A Court of Mist and Fury (Court of Thorns and Roses, #2)

by Sarah J. Maas

[Berls]

Original review (February 2017):
By the end I really enjoyed A Court of Mist and Fury and I’m super excited for the next one. But GAH!!! It started SO SLOW! Seriously! Feyre spent the first third of the book moping around, not standing up for herself, and literally wilting away. I think the point was to make sure that when she starts making the moves she makes, you feel it’s the right decision. And for some people, maybe it was necessary. For me, it really wasn’t.

Now I couldn’t remember how I felt about the sort of love-triangle characters from A Court of Thorns and Roses because I read it so long ago, so I looked back at my review. And as it turns out I did like Tamlin in the first book, but I wasn’t sold on him. In fact, I said, “at times I had a hard time because those I had decided I hated I was starting to seriously LIKE.” And I said that in reference to Rhysand… who only grows on you more and more in A Court of Mist and Fury. I personally love that Sarah J. Maas managed to take the bad guy and cast him in a new light.

And once Feyre starts to stop moping and return to the woman who had the guts to endure so much to save everyone from the curse, I started to love her again too. In fact, the characters turned out to be my favorite element of A Court of Mist and Fury, probably because they were so complex that you have to spend a lot of time with them to really see their true colors.

The plot was good, though sometimes it meandered a bit and lost me, to be honest. I think I probably needed to be better focused than I was at times. And I guess the loose connection it had to a retelling of Beauty and the Beast is entirely gone now…? I guess that’s kind of weird for me, that it started off as a retelling and now has taken on an entirely different life. I’m okay with it, but it was weird.

I feel like it’s also worth noting that I would NOT consider this young adult, but New Adult. I think I’ve heard it categorized as YA a few times, but there are sex scenes in this that make me blush… it’s definitely New Adult territory. I think I even categorized the first one as YA, but this isn’t!

I continue to enjoy Jennifer Ikeda’s narration, though I have a feeling her pacing must be really slow because I listened at 2.5x speed and it felt like my normal 2x. But that might work well for some people. And her voices are really good – I feel like the characters were all distinct and her voices definitely helped bring them to life. I’ll be continuing the series on audio, for sure.

All-in-all it was a great listen and I look forward to the next book!

Reread review (June 2021):
Okay, so from that review I guess I didn't sleep through the entire book last time, but I remembered absolutely NOTHING. I guess when I said "I think I probably needed to be better focused than I was at times. "I wasn't exaggerating. I felt like I was reading it for the first time. I'm so incredibly glad I decided to reread before continuing with the next book - which I leapt right into. Another note, I listened at 2x this time and it didn't feel slow at all. So maybe that was my problem last time... I think I was in a rush to read it (deadline of some sort maybe?) and pushed through too fast...

So I stand corrected, the plot wasn't meandering at all for me this time. And some of the action and magic were fantastic. But I do agree with my statement that the characters were great. I especially loved Rhysand's inner court. And that ending! It's not exactly a cliff, but close enough! I couldn't wait to start the next one and abandoned my plans to read something else in between.