaking this treaty that’s a huge fucking deal?

But there I go again, expecting consistency or even like, mediocrity from this book.

Nesta shoots down Feyre’s argument that their dad loved their mom by saying that Feyre would go to the ends of the earth to save Tamlin, and Feyre is like, yeah, I would and goes off to get ready for the ball.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR, Chapter 28 or, “Feyre-Man: No Way Home”

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.

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.

I feel like the chapters in this book are getting shorter as we move closer to the end. Wait, sorry. I meant hope. I hope the chapters are getting shorter as we move closer to the end.

It’s time for Feyre to go home. Alis puts her in a frilly dress. Let’s play a game. Movie costumes get recycled all the time. Which movie costume would get used for this description?

The dress was made up of layers of pale pink silk, accented with white and blue lace. Alis placed a short, lightweight jacket of white linen on me, and atop my head she angled an absurd little ivory hat, clearly for decoration. I half expected a parasol to go with it.

Anyway, leave ideas in the comments, if you want, or over on the Jealous Patrons Book Club Book Club post. I’m curious how all our imaginations line up.

Feyre and Alis agree that goodbyes suck, so they don’t do them. But Lucien is waiting downstairs.

Lucien’s smile was edged, his shoulders tight as he gave a sharp look behind me to where Tam was waiting in front of a gilded carriage. When he turned back, that metal eye narrowed. “I thought you were smarter than this.”

Uh…

Wait, are you blaming Feyre for leaving? She’s being kinda kicked out.

Lucien shook his head, his scar stark in the bright sun, and stalked toward Tamlin, despite the High Lord’s warning growl. “You’re not going to give her a few more days? Just a few—before you send her back to that human cesspit?” Lucien demanded.

Dude, that’s where she’s from. Not cool.

This whole unintentional metaphor for race and slavery and oppression happening throughout this book continues to get more and more uncomfortable. Lucien is standing there calling the human world a cesspit and Feyre, who grew up in a world brutally oppressed by this man’s society, is like wow, I wish I didn’t have to leave. The slavery apologia in past chapters looks worse and worse the more Feyre adopts Lucien and Tamlin’s attitudes toward her own home country. It’s icky.

Lucien is pissed off, so he leaves without saying goodbye or even, idk, expanding on what he means by blaming Feyre for Tamlin sending her away.

“Remember what I told you,” he said. I nodded, too busy memorizing the lines of his face to reply. Had he meant what I thought he’d said last night—that he loved me? I shifted, already aching in the little white pumps into which Alis had stuffed my poor feet. “The mortal realm remains safe—for you, for your family.”

Not for that one girl’s family, though.

This should be more than one paragraph. There is so much going on here. Also, remember how in the last chapter Maas could describe panties but not call them that? And now Feyre is wearing pumps. And yes, the word goes back a long, long time, but I’m guessing the average reader isn’t imagining a tight, flat-soled shoe when they read “pump”.

Feyre wonders why Tamlin didn’t order her to take her family and sail away to the south and decides it’s because he knew she would never go that far away from him. Tamlin doesn’t say or do anything that would give the reader that impression but darn it, Feyre just knows that he knows that she’s going to stubbornly do what she wants.

It’s not an unfair assumption.

Feyre tells Tamlin he can keep all of her paintings and he’s like:

He lifted my chin with a finger. “I will see you again.”

I’m the kind of insecure person who would be like, wait, are you saying you don’t want my paintings? Is that what you’re saying?

Tamlin kisses her and opens the door to the carriage and he’s like, are you ready.

No, no, I wasn’t ready, not after last night, not after all these months.

All these months? Most of those were spent hating Tamlin and wanting to escape (if they’re going by the usual wheel-of-the-year for these holidays). When he assaulted you, though, that’s when things changed. And I’m supposed to believe that this isn’t an out-and-out case of Stockholm syndrome.

At least Feyre finally understands why she has to leave:

If Rhysand came back, if this Amarantha person was indeed such a threat that I would only be another body for Tamlin to defend … I needed to go.

You come to that conclusion all by yourself, Feyre, or did it finally sink in after you heard it nine-thousand times?

The carriage starts to move and Tamlin tells her that he loves her one last time.

