Tag Archives: teen fiction

Court of Thorny Roses: The Huntress and the Shiny Fey Shifter

Posted by Seriah Black Sheep on

A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

My Summary:
Feyre and her family are about to starve to death if she can’t find food. But killing that food means taking it from another predator, which has regrettable consequences. The next thing Feyre knows, she’s being dragged across the fey border for killing a faerie, leaving her family behind to starve. The power of the faerie whose subordinate she killed cannot quite make up for his social awkwardness. Tamlin has good reason to be awkward, however. Trapped in a mask from a masquerade ball gone wrong and stuck somewhere between defending his borders and sending his subordinates to their deaths, he seems to need help but refuses to be forthcoming with the information. Tamlin is fine, Tamlin is strong, Tamlin is going to save the day…until Tamlin needs saving, because Feyre failed to realize she’s the heroine and left him to deal with an old acquaintance he can’t win against. If the ever-stoic, survival-mode Feyre can’t put a name and actions to her feelings in time, it’s Game Over for everyone—humans included. Even if she does succeed, there’s no guarantee she’ll live.

This is a High Fantasy Romance that takes place on topography likened to the British Isle: heavy on the Fantasy and heavy on the Romance. It’s upper YA, but don’t think that’s going to get you out of gore and sex (though there are a lot of breaks in between). There’s also a near-rape scene, some brainwashing into doing adult things, drinking, and some gruesome stuff at the end. If you liked Hunger Games or Kate Daniels, you’ll be fine. It’s nowhere near Game of Thrones TV level.

My Thoughts:
If you are familiar with the original Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, you will recognize the original setup: girl lives with her father and sisters in a shack, father went broke when his merchant vessels went missing at sea, sisters are frivolous, girl or her father accidentally wrongs beast and beast demands her as payment, father doesn’t want to give her up as payment but she goes anyway. None of that should be a spoiler. What makes Beauty different is that she’s a scrawny, starving artist-turned-hunter who won’t go down without a fight, and she hates her family but protects them anyway.

From there, it starts to go all Fantasy genre on you. It’s a classic case of the fey stealing away a human and most fey considering them gullible food—and faeries, famous for their cruelty, play with their food. Throwback to Julie Kagawa’s The Iron Fey series: once you cross that gateway into the faerie realm, there’s no undoing what you see and experience. If you loved The Iron King, you’re going to feel nostalgic. Especially if you were rooting for Ash and Puck the whole way through and couldn’t decide between them.

I picked up this book because it came highly recommended to me from both strangers and friends. I’m a sucker for the Beauty and the Beast trope, but I’m also a stickler for uniqueness. That conflicted me a bit over this retelling.

S.J. Maas was a master of crafting suspense in this book. Not only that, I was biased against the book after reading Throne of Glass, and she overcame that bias by leaps and bounds. I read this entire book in one day. I, who am so picky that I rarely finish a book anymore.

That being said, I had two frustrations and one confusion about this story. One frustration was I could not connect to Tamlin—and he was the male lead, and eventually the “damsel in distress,” so that was really important. I must be really visually dependent (as far as visualizing in my mind) to have had this much trouble with picturing Tamlin’s appearance around a mask. There were allusions to his facial structure, but way more time was spent on his claws than on what his face might look like underneath. Granted, Feyre (the main character) did express need to know what he looked like, the longer she was around him, and even spent some intermittent paragraphs musing over what it would be like to see his face. But the only time I felt the giant blur that was his face (which made him feel impersonal) was overcome was at the pool of starlight. The rest of the time, I felt closer to Lucien than I did to Tamlin. While I realize that was somewhat by design, it actually had me rooting for a relationship with Lucien rather than Tamlin, which was counterproductive.

The confusion part came from Tamlin’s name. I spent half the book trying to figure out why his name sounded so familiar. Turns out I was thinking of the female Tamsin in the fey TV series Lost Girl. My bad. To Maas’ credit, the name Tamlin really does suit him.

