My Latest Obsession with Faeries

If you can even get your hands on a copy of it, read it. All my local libraries have it on hold for the next year, which tells me it must be good. My sister picked it up from a librarian that described it (Poorly, on purpose) as follows, "Girl kills a wolf and then a guy that plays the fiddle follows her around forever." Silly as it may sound, the premise was intriguing to us both. Tis the exact kind of escape from reality that we both needed.

The protagonist, Fayre (Pronounced Fay-Ruh) is an artist at heart, and it serves the descriptions of her surroundings well. She describes her surroundings with an artist's eye, and as an artist myself, it is highly immersive. Good for those types of readers that "watch a movie" in their mind as they read.

It has an almost typical fairytale beginning, girl provokes an evil magic, monster with evil magic comes to her with a proposition, life for a life, she must make the decision to go with the monster or perish. So she leaves her family and everything she's ever known to travel into the faerie lands with the beast, where nothing is as it seems.

There she learns that she is the monstrous one among them. It is difficult to make friends, or at the very least, allies, with any of the fairies that only see her as the wrong that she has committed. She cannot trust anyone, and no one seems to trust her either.

Once she has discovered that there truly is no way to get back to her family, there is no way to fulfill her mother's deathbed promise to take care of her family, she is left empty and confused about her purpose in life. So, she wanders the halls of the grand manor house in the woods, sketching her surroundings, familiarizing herself with the best places to hide.

And for now, that is about as far as I have gotten. I truly cannot put it down. There's roughly forty chapters, but don't let that intimidate you. They run by quick.

As far as how well the book reads, it is enchanting. The structure of sentences is varied enough that it is easy to read while still being highly entertaining. The characters are compelling and make me desperate to get to know them and understand them. There are some intense action scenes which I did not expect from a story about faeries, but it has kept my attention in a vice grip. These are not your typical Tinkerbell type fairies. They're more like werewolves and vampires, without the broody nonsense.

The typical remark in a book review usually includes something about how descriptive it is. Fantasy tends to go overboard and drag the narrative down, but that isn't the case with Maas's narrative style. Descriptions are beautiful and to the point. No garbldy-gook. Makes me wonder if Maas is also a visual artist of some kind. I wouldn't doubt it.

Word on the street is she's coming out with another, to make a total of six books. So far. I do plan to read all of them. Her Court of Thorns and Roses series goes first A Court of Thorns and Roses, published 2015 , second A Court of Mist and Fury, published in 2016, third A Court of Wings and Ruin, published in 2017, fourth A Court of Frost and Starlight, published in 2018, and fifth A Court of Silver Flames, published in 2021.

Beyond this series, she also has a series of shorts about an assassin, and another series as well. She has been a published author since 2012, when I was writing for Fanfiction.Net. There's no title released yet for the sixth book, but me and my sister will be eagerly awaiting it.