I should say it—I should say those words, but they got stuck in my throat, because … because of what he had to face, because he might not find me again despite his promise, because … because beneath it all, he was an immortal, and I would grow old and die. And maybe he meant it now, and perhaps last night had been as altering for him as it had been for me, but … I would not become a burden to him. I would not become another weight pressing upon his shoulders.

Why is there a new conflict all of a sudden, one that they haven’t discussed at all? Yes, he’s immortal and one day, Feyre will die. But that’s not connected to this scene or what’s happening, at all. It’s cool how Feyre just decided that leaving is her own, very, very smart and considerate decision like she wasn’t begging to stay the night before.

This is an ongoing problem with this book. Feyre can’t just think, okay, I reacted this way before but now I see this other person’s point. Nope, it has to be a brand new, totally original conclusion that she has come to independently before she can accept that maybe someone else might know something better than she does. Those types of people are exhausting in real life, so why would I want to hang out with them in fiction?

So, the carriage pulls away into a section break and we come back to:

Almost as soon as the carriage entered the woods, the sparkle of magic stuffed itself up my nose and I was dragged into a deep sleep. I was furious when I jerked awake, wondering why it had been at all necessary, but the air was full of the thunderous clopping of hooves against a flagstone path. Rubbing my eyes, I peered out the window to see a sloping drive lined with conical hedges and irises. I had never been here before.

Oh shit. Tamlin set this family UP. But let’s remember that she was asleep the second they got to the human world, because I’m thinking that might be something that comes up later. Why would they put her to sleep to take her there and to return her? Because they don’t want her to know the way.

I’m saying to remember it, by the by, because I want to see if the author remembers it and actually uses it in the story, or if it’s just a way to pass time.

I took in as many details as I could as the carriage came to a stop before a chateau of white marble and emerald roofs—nearly as large as Tamlin’s manor.

There’s a chateau, so. France exists. That’s good information to have.

Feyre notes that the servants around her are human and hey, remember what I said further up about how weird it is that this a story where an oppressed person spends time with her oppressors and decides that yeah, actually, they kinda have a point or whatever is happening here?

The other servants were human, too—all of them restless, not at all like the utter stillness with which the High Fae held themselves. Unfinished, graceless creatures of earth and blood.

I can’t believe that there isn’t a YA fantasy out there titled “Graceless Creatures of Earth and Blood” yet.

But yeah, there’s Feyre thinking, wow, I guess my race really is inferior and it’s maddening because like…what?! WHY IS THAT THE ANGLE YOU’VE CHOSEN, SARAH? WAS IT BY ACCIDENT? AND IF SO…HOW!?

Feyre’s sisters come out of the house and they don’t recognize her at first.

Elain gasped. “Feyre?” She reached for me, but paused. “What of Aunt Ripleigh, then? Is she … dead?” 

That was the story, I remembered—that I’d gone to care for a long-lost, wealthy aunt.

Thanks for the reminder.

I feel like this is a style of writing that’s popular with people who are prone to skimming. Information is repeated over and over and over again, so they’re bound to see it, at some point, if they missed it before. I wonder how many one-star reviews of this book mention how repetitious it is.

I’m not going to look, though, because I accidentally got spoiled for something involving Nesta recently and I don’t want to get spoiled for anything else.

Nesta and Elain are doing great for themselves. They’ve got pearls woven into their hair and everything.

“Feyre, you should have told us!” Elain said, still gaping. “Oh, how awful—and you had to endure losing her all on your own, you poor thing. Father will be devastated that he didn’t get to pay his respects.”

Yeah, about that whole “elderly aunt” thing.

Tamlin created an entire family member that these people now have to grieve.

That’s real fucked up.

Don’t worry, Feyre doesn’t care about that:

Such … such simple things: relatives dying and fortunes being left and paying respect to the dead. And yet—yet … a weight I hadn’t realized I’d still been carrying eased. These were the only things that worried them now.

Just when I thought there was no way Feyre could become more unbearably selfish and awful. At this point, I feel it’s safe to say that Feyre is fucked up beyond any capacity of redemption. Yeah, they’re grieving false memories of a beloved aunt who never existed, going through emotional pain over an imaginary past, but at least they don’t have to worry about money?

What kind of fucked up, Patrick Bateman, psychopathic bullshit did I just read?

This book.

This fucking book.

Now that Nesta is back, it’s time to shit all over her.

