I finished this book a couple months ago and didn’t write a review because this book is so much. . . I had to process what I had just read. 

I should start off clarifying that I read this and the first book knowing I wouldn’t like them. Once I got into the first book I had a really hard time reading it because it very much isn’t the type of read I enjoy. I don’t think that anyone that does enjoy these books is stupid or bad for enjoying it. Humans have always enjoyed weird, uncomfortable, ugly, bad things because for them they aren’t weird, uncomfortable, ugly, or bad. And when I say bad I don’t mean morally bad, I mean not done well. It’s bad the same way that popcorn, soggy from too much butter, is bad. Someone will definitely like it, and to people that love butter a lot, or didn’t know you could put butter on popcorn it’s transformative.

I also want to say that I love romance and fantasy, but I haven’t found many romance books that I love. I don’t know what it is (that’s a lie, I can point to all the things I dislike) but when the plot or main focus is on the romance, especially when it’s hetero romance, I get the ick. I find it cringey, stupid, cliche, lazy, and unrelatable. I should note that I am on the aro+ace spectrum so many of the things (like getting turned on because someone is attractive and talking to you) that are relatable to allo people are just awkward and cringey to me. BUT! BUT I don’t think that means the slop being served up as sexy and romantic is actually good and just not to my taste. I think that when you are a good storyteller your readers, from all sexualities will enjoy your stories because the whole point in writing stories is to captivate the audience. I say this because there are romances that I have enjoyed and seen others find books outside their preferred genre that they greatly enjoyed. Every once in a while there is a book from a genre you generally dislike but you find wildly good, like so good that you’re obsessed with it. Sure, many people just aren’t going to like certain things. But there’s a difference between reading a book that just isn’t your genre and reading a book that’s just the stalest slice of white bread served on a gold platter. (The gold platter in this analogy is the story concept) I have read many books that were good - good descriptions, complex characters, consistent world building, smooth pacing, solid ending - that I just didn’t like. This book is not one of them. Again, people that enjoy this series are not stupid, ignorant, or purely horny fake readers. I have read and enjoyed some truly diabolical fanfics because they relax me. We all deserve our heaps of garbage as long as it doesn’t poison our neighbors and helps us get through the day (week, month, year etc).

Some people don’t know this but SJM is a really bad writer, on a grammatical, sentence structural, and prose level. If she wrote a college essay her professor would ask her to stay behind after the lecture so they can schedule a meeting. If she were in a writing class and it was time to review her paper, the first minutes of the class discussion would be silent as her classmates were trying to find ways to tell her that rewording the same sentiment ten times does not a emotional scene make. Or a romantic one. Using prose to write an emotional scene is like, top tier writing choice and in prose repetition is a powerful element. Like if our mc is falling from a great height and the author says, “they fall down down down.” It’s good pacing because falling from a great height takes time and “down down down” takes us with the character physically as the character falls and emotionally as they prepare for the pain of landing. But describing how scared the character is for two pages does the opposite. It should not take two pages of shuddering breaths and whipping hair etc etc etc for the character to land or be caught. SJM pauses her story so she can show us how many words she can dress up prettily and incorrectly. Prose often breaks sentence structure rules because prose uses rhythm to communicate feeling. SJM is bad at building up the emotion to transfer a reader from the story’s reality to the character’s emotional response. So the huge emotional claims and discoveries that the characters go through do not fucking matter. Feyra’s feelings do not change her situation and they definitely don’t make sense because SJM did not give Feyra a solid enough personality or backstory to support her feelings. So often I’d come to a part of the story where Feyra used her emotional logic to understand the physical setting or other people’s situations. It was confusing because I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to be understand this moment as a major fuck up on Feyra’s part or a character growth moment. Because SJM doesn’t show the difference between emotional intelligence, trauma responses, or the surrounding world. 

Feyra is as stupid as ever. Writing her inner thought life does not make her philosophical or emotionally intelligent and telling the reader how fucking great Rhysand is does not make him great and him not physically forcing her to do what he wants does not make him an ally to women. It makes him barely standard. Most men can’t force a woman to talk to them even when they are sexy af because women have separate bodies that they can use to walk away, fight back, and communicate with. Men are often stupid and abusive enough that women often extract themselves subtly but they are still separate beings that can and often do make their own choices whether men like it or not. Rhysand acknowledging that it would be incredibly inappropriate to force Feyra to join his war is like. .  . yay he’s not going to kidnap her. .  . yay he’s not abusive. Even if he did try to force her, Feyre could still fight back so it’s not like his decision on whether to force her or not would actually change her decision. (Except it would because SJM would write it so Feyre wouldn’t have enough Will to be anything other than grumpily malleable to whichever sexy man she’s supposed to be weak for). Like a guy not abusing women doesn’t make him great and him agreeing that women should not be abused even when it makes his life inconvenient is not exciting. And him being a good guy outside of that still does not entitle him to a woman’s attention. He should not touch her suggestively without her explicit consent even when he means her no harm because her body is not his. Lower back touching is fucking gross when the toucher doesn’t have permission to touch the touchee. Face touching is borderline inappropriate. Even when the toucher is attractive.

Rhysand and Feyra’s mating relationship was incredibly heteronormative and adding brutality and women’s objection to the mix did not make it better.

The fight scene was awesome.

I need to address Feyra’s mental health journey because it was vomit worthy. First off, I am right because not only do I have trauma but I have some of the worst and because of it I have mental illnesses that I’ve been dealing with for more than a decade. That said, every one responds differently to trauma and recovery looks different for everyone. There are still some very common symptoms and coping mechanisms that survivors tend to have. Feyra’s trauma responses weren’t wrong but her recovery was and her inner monologue. A handsome kind guy treating you right does not erase bone deep trauma. They can make it easier to recover but they can not make it disappear. I would have liked to see Feyra’s recovery take much longer and have scenes with the panic, dissociation, and apathy that often follows an episode or trigger. And then the following anger. But the trauma  and recovery was not important to the story for SJM so she couldn’t be realistic with it. Instead of lying about representation it would have been better for SJM to just not have that plot point at all. Romance and trauma recovery do not mix when the story is more about falling in love with sexy men than it is about trauma.

Feyra should have been made smarter. Her relationship with Rhysand would be like 5x more interesting and angsty if she wasn’t such a fucking preteen. Feyra is meant to be a strong woman. Instead she’s so stupid and horny and emotional that she can’t think without her love interest guiding her thought by thought. So she most definitely can’t make good decisions about sex or men. 

The last 3-4 chapters were the stupidest shit I read in the entirety of the two books. I feel like I lost a part of my soul with the high lady reveal and Feyra’s last chapter because it was so fucking white feminist and toxic masculinity fetishistic. It was basically like reading, “I love that my man is on the raw meat diet because that means that he is the most alpha and could throw me across the room but he doesn’t because he loves me so much. We love each other so much we can read each others minds and he said that to him, I'm even more important than his guy friends because I’m just that smart and tough.” It feels like it was written by a 13 year old. Toxic pairings can be really interesting because they actually have relatable mental issues. This is not that though.