A Court of Thornes and Roses

Hey guys!

Last year on the Madrid Book Fair I found a Little stand of an independent book store that had become one of my favourites in the city. It has a huge amount and variety of books in English, books that sometimes are not published in Spanish, so you can guess why I love this store. Whatsoever, I found A Court of Thornes and Roses (by that time I didn’t know it was about to by publish in Spanish) and I bought it. I took the book on vacation with me but I did not have the time to read it. Then as you guys know if you have been following the blog for a while I went on Erasmus and just took eBooks with me; and after that I was just not in the mood for it.

However, finally I have read it and I have to say that I am disappointed with it. I have heard so many great things about this book and read so many great reviews that I was expecting a really good book; instead I found an entertaining book that could have been better. Before I start with the whole review let me tell you guys that you can keep reading until the end of this post as it will be a spoiler free review.

So, the premise of the book is that Freyre kill a fairy in a hunt and she must pay now for the life she has taken. However, this payment will not be with her life but she will be living on the realm of the fairies and cannot leave ever.

Apparently, this is a retelling of the beauty and the best but in my opinion it has some common elements but changes way too many things to be a retelling.

I have many issues with this book but there are a few things that I enjoyed as well.

Firstly, I will say that I love Sarah J. Maas as an author, I have read the first two books on the Throne of Glass series and I highly enjoy them. I think that her writing style is unique and that she is really gifted in the way that she comes up with very interesting concepts for stories.

By reading ACOTAR, I could find some of the things that I liked about her writing but there were, in my opinion, not as good as they were in Throne of Glass. One of the things that I have missed the most is a strong female leading character, Freyre is really annoying as character and is like she is just there and things are happening to her. Her behaviour is erratic and at times really contradictory, and sadly I must say that I found her to be a walking cliché. I also have some issues with the main male protagonist, because if talking about toxic relationships, what about this one?

The plot was interesting when told in the synopsis but when executed it was not so good. I was waiting for a fast-paced read and instead I found ACOTAR to be a slow read. However, I kept reading because I don’t like to DNF books and within the last 100 pages the story started to be what I was expecting and became interesting even when the couple of major plot twist were really predictable for me.

I also have some issues with the narration. This is highly related with the fact that I was annoyed for most of the book by Freyre and the narration is on the first person. She has a very poor defined personality and have some random thoughts that are not related with what is happening in the story. And because she is at times very immature for a person that had gone through what she has it made little sense. Plus, when she acknowledge something at dangerous she went for it instead of running away for it, which made her kind of unrealistic as a character and not the best narrator for this story.

I like the descriptions that Sarah J. Maas made, and I thought that the world building even when kind of poor was really good. And even when I am not really sure about the how the book managed to keep me reading until the end. So that´s why I decided to give this book 3 out of 5 stars and of course read the next book in the series.

Have you guys read this book already? If so what are your opinions about it? If not, are you planning on reading? Leave a comment down below so we can discuss it.

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See you all next Wednesday.