I’d forgotten how cunning her eyes were, how cold. She’d been made differently, from something harder and stronger than bone and blood. She was as different from the humans around us as I had become.

Feyre allows her sister absolutely no vulnerability, to the point that she’s literally dehumanizing her.

I HATE FEYRE SO MUCH.

“I’m … glad to see how well your own fortunes have improved,” I managed. “What happened?” The driver—glamoured to look human, no mask in sight—began unloading trunks for the footmen.

Wait.

Wait a second.

If they can just glamour themselves to look like they’re not wearing masks…

why don’t they do that?

I.

Yous all.

I.

They could just…

The whole conflict with the masks is…

It…

FUCK THIS MOTHERFUCKING BOOK OH MY GOD I AM IN ACTUAL LITERAL PROTESTANT FIRE AND BRIMSTONE MOTHERFUCKING GOD DAMN HELL

Okay. I’ll give that a minute to settle.

And we’re back.

ed.—I am still furious about this. They can just glamour the masks off. They can just… it’s not even a big deal. They do it for a servant. They never, ever have to be seen wearing the masks, if they so choose. And they don’t. They just complain about how cursed they are. It’s just… I don’t understand why there is a readership for this garbage.

Elain beamed. “Didn’t you get our letters?” 

Editor: Why did Elain write Feyre letters if Feyre can’t read?

Sarah, probably:

She didn’t remember—or maybe she’d never actually known, then, that I wouldn’t have been able to read them, anyway.

The whole time Feyre has been gone, Elain has been trying to update her about the goings on back home. The family’s experience of Feyre’s absence has been pretty wild; a week after Feyre left to care for their elderly aunt, a man showed up asking for their father to oversee his investments, which did amazingly well. Then, all the ships that had been lost years and and years ago suddenly showed up, with all the riches on them. The house they bought doesn’t have a room for Feyre in it, which I find interesting. Elain says it’s because they thought Feyre wouldn’t be returning for a while, but I wonder if some part of the glamour made them just kind of think, well, she’ll never be back, and they would have just kept putting off creating space for her in their lives until they totally forgot she was ever meant to return.

Also, can someone do that spell on some people for me?

Nesta fell into step behind us, a quiet, stalking presence. I didn’t want to know what she was thinking. I wasn’t certain whether I should be furious or relieved that they’d gotten on so well without me—and whether Nesta was wondering the same.

The carriage hasn’t even left yet and Feyre is already done with Nesta. JFC, can we go back to Prythian? Just so I don’t have to read about how terrible Nesta is every six paragraphs? It’s easily the most boring part of the book.

But the carriage does leave, and Feyre thinks about how it’s going to her true home, while I would argue that her true home is that little cottage Tamlin wrecked to pieces back in chapter three or whenever that happened. But sticking with the I-belong-in-Prythian-and-not-the-gross-human-world:

He had said he loved me, and I’d felt the truth of it with our lovemaking, and he’d sent me away to keep me safe; he’d freed me from the Treaty to keep me safe. Because whatever storm was about to break in Prythian was brutal enough that even a High Lord couldn’t stand against it.

Okay, yeah but like…

We knew that already? Feyre just now seems to be accepting it but again, she can only accept it if it’s something she’s realized independently. If she doesn’t regurgitate everything other characters have said and done and make it seem like her own decision, she just…doesn’t get there. Feyre can’t listen to people, for some reason. First, it had to be, oh, Tamlin must be sending me away because I’m mortal and one day, I’ll die. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Now, it’s, oh, Tamlin has sent me away to keep me safe. Yeah. He did send you away to keep you safe. This isn’t new information to anyone and it shouldn’t be new information to you. There was a whole chapter about it and you narrated it.

I had to stay; it was wise to stay here. But I couldn’t fight the sensation, like a darkening shadow within me, that I’d made a very, very big mistake in leaving, no matter Tamlin’s orders. 

A darkening shadow, unlike the regular kind of shadows, the kind that add light.

Stay with the High Lord, the Suriel had said. Its only command.

If we keep acknowledging the plot hole, maybe it will seem like it isn’t a plot hole. Good strategy.

What I need to know is: why didn’t Feyre tell Tamlin that the Suriel said she should stay at his side? She’s desperate to be with him, there’s nothing she can say or do to keep him from sending her away except telling him about what the Suriel said…but she just doesn’t? Why?

“Because it would be disastrous to the author’s plan!” is the only answer, really. Plus, Maas already completely undermined the Suriel’s whole deal when Tamlin just decides to break the unbreakable treaty that can never be broken.

I shoved the thought from my mind as my father wept at the sight of me and did indeed order a ball in my honor. And though I knew that the promise I had once made to my mother was fulfilled—though I knew that I truly was free of it, and that my family was forever cared for … that growing, lengthening shadow blanketed my heart.

There’s that pesky shadow again. The problem is, the “darkening shadow” didn’t have anything to do with her vow to her mother or with the safety of her family. The “darkening shadow” is about the fear that she’s in danger now that she’s left Tamlin. So, as a chapter hook, this isn’t compelling or remotely logical. But sixty-percent into the book would be a terrible time to start being compelling or logical so here we are.

A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 27 or, “Fifty Shades of Fae”

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.

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.

We did it. We got to the sex. We got to the…

Didn’t BookTok and BookTube and BookTwitter and everywhere else assure me that this was gonna “spicy”? Like, I just got Indian food today and the guy warned me not to put too much of the chili sauce in my food because it’s spicy, so I listened to him, and of course, he was right. It was really spicy. So, I listened to the internet when they warned me that ACOTAR would be spicy and, well, frankly…

We’ll get to it. I don’t want to jump the gun. ed.—The guy who warned me about the chili sauce did so by relating a story about someone who didn’t listen to him, and who ended up having cardiac issues. This will not be the case for you while reading the sex scene in this book. Your heart rate won’t increase even just a little bit.

Chapter twenty-seven opens with Feyre laying in bed, trying not to think about how Tamlin reacted when Rhysand left. His reaction was…bad:

It was even more of an effort to not recall the roaring that rattled the chandelier or the cracking of shattering furniture that echoed through the house.

It’s nice to have yet another hero who reacts to things with violence. I like to keep things generally same-y. I don’t like change.

But we all know what the most important detail is. Come on, Feyre. Tell us. You know you want to tell us.

And I couldn’t bring myself to paint.

Now that we’ve established Feyre’s painting status, let’s move on.

The house had been quiet for some time now, but the ripples of Tamlin’s rage echoed through it, reverberating in wood and stone and glass. 

I guess I might could be reading this a little too literally, but what I’m getting is that he yelled so much the echo is still going on hours later? I don’t get this description or how I’m supposed to take it, but also, autism, so this one might be on me and my tendency to think too literally.

Which, coincidentally, makes “Piano Man” an incredibly difficult song to listen to.

I didn’t want to think about all that Rhysand had said—didn’t want to think about the looming storm of the blight, or Under the Mountain—whatever it was called—and why I might be forced to go there.

Wow, the rare triple em dash. And so entirely unnecessary, considering “whatever it was called” was literally in the sentence, capitalized and everything. Brava.

And Amarantha—at last a name to go with the female presence that stalked their lives.

At last, another opportunity for blatant misogyny has entered the story. But Feyre is pretty scared/impressed about Amarantha’s power:

To hold Rhysand’s leash and make Tamlin beg to keep me hidden from her.

Glad to see we’re still going with the accidental horny gay stuff because let me tell you, autism literalism or not, Rhysand on a leash is some leather club visuals.

Tamlin comes into the room and sits on the bed to apologize to Feyre. 

“It’s fine,” I lied, clenching the sheets in my hands. If I still thought too long about it, I could still feel the claw-tipped caresses of Rhysand’s power scraping against my mind.

Let’s talk about strong female characters and our perception of what, exactly, makes them strong. I’ve noticed a running theme in the books we read as Jealous Haters: from Ana Steele to Feyre Whose Last Name Escapes Me, the heroine’s strength always seems to come not from her actions, but her ability to keep her reactions to herself. In Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels, Ana would often brush off things that bothered her or hide how situations made her feel, and then she would almost always be described as “brave” right after. For example, wanting Christian not to worry about her after she’s hospitalized following the time she foiled a violent kidnapping. That’s what made her strong and brave: not acknowledging her trauma. In Apolonia, the heroine is strong and brave because she’s walking around with untreated PTSD after she’s the sole survivor of the gruesome murder of her family. And here, we have Feyre, who just had her mind violated, putting that trauma aside to reassure the male main character that she’s fine, even though internally she says it’s very much not fine.

And that’s what makes her tough, more than any of the rough and tumble stuff we’ve seen her do. And whe know that’s what makes her tough because we see it more than we see the rough and tumble.

The more I think about books I’ve read with Strong Female Characters, the more I see this pattern. It’s in books I’ve written. At some point, genre fiction just kind of banded together and unconsciously decided that the best way for a female character to be strong is for her to achieve toxic levels of emotional repression.

Moving on.

Tamlin tells Feyre that he’s sending her home.

“What about the terms of the Treaty—”

“I have taken on your life-debt. Should someone come inquiring after the broken laws, I’ll take responsibility for Andras’s death.”

Editor’s note: Didn’t the Suriel, a creature who cannot lie, tell Feyre there’s no way around the Treaty? Tamlin also seemed to be under this impression.

Sarah:

“But you once said that there was no other loophole. The Suriel said there was no—”

A snarl. “If they have a problem with it, they can tell me.” And wind up in ribbons.

Translation: Yes, Maas absolutely laid down rules of her own creation that unequivocally set the parameter that there is no way for Feyre to go home, no matter what. But then she decided not to go with that after all and editing isn’t something you do after you sell Throne of Glass.

My chest caved in. Leaving—free. “Did I do something wrong—”

Yes, Feyre. It’s all about you. It’s not about the blight or the fact that you’re in danger.

Well, I mean, that Clare girl is in danger. You’ll probably be fine. I mean, Clare will also probably be fine because the author will probably forget about her. ed.—The author does not, in fact, forget her.

He lifted my hand to press it to his lower cheek.

JAW SAY JAW FOR THE LOVE OF GOD BECAUSE I THOUGHT YOU MEANT HIS ASS CHEEK.

Tamlin reassures Feyre that she’s perfect and has never done anything wrong ever and she asks why she has to go even though her safety in Prythian has been a plot point this whole god damn time.

“Because there are … there are people who would hurt you, Feyre. Hurt you because of what you are to me. I thought I would be able to handle them, to shield you from it, but after today … I can’t. So you need to go home—far from here. You’ll be safe there.”

Makes sense, right?

NOT TO FEYRE BECAUSE SHE’S A KICKASS HEROINE.

“I can hold my own, and—”

“You can’t,” he said, and his voice wobbled. “Because I can’t.”

THANK YOU. For fuck’s sake, Feyre. You spend the whole god damn book talking about how dangerous fairies are, you get into a bunch of situations you have to be rescued from by fairies because they’re stronger than you are, but you think you can hold your own? I wish I had the powerhouse of self-esteem and disproportionate self-confidence Feyre has. I’d be as unstoppable as a young white man who knows that you know who his father is.

“When you get home,” he cut in, “don’t tell anyone the truth about where you were; let them believe the glamour. Don’t tell them who I am; don’t tell them where you stayed. Her spies will be looking for you.”

Her spies will be looking for that Clare person. We’ve covered that already.

Feyre is still like, oh, I don’t understand, why do I have to leave and like, Feyre. He covered this pretty extensively already. You have to leave because he can’t protect you from the blight or Amarantha so he has to send you back home. There’s not a lot more for him to explain.

Home. It wasn’t my home—it was Hell. “I want to stay with you,” I whispered, my voice breaking. “Treaty or no treaty, blight or no blight.”

There’s that pesky hell word again, in a world where, and I cannot stress this enough, there doesn’t seem to be any religion in which hell is a concept at all.

Tamlin tells her there’s no use in arguing about it, he’s sending her away.

“Rhys was the start of it. Do you want to be here when the Attor returns? Do you want to know what kind of creatures the Attor answers to? Things like the Bogge—and worse.”

Isn’t Rhysand worse than the Bogge, really? We didn’t see the Bogge or the violence it’s capable of. We saw it turn into stuff at the gate and we saw Tamlin after he fought it, but it was all off-the-page. And the Attor spooked Feyre but it didn’t really do anything other than hiss at Tamlin and Lucien. The way this sentence is worded implies that Rhysand isn’t actually as dangerous as those things when we’ve seen him inflict worse brutality upon Feyre than any of the other creatures she’s encountered. He’s also the only one with power over Tamlin and Lucien, and we already know that Amarantha killed that one fairy by ripping his wings off. Honestly, now that you’ve got those heavy hitters in your rotation, Sarah, it’s time to forget the fucking Bogge, which wasn’t that scary, to begin with.

“So you’re sending me away because I’m useless in a fight?”

Yes, Feyre, that’s why he’s sending you away. After pages of being told, hey, you have to go because you will get killed, you’re finally able to grasp the point: you have to go because you will get killed.

She asks Tamlin how long she has to hide, because she can’t stand the thought of being away from him for years or longer:

“But not forever, right?” Even if the blight spread to the Spring Court again, even if it could shred me apart … I would come back.

Far be it from me to suggest that intelligence is a strength and that Feyre doesn’t appear super strong by insisting that she’s gonna run straight into the arms of death so she can be with the guy who kidnapped her but…

Choo choo, here comes the self-pity train:

“I suppose it’ll be easier if I’m gone,” I said, looking away from him. “Who wants someone around who’s so covered in thorns?” 

“Thorns?” 

“Thorny. Prickly. Sour. Contrary.”

GET IT BECAUSE THORNS IS IN THE TITLE OF THE BOOK THIS IS CLEVER BECAUSE IT’S IN THE TITLE OF THE BOOK.

I like that Tamlin doesn’t get her metaphor at all, giving the author the chance to explain what she means and why it’s so clever.

Tamlin responds to this by saying that they won’t have to be apart forever, and then he kisses Feyre and guess what?

*porn music*

Awww yeah. You know what time it is.

They get all kissy and gropey and she straddles him.

My entire world constricted to the touch of his lips on my skin. Everything beyond them, beyond him, was a void of darkness and moonlight.

Darkness. You know. The kind that has light in it. That kind of darkness.

He breathed my name onto my chest, one of his hands exploring the plane of my torso, rising up to the slope of my breast.

For all we know he’s got one hand in her ditch and the other in her game park. We’ve already established that Maas isn’t good at geological features.

With one long claw, he shredded through silk and lace, and my undergarment fell away in pieces.

Through the scene so far, her “undergament” is mentioned three times. It’s described as having a waist that runs across her hips. Maas will throw “Hell” around like a fucking dodge ball but she’ll be damned if she just says “panties,” even when the “undergarment” she’s describing is clearly PANTIES.

I ground against his hand, yielding completely to the writhing wildness that had roared alive inside me, and breathed his name onto his skin.

That’s right. She used “breathed [his/her] name onto [his/her] [body part]” twice on the same page. It’s not like using “hands” or “sit” too much. It’s such specific wording you can’t just recycle it. This is not a Merry Gentry book where the heroine gets to “glow like I swallowed the moon” nine times per chapter.

So, he’s vaguely fingering her because what’s the point of writing a sex scene if you have to name actual body parts and actions, and he stops. And Feyre is like, don’t stop, and Tamlin starts quoting shit from 1980s historical rapemances:

“I—” he said thickly, resting his brow between my breasts as he shuddered. “If we keep going, I won’t be able to stop at all.”

Uh-huh. Well, you fucking better be able to stop or you need to not be engaging in any sexual activity whatsoever. This isn’t Calanmai, you’re not possessed by magic or something. You don’t have a get-out-of-consent-free card anymore.

I hate that “I won’t be able to stop” is making a comeback. I keep seeing it pop up in all these Facebook ads for those jackass little manga apps targeted to teenagers. If you wanna write a romance, make it romantic. If you wanna write stuff with reluctant/dubious/no consent, write erotica and for god’s sake, put it in the right genre.

Feyre answers him by getting naked and showing him her pussy, but obviously that particular body part must not be named in any way:

Utterly naked before him, I watched his gaze travel to my bare breasts, peaked against the chill night, to my abdomen, to between my thighs. A ravenous, unyielding sort of hunger passed over his face. I bent a leg and slid it to the side, a silent invitation.

Not “between my thighs!” That’s almost as filthy and explicit as “…down there!” I’m sorry, I need to go to church. This is too much for me.

There’s another “between my thighs” when he eats her out until “[…]I shuddered and fractured.” Then he “sheathed” himself in her (that’s P-in-V intercourse, dear Patrons) and that “[…]had me splintering around him.”

We moved together, unending and wild and burning, and when I went over the edge the next time, he roared and went with me.

So, for as hot and sexy and edgy as this book is supposed to be, it’s really just a standard, mild sex scene from an author afraid to use the sex words. And this really isn’t a fault with the book, but with the hype. If I had never heard about how unrelentingly explicit it was and I read it and somehow didn’t DNF before this point, it wouldn’t have appeared so laughably tame. But I did hear the hype and frankly, most of the hype isn’t around what a great fantasy novel this is (because it’s not) but how it’s basically the Fifty Shades of fairyland. And it is, but not in a complimentary way. It’s just further proof of how sexually repressed our culture is, that any sort of vague, brief sexuality is considered oh my god, so groundbreakingly controversial.

It’s annoying and I hate it.

There’s a section break followed by:

I fell asleep in his arms, and when I awoke a few hours later, we made love again, lazily and intently, a slow-burning smolder to the wildfire of earlier.

“Lazily” and “intently” aren’t adverbs that compliment each other. They’re not directly contradictory in terms of definitions, but the idea that you can focus on something intently and do so lazily is difficult to reconcile.

So is:

Once we were both spent, panting and sweat-slicked, we lay in silence for a time, and I breathed in the smell of him, earthy and crisp.

They fucked so lazily that they ended up “sweat-slicked?” How does that work?

Also, how does this work?

I would never be able to capture that—never be able to paint the feel and taste of him, no matter how many times I tried, no matter how many colors I used.

No shit, you can’t paint a smell or a feel or a taste. But at least we’re once again reminded that Feyre paints. It’s such a subtle detail of her characterization that I had almost forgotten.

Tamlin tells her that she needs to rest for the journey home. They’re going to leave at dawn tomorrow. I’m a little confused about that because it was nighttime when he came to her room and they’ve now slept and fucked for hours, so it should be almost dawn, right? 

But Feyre tells Tamlin not to leave her alone, and he stays and holds her until she gets real sleepy.

I was leaving. Just when this place had become more than a sanctuary, when the command of the Suriel had become a blessing and Tamlin far, far more than a savior or friend, I was leaving. It could be years until I saw this house again, years until I smelled his rose garden, until I saw those gold-flecked eyes. Home—this was home.

At what point did Tamlin become her savior? He kidnapped her. He tore her away from her family. How on earth did that save her? Yeah, he intervened and stopped her from getting killed by stuff but she would never have been in danger if he hadn’t kidnapped her in the first place.

I get super angry when people say Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is about Stockholm syndrome. Belle is never happy being locked up at the Beast’s castle, and even though she starts to fall for him, she’s happy to return home. She knows her father needs help and she wants to leave the Beast’s castle. When he asks her if she’s happy to be there with him she’s like, yeah BUT I want to see my father. And when the Beast frees her, she leaves RIGHT THEN. It takes her like two seconds to change out of that ballgown and she’s on the next horse out of there. She’s like, thanks for understanding, bye, and takes off. She doesn’t ask if she can come back, she doesn’t express any desire to, she just is like, it’s been real, it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been real fun and walks out of his life. She only realizes she loves him after he lets her go and she can’t bear the thought of him being murdered by Gaston and his angry mob. Nothing about her character or who she is as a person changes at all. The Beast does all the changing and that’s what earns Belle’s love.

But pop culture feminism decided at some point in the ’10s that Disney’s version of this story is toxic, abusive, and a horrible example to women, while A Court of Thorns and Roses was touted as a new wave of feminist-friendly fantasy. Because Feyre is a Strong Female Character in a genre that, despite featuring classic characters like Éowyn, Brienne of Tarth, Ciri, Anathema Device, et. al., allegedly doesn’t have any of those. ed.—And all of those characters are allowed to be frightened and fragile at times.

And what was I saying about Stockholm syndrome? Oh yeah. This retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” really is sending up a lot of Swedish flags.

If you weren’t around for the dawning of the age of Maas domination, you might not realize just how prevalent the social media praise for this book was. You could not get it out of your face and while a lot of people didn’t fall for the “It’s feminism!” word-of-mouth marketing, critics weren’t in the majority. I’m still not sure they are. There were people who pointed out how misogynistic and weird this book is, but most readers kind of just decided, well, there’s a sexy scene in it so…yay? It’s empowering?

Where have we run into that before, I wonder?