A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Overall rating: 🖤🖤🖤🖤
Romance rating: 18+ (Bumped up from the previous novel, due to the portrayal of some of the darker romantic themes.)
I enjoyed this book so much more than the first in the series! There was beautiful character development on Feyre’s part. Maas has the ability to incorporate such real feeling emotions in her characters. In the previous book, a quart of thorns and roses, there seems to be the general consensus that it had a very beauty and the beast feel to it. With the second book, a quart of missed and fury, it had a different flavor all its own. (Despite there being the familiar theme of stealing away Feyre from the world she knew before) The world building in this book was better than the last, and the unique chemistry that forms between the characters was more palpable than the previous book. The plot development shows that Sarah J Maas really considered her overarching goal for the series before she ever put pen to paper for the first novel, and for that I truly commend her.
However, the unrealistic character transformations for Feyre’s love interests really became distracting for me. The biggest issue that I had with the second book in her series, and the reason why I couldn’t give it a full five stars/hearts, is that I just didn’t find the timeline and love interest character swap to be believable. The main character, Feyre, had a change of heart regarding two very important characters, and I think those feelings that Maas wrote felt very organic and genuine. But I just didn’t buy into the good guy suddenly becoming a bad guy and the bad guy suddenly becoming the good guy. It’s not that the storyline itself is unbelievable, but the abrupt character shifts just didn’t make sense. Some actions aren’t fully explained, leaving the reader to wonder why the new good guys did bad things in the past and the new bad guys did good things. The ending seemed to be one of those too good to be true endings, where our main character Fayre pulls off a challenging heist over an ancient, more prepared adversary.
Despite the drawbacks of the second book, I personally would favor it more than the first and will be reading the rest of the series eagerly. Sarah J. Maas’s ability to write in beautiful emotional characters is certainly one of her greatest talents, and though I had several questions throughout the book, I still continued reading so I can continue on Feyre’s journey with her.
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Charlotte S. Meyer 