A Court Of Wings And Ruin (A Court Of Thorns And Roses book 3) by Sarah J Maas (book review)
‘A Court Of Wings And Ruin’ is the third and final book in the ‘A Court Of Thorns And Roses’ trilogy. This means that this review will contain spoilers for the previous two books in the series.
This book starts right at the end of book two, ‘A Court Of Mist And Fury’, so Feyre has decided to go back to the Spring Court in order to spy on Tamlin and his dealings with the invading king. During her time there and the rest of the book, Feyre has to decide who she will trust as she meets more and more of the Fae High Lords. Feyre’s sisters come more to the fore in this book as part of her Fae family. There is a lot of double-dealing and political events along with a huge final battle involving some characters we already know and quite a few brand new characters.
As this is the third book in a series, where war is promised, I did go in with a bit of apprehension wondering what Maas would do with the characters, in particular my favourites, Mor and Amren. I was also massively daunted by the sheer size of the book! To be honest, it took me ages to get through as it didn’t really grab me until about three-quarters of the way through when the actual war started. Previous to this, it was all a little too political and overdramatic for my taste. Maas does write great fight scenes and scary characters well, but there is just too much filler in between these great scenes to keep me interested. Maas seems to fill most of her books with far too much melodrama; absolutely nothing can happen without someone growling or it being a deep and meaningful event with lots of glances to different people. I wouldn’t mind some melodrama if it actually went anywhere but nothing seems to happen as it just fills out the pages. It feels like Maas is trying to ramp up the tension and you think that something bad is going to happen, like a random death a’la George RR Martin but, no, just nothing.
Having read a few of Maas’ books now, I know that she seems to be putting a little more raunch into her books, so this is a trigger warning for huge amounts of sex scenes in this particular book. I felt that there were far too many scenes of this nature, I don’t mind a few but these really did seem to take over the book. To be honest, most of them could have been missed out making the book about 50 pages shorter and the story would have lost nothing. I would say that this book should not be read by younger audiences as there is a lot of strong adult content.
Personally, I’m glad that this series was only three books long as they were just getting exponentially larger. There are rumours that there will be some novellas or even full-length novels about some of the side characters from this series of books. There are definitely some I’d like to read more about, especially some of the characters that have been introduced in this last book. Thinking about it, I wonder if some of the new characters were simply added by Maas so she had some interesting characters to write about in her new books.
Overall, Maas is not a bad writer and this is not a bad book but she needs to write to her strengths rather than trying to write a massive book just for the sake of it. Maas does write good fight scenes, some truly emotional scenes, I did have a cry at one in particular and some excellent sections where horrifying things happen, but she just doesn’t need to pad the rest of the book as much. The level of hype that Maas gets is not deserved in my opinion and I know I’m going against the crowd with this but there are much better writers out there. I’ll keep my eye out for the short stories promised in case any of my favourite characters are mentioned and I would prefer if they were short stories otherwise I’m not sure I’ll be reading much more Sarah J Maas.
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Sarah Bruch
July 2017
(pub: Bloomsbury Children’s. 720 page paperback. Price: £ 7.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-40885-790-8)
check out website: www.bloomsbury.com