2021 read #1: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas.

 A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

419 pages

Published 2015

Read from January 1 to January 12

Rating: 3 out of 5

2020 was not kind to me, and this is reflected in how few books I finished last year: six, quite possibly the fewest books I've read in a calendar year since 1990 or so. My book reviews were never insightful in the best of times, and now I face the extra struggle of rust. I haven't written a review since July, when my life was entirely different, before so many things fell apart. What thoughts can I even string together here that feel worthy of such a return from bad places?

I don't want to give up on reviewing what I read just yet. I've maintained this blog since 2013. It's a luxury to be able to go back and read my thoughts (however vague and disjointed) on any random book I read in the last eight years. So I'll try to pull something together for now, and in the future, I hope to put in a better effort to write reviews worth reading.

A Court of Thorns and Roses is one of the default YA fantasy books of recent years. If you go on Instagram and search tags like #fantasybooks, Sarah J. Maas titles will be ubiquitous -- tastefully arranged on beds of cotton fluff, bedecked with flowers. I've always had a hipster streak, a preference for forgotten or underappreciated works and a tendency (unconscious or not) to avoid the popular titles. But my partner R bought me a lovely copy of Thorns, and when I found myself picking up the pieces of my old life, it was one of the few things I took away with me, and just the sort of light escapism I needed to get me back into reading.

YA fiction has anger issues. Every character will be snarky or sarcastic to every other; narrators will arrive with chips on their shoulder. This isn't my sort of thing -- but I acknowledge I'm not the target audience here, and haven't been for about twenty years. For the most part, Thorns handles this fairly well, justifying the walls our narrator has built around herself. Perhaps the fey beings she encounters could have been more august and freighted with the centuries they have seen, and perhaps major plot contrivances happen solely through our narrator's stubbornness two too many times, but it works. There were glimpses of delightful fey strangeness here and there, and I enjoyed how horny everyone became maybe halfway through.

I can't decide how I feel about the main faery dude being named Tamlin. Given the name, and the mask magically stuck to his face, I naturally assumed that a particular twist would be coming -- and then it never came. I'm glad I didn't guess a major twist, but then I have to ask, why was he even named Tamlin in the first place? Enough of the book loosely aligned with the titular ballad that I guess I can see the connection between the two, but it was a bit distracting in the early chapters all the same.