The second frustration was getting almost zero info drops. I kept waiting to find out more about the regular plot, but learned more about the romance instead. As a Fantasy-Romance cross-genre writer myself, I well appreciate the romantic plot arc and the regular plot arc being inseparable; one cannot exist without the other, or the story would fall apart. But because most of what was revealed were the classic Beauty and the Beast storyline and the extent of Tamlin’s shapeshifting capabilities (full-body and partial-transformation), the main character and I were both left completely in the dark as to what was going on until it was time to go save Tamlin. I knew dark things were happening behind the scenes, but I had NO IDEA about what was truly going on. It would have been nice to feel like Tamlin was at least trying to help Feyre guess. If I hadn’t been gifted such a spectacular breakup sex scene right about the time I was getting mega frustrated, I don’t know if I would have finished the book. Kudos to Maas for the perfect timing, delivering on long-built sexual tension throughout the story.

The end, I admit, is a little troubling. It’s a great finale, and a great ending, make no mistake. I was riveted the whole way through the ending sequence. I just don’t know how I feel about Feyre’s aftermath.

Consensus:
It’s obvious why this book came highly recommended, and I recommend it as well. It bridges well that gap between just-out-of-high-school Young Adult and adult Fantasy, so well that I’m surprised it’s not openly classified as New Adult. The narrative style is engaging, there are no blackout scenes, Tamlin on summer bonfire night is electric, I almost fell on myself when I first saw the High Lord of Night, and the villainess absolutely dominates everything that a stereotypical male villain can do (and yes, you can take all the dominating implications there) without feeling like you’re watching a catfight.

I did figure out the answer to the riddle way before the end of the trials, because I have experience with the answer. If you don’t have that kind of personal experience yet, or overthink things, you might have a hard time guessing it. But it doesn’t matter either way, because what you really want to see—why you keep reading—is to find out whether Feyre will have a self-reflective epiphany moment in time to save the ones she cares about. So in terms of character development, Feyre gets a gold star.

If you’re one of those people who likes to piece together everything, like a detective novel, throughout the story, you’re going to get a little frustrated. It’d be better if you just tried to figure out and enjoy the fey creatures instead. There will be payout, I promise. You just have to make it through 2/3 of the book first.

I did order the second book; I heard the second book is phenomenal, so I’m looking forward to it. I’m also hoping to see more of Rhysand in Book 2, but I’m hoping Rhys and Feyre’s little “arrangement” doesn’t make Feyre a cheater.

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Disclaimer / Side Note: I read this book 14 years after I started writing my own Beauty and the Beast series, BeastKing Chronicles, and was alarmed to discover that Maas and I have similar ideas as to what a beast character should look like and what kind of partial-shifting body modifications should be prevalent. One of my ideas was inspired by a particular painting I came across on Pinterest, and of course I mutated what I saw into a new idea, but apparently Maas had the same one—and I had told nobody about that mutation idea. They say “there is nothing new under the sun,” but this one struck too close to home. Though Maas and I were FictionPress contemporaries, there is no way we would have copied this from one another. I even tried researching mythology to see if we might be referencing a known mythological creature, but no such luck. I am, of course, not writing about fey in BeastKing Chronicles. But I will be seriously reconsidering some of Rome’s beast characteristics before pursuing any form of traditional publication, for the sake of original design and trademark uniqueness.

Cruel Beauty: Pure Love or Wicked Love?

Posted by Seriah Black Sheep on

Cruel BeautyCruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My Summary:
Nyx is trained from childhood to take down her future husband, the Demon Lord of Bargains, who holds the kingdom of Arcadia captive and offered the bargain that stole her mother’s life. Knowing the mission will cost her own life, she grows to resent the people around her, who are allowed to be happy. Nyx faces her fate squarely, but neither her husband, nor his servant, nor the house they live in are what they appear to be. She starts to fall for her husband’s tranquil servant, a shadow who desires to help her but is unable to lend much assistance. The lines between hate and love blur as Nyx realizes that the resentment and selfishness in her own heart are not so different from the quick-witted wickedness of her doomed husband, and that he may be the only person who does not ask anything of her. In the end, the fate of the world rests upon the choice of embracing pure love or wicked love, who to betray, and whether once-in-a-lifetime love is worth sacrificing the rest of the world.

