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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4.5/5
Pages: 751
Started: 6 August 2022
Finished: 7 August 2022
Summary:
Since the war with Hybern, Nesta Archeron has done everything in her power to forget the bloodshed and her devastating transformation from a human to a High Fae with immense power: conjugals with strangers, dancing at cheap pubs, and glasses and glasses of wine. But nothing really helps to take away the memories and keep her dark power at bay. Finally, Feyre puts down her foot and forces Nesta into the House of the Wind to train with Cassian and work in the library below. As Nesta begins the slow process of healing from her mental wounds with help from the powerful Illyrian warrior, she begins to understand that her powers--and her strength--might be integral to stopping the looming war with one of the Mortal queens.
Thoughts:
As I wrote on a post-it note when I lent this book to Amelia immediately after finishing it the first time, this book hurts like hell, but it's so good. A lot of elements of ACOSF are extremely painful, especially to me. I hate when the protagonist switches and I have to reevaluate my loyalty, and I despise the pregnancy trope with all my heart. So portions of this book were filled with an inner ick and yuck that I did not enjoy. And honestly I thought Nesta and Cassian's relationship fell a little flat. Restraint usually is more effective for me in a romance than hate sex (with the glorious exception of Holly Black's The Cruel Prince series) so I was not particularly invested in the relationship.
But the rest of it . . . The Valkyrie stuff killed me both times I've read the book. It's so badass, and it's infinitely cool that Nesta, Gwyn and Emrie are the matriarchs of the new Valkyries. They worked so hard, and their training and its results were amazing. Nesta and her friends' perseverance in terms of physical training was impressive and inspiring, if a bit provocative of jealousy. I would love the opportunity to train like that with so much time and help. But their mental perseverance and healing were really cool too.
I liked the way Maas integrated real-world PTSD and mental health coping techniques into a fantasy world. It wasn't seamless, but the idea of a fantasy novel being flawlessly immersive is a fallacy: many authors try to avoid words that are evocative of a real-world civilization, but every word of a book written in a real-world language is inherently tied to that civilization, and thus avoiding religiously tied words or the like is pointless. But I digress.
Two really exciting things about reading this book this time were the connections and predictions I found.
- In the book characters talk about an ancient race that ruled over the High Fae long ago. They give it a different name, but could it possibly be the Asteri?
- There was a possible explanation for how worlds fit together in the book as well: that the different worlds were stacked, at different points in their timelines, but possibly with portals between them. This makes a lot of sense considering the events of HOSAB.
- I know everyone in the fandom is all caught up about whether Elain or Gwyn is going to end up with Lucien, but why is no one talking about how Mor and Emrie are going to end up together? Emrie checked Mor out several times, and blushed when mentioning how pretty she is. So I'd guess she's bi, and is going to come out to Nesta and Gwyn by giving them a sapphic romance novel to read. But honestly, as long as Mor actually ends up with a woman, I'll be fine with whoever it is.
I'm super curious about how Crescent City and ACOTAR are going to merge--which will come first? Which plot will take precedence?--but I guess we'll just have to wait and see. In the mean time, I'm hoping to have time to re-read the Throne of Glass series before school starts. Fingers crossed I make it.