Unnamed Prologue Thing:
Feyre is clearly having a nightmare about Amarantha and the third trial. It is very angsty. I know this is a thing Feyre should be angsty about, but it’s written in such a way that now Feyre mostly sounds like a whiny teenager.
Maybe I’d always been broken and dark inside.
Maybe someone who’d been born whole and good would have put down the ash dagger and embraced death rather than what lay before me.
[…]
I was the butcher of innocents, and the savior of a land.
[…]
Murderer. Butcher. Monster. Liar. Deceiver. I didn’t know who I meant.
The lines between me and the queen had long since blurred.
Am I totally out of my mind or did the last book let us reach some conclusions on our own? From what I’ve read so far, this book is terrible for this.
Feyre relives killing the Fae, but this time when the hood is removed, she sees that she’s killing herself! Symbolism alert!
A Court of Mist and Fury Chapter 1:
The chapter begins with Feyre vomiting. Crucial reminder: we are keeping close track of how many times vomiting occurs in the series for very important and serious cataloguing purposes.
Feyre informs us that it’s been three months “since Under the Mountain,” which continues to be a strange way to refer to this place. She’s plagued by nightmares like the one in the prologue. If you thought the symbolism was bad in the nightmare we saw, I bet Feyre’s dreamed way worse these past few months.
We get updates/reminders about the first book. Feyre is still getting used to her new Fae strength, and Rhysand hasn’t come to make good on their deal to take her away for a week. If it was always planned that he wasn’t going to be a jerk and force Feyre to spend a week with him every month, why not have him just tell her that at the end of the last book?
[Tamlin] never woke when the nightmares dragged me from sleep; never woke when I vomited my guts up night after night. If he knew or heard, he said nothing about it.
Well, why don’t you wake him up or talk to him about it the next day? In the last book, you two were able to talk about your feelings, so why not now?
It sounds like one time Feyre tried to talk to him about his own nightmares, and he didn’t want to. It’s weird, the book was so heavy-handed about Feyre’s angst, but it suddenly won’t explain why she doesn’t try to talk to Tamlin more than one time in the middle of the night about their mutual suffering.
And I didn’t think even eternity would be long enough to fix me.
Oