A Court of Mist and Fury

I read this book because one of my reading group members assured me the series gets better after my tepid response to A Court of Thorns and Roses.

The first half of the first book was a re-telling of the story of Beauty and the Beast - perhaps stretched all the way through, but that is kind of thin in the main story of the 2nd half of the book. This book is the story of Persephone, which was started in the 2nd half of the first book. It is not the usual telling of that story, but that mythology is still the basis of this book. I quite like this version of the story.

Another aspect of the story that I like is the attempt to show PDSD and depression from the perspective of the person who cannot get out of bed and does not want to eat. The story spends a lot of time on this. For people unfamiliar with such feelings, it can feel long and dragged out. However, when within the grasp of that sort of bad time, everything feels long and dragged out. There were some things I did not like about the representation, but everybody's situation is different and my dislikes were minor. I liked that it took both those around her either compounding Feyre's difficulties or actively trying to help her - and how that impacts the symptoms of PDSD and depression - and Feyre herself to come out of her depression. It took someone who was willing to meet her where she was and help her plus her own decision made when she could make it to at least try to live and be active.

Maas did better in this book with scene-stealing, which is to say I at least did not recognize any scenes that were clearly from other books, or at least none stuck with me to the end of the book to write in this review. Unfortunately, that is eclipsed by the fact that one her entire races of people seems to be lifted straight from another series - the series I was told this series is like. Even not primed with the similarities, the Illyrians are described nearly exactly the same with the exception of skin tone, and I would have recognized them.

That leads me to the confusion I had about the comparison to the other work in the first book of this series being cleared up. It took at least half of this book, if not more, for me to see the comparison. There is a particular scene where it sort of hit me. I'm not sure if the echoes of the other series are just very strong in that scene or if it was the culmination that led there. It is a pale enough comparison. I don't know how many series show people who had to do bad things to bad people to survive and sometimes bad things to good people, and end up in a court of the people with the strongest power in the land. They may be few and far between. If there are so few, then clearly the series written 20 years ago, and a series written a couple years ago will be compared and rightfully the older series will hold up. I would say it's more like if someone likes this series, they should definitely read the other. I would not necessarily suggest the other way around.

Another complaint is the use of the word "males" and "females." In a 20-year old book, it grates, but you can dismiss it due to age. In a book written within the past 5 years, it is pretty awful. There are groups who call people males and females as a way to demean rather than build up. It also reinforces the gender binary. Maybe "males" and "females" is common in romance fiction? I don't read enough romance to know. But in fantasy, it isn't used the way it is here, which again harkens back to another series written 20 years ago.

Maas wrote good sex scenes in this book. I can see why her fan base praises that aspect of these books. And the writing itself was engaging. I read it fairly fast in that even though Kindle predicted it was a 10 hour read for me (actual read time unknown), I spent the time over only 3 days reading it. I did have some long bus commutes though.

One more issue I had with this book is that the plot is a little thin. The goal seems to be "get Feyre better so she can so some things to the big bad." That's not a very complicated plot, and it leads to a lot of story-telling that is character-based rather than plot based.

Finally, in this book, I felt like we moved out of the YA genre fully into romantic fantasy. Just because your main character is 17/18 (I think? I may be mis-remembering how old she started as) does not make this inherently YA. Definitely the first book in the series fell strongly within the YA boundaries, but this one did not seem so much. But I'm often confused about the YA classification.

Overall, I liked the book. It's an improvement over the "meh" I felt on the first book, so indeed the series does get better. I will read the remaining books in the series. I'm still not sure if I would recommend these if I weren't asked for a re-telling of common mythology with some good sex thrown in.