This is a paranormal/occult Beauty and the Beast novel, set in Greco-Roman times, in the kingdom of Arcadia. Multiple Greek gods and myths are referenced throughout the book, as the belief system of the majority of the characters.

My Thoughts:
The book started off pretty redundant and slow, with the recurring theme of Nyx’s hurt from her father’s inaffection, disgust toward her aunt’s affair, and internal battle against hating her sister Astraia (who was not chosen to wed the Gentle Lord because of her resemblance to their dead mother) and hating her mother (whose death began Nyx’s life of revenge). I felt like I really didn’t need these themes hammered home as many times as they were within the first couple chapters.

Once I figured out that this story was not about an epic take-down, but about solving riddles, I was able to sit back and enjoy it. The fact of the matter is, nobody really knows that much about the Gentle Lord, a.k.a. the Demon Lord. And certainly nobody but his wives and the doomed people he’s bargained with know much of anything about his house. The only person who seems to know stuff is Shade, who is bound not to tell, and the Kindly Ones (who aren’t so kind, and aren’t so available). Everybody else is trying to figure stuff out. Once you see the story as one big puzzle, it makes a heck of a lot more sense.

What really threw me was that Nyx’s original tactic for taking down the Gentle Lord’s house (with him, and probably herself, inside it) was almost irrelevant. She needed to find the rooms, yes. And they had massive significance. But it felt like there was virtually no point to all that world-building about Hermetic sigils and workings, except to give context for her father’s position. I think Nyx only used a sigil once in the entire book (turning off her bedroom lamp once to show how it works doesn’t count). And her “virgin knife” never made an emphatic comeback. Not to mention, throwing away her only true trump card—her virginity—didn’t make that big of a splash. Not only was it not played up after all those nervous warning bells in the beginning, but it didn’t make any difference to the outcome. She drops her dress, and then *bam* next scene. I thought, Wow, that could have happened a lot sooner, with virtually no ripples.

It was about halfway through the book that my mind started doing gymnastics, attempting to guess the answers to all the riddles and how they all tie together. It got super fun from there, though not a lot more emotional until nearer to the end. I won’t tell you the ending, but I will tell you that it’s worth getting to. And, DON’T SKIP AHEAD!!! Seriously, you’ll be soooo confused, because at one point the chronology becomes super important. If you read the book in order, you’re already getting pieces from all different parts of the chronology, so skippers beware. I didn’t skip, but if you do, you’ll just jumble the brain-bending ending.

Consensus:
If you’re intrigued by the book’s cover blurb about an unconventional Belle and a not-so-charming lord, this is definitely the book for you. If, however, you are waiting to see that there’s a lovely Prince Charming beneath that gruff, scarred male exterior…go find another book. Part of this book’s charm is that it doesn’t conform to that old-school/Disney pop-culture transformation; it’s more realistic.

I really enjoyed this book, as a story full of puzzles and riddles and mysteries and unconventional romance. The heroine is smart (but not too smart), and doesn’t give up easily, and she doesn’t change all that radically. This book is very much about loving people as they are, and loving within your capacity to love.

So, don’t read this book for the assassination action. Read this book to get to know Ignifex and Shade, the two juxtaposed, troubled men that Nyx is not sure she can save.

In all honesty, I would have liked some more details in the narration—more narrative coddling and in-depth, in-their-head emotional action. I felt a bit distanced from the characters, like I was watching the story unfold rather than feeling my heart race when I looked at one guy or the other, or almost drowned in a supernatural pool, etc. But I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint exactly how this should have been incorporated, because I feel like all of the characters were intentionally distant; they all had secrets. And the secrets were what made the book interesting.

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