Synopsis

Sarah J. Maas’s sexy, richly imagined series continues with the journey of Feyre’s fiery sister, Nesta.

Nesta Archeron has always been prickly-proud, swift to anger, and slow to forgive. And ever since being forced into the Cauldron and becoming High Fae against her will, she’s struggled to find a place for herself within the strange, deadly world she inhabits. Worse, she can’t seem to move past the horrors of the war with Hybern and all she lost in it.

The one person who ignites her temper more than any other is Cassian, the battle-scarred warrior whose position in Rhysand and Feyre’s Night Court keeps him constantly in Nesta’s orbit. But her temper isn’t the only thing Cassian ignites. The fire between them is undeniable, and only burns hotter as they are forced into close quarters with each other.

Meanwhile, the treacherous human queens who returned to the Continent during the last war have forged a dangerous new alliance, threatening the fragile peace that has settled over the realms. And the key to halting them might very well rely on Cassian and Nesta facing their haunting pasts.

Against the sweeping backdrop of a world seared by war and plagued with uncertainty, Nesta and Cassian battle monsters from within and without as they search for acceptance – and healing – in each other’s arms.

Barnes & Noble

Review

Read: April 2021

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Spoiler warning! There are major spoilers in this review!

Content warning: sex scenes, gore, violence, sexual assault, torture. Some of these topics might be discussed briefly in the review.

So I waited the last three years for this? Count me among the disappointed. It took a lot of consideration for me to settle on a rating for this, and even now I’m uncertain about the score I’ve assigned. I have so many thoughts on this book.

A Court of Silver Flames isn’t without its merits. First off, I’ve been a Nessian shipper since Day One, and this book fulfills my dream of seeing them finally get together. Second, I appreciate the emotional healing that Nesta, Emerie, and Gwyn undergo. I love witnessing the blossoming of supportive friendship between these three – and I love how they absolutely kicked misogynist ass in the Blood Rite. Finally, I see a great deal of promise in Emerie’s and Eris’s characters. Steadfast, reasonable, brave Emerie already has earned a special place in my heart, and Eris is fascinatingly flawed. Hopefully both of them will be further developed as characters in the next installment.

Unfortunately, my complaints about ACoSF far outweigh what I enjoyed about it. Much to the dismay of my grammar-loving heart, Sarah J. Maas has evolved a weird predilection for overusing sentence fragments. Sentence fragments can add dramatic effect when used judiciously; once the author begins liberally tossing them in, they become an annoyance that can only be overlooked if the rest of the story is solid. Maas employs them with almost no discretion. They pop up everywhere. Here are just a few examples:

She felt it a heartbeat later. The presence creeping toward them on soft paws.

Nesta seemed to glow with the attention. Owned it. Commanded it.

Nesta let him see it then. That she bore no ill will toward Feyre or the babe.

I actually looked back in some of my old Throne of Glass books to see if Maas has always been so fond of this writing style, and I don’t think she has. I noticed the frequency of sentence fragments really began to rise in Maas’s books around the time of Empire of Storms and A Court of Thorns and Roses. As of ACoSF, it appears that Maas has fully embraced this irksome pattern and doesn’t intend to rein herself in. Imagine it. If I talked to you like this. In these jagged fragments. Fragments that are disjointed. Fragments that interrupt speech and thought.

That’s fucking irritating, isn’t it?

Speaking of reining herself in, fucking hell, Sarah, dial back with the sex and horniness. Yes, I expect sex scenes in a new adult romance, and while I’m personally a bit more conservative about sex than a lot of people are, I don’t consider myself a super-prude by any stretch of the imagination. My problem isn’t that there are sex scenes – it’s that Maas seems to utilize sex scenes as filler content. There is so much sex in this book that I started skipping sex scenes not because I was offended, but because they were repetitive and generally not important. There is so much sex in this book that it gets boring. Even when they’re not having sex, the characters still think about it with such constancy that it’s a bit disconcerting. The viewpoint characters are endlessly, incorrigibly horny, and Maas spends so many words on that fact that the writing suffers because of it. No one can go seven pages without thinking about themselves or someone else gettin’ busy – and Maas absolutely has to tell you in detail about those thoughts. Instead of incessantly rambling about sex and how hot everyone is, Maas should focus her energy on developing the non-viewpoint characters she left to languish in the corner, only to be brought out to prop up our heroes.

This book lacks the intrigue and action I expect from a Maas book. Although I liked the Oorid scene and the Blood Rite, ACoSF is relatively devoid of the excitement that its predecessors had. The politicking and scheming and world-building potentials of this book are painfully underplayed, and Maas tries to compensate for that by contriving bullshit drama. Given the opportunity to delve further into the threat of Briallyn and Koschei or better explain Nesta’s powers beyond nebulous uber-powerful magic, Maas instead fabricates a last-minute sort-of love triangle between Eris, Nesta, and Cassian that lasts for less than a hundred pages and invents a convoluted, phenomenally stupid subplot surrounding Feyre’s pregnancy.

Seriously, the pregnancy nonsense might have been the biggest fault of the entire seven hundred fifty-page book. Feyre conceives a baby with Rhys, but because Feyre was in Illyrian form during the baby’s conception, the baby has wings. The baby’s bony wings will get caught in Feyre’s birth canal and kill her because of her High Fae anatomy. So what? you shrug. Feyre can shapeshift. Problem solved. Cassian had the same thought.

“So let her change back into an Illyrian to bear the babe.”

Rhys’s face was stark. “Madja has put a ban on any more shapeshifting. She says that to alter Feyre’s body in any way right now could put the baby at risk.”

So wait. Let me get this straight. Feyre can shapeshift her damn eggs, and those eggs are still capable of producing a viable zygote. Rhys knows that the baby’s wings will most likely kill his wife (and himself because of that stupid bargain they made to leave this world together). There are documented cases of High Fae women being killed by their half-Illyrian babies, and if they aren’t killed, they almost certainly will never bear another child. Grievous morbidity or death is certain. Yet even despite all of that, it’s still deemed too great a risk for Feyre to shapeshift so much as her pelvis.

Slam Dunk Baby!

How is the pelvis problem solved? Nesta – who has the power to imbue the House of Wind with a soul, Unmake a Made queen, and Make a brand-new Dread Trove, and who is capable of wielding all three components of the original Dread Trove simultaneously – must relinquish most of her power back to the Cauldron because she “doesn’t know how to save” Feyre from bleeding out. She unwittingly Made a new Dread Trove, but she has to “know” exactly what to do to save Feyre? Even with that weakness in her power, Nesta is somehow conveniently able to transmogrify both hers and Feyre’s pelvises to accommodate half-Illyrian babies with her power – never mind that Feyre can transform her own damn pelvis after she recovers from nearly dying in childbirth. This all becomes even dumber and more unnecessary when you consider the Blood Rite and the confrontation with Briallyn could have served as an adequate climax (although the Briallyn arc struck me as underdeveloped to begin with).

One of the worst parts about this whole thing is that Feyre is ignorant of the danger the fetus poses to her, and Rhys chooses not to share this information with her and orders his friends to shut the hell up about it. He loves Feyre and encases her in a fucking shield for much of her pregnancy because he wants to protect her so badly (um, ew), but he actively keeps this knowledge from her at her peril. Nesta tells Feyre, and his reaction is to tell Cassian to get Nesta out of Velaris “before I fucking kill her.” In addition to all of that shit with Feyre, he pulls rank on his brothers for asinine reasons, he’s unsympathetic to Azriel’s romantic situation, and he interferes in Elain’s love life out of concern for politics. In previous books, Rhysand is arrogant, sarcastic, and sometimes a bit too big for his britches, but ultimately he’s compassionate, loyal, and just. In this book, I hardly even recognize Rhys because he’s such a fucking prick.

This book is one of the biggest letdowns I’ve ever read. I consider myself a fan of Sarah J. Maas. Throne of Glass is one of my absolute favorite series, and I thoroughly enjoyed the first three books of A Court of Thorns and Roses. Sadly, A Court of Silver Flames fails to live up to – let alone exceed – my expectations of a Sarah J. Maas book. The pacing is inconsistent, the sex scenes are absolutely absurd, and two-thirds of the plot is stupid and/or underbaked. I’d like my twenty-eight dollars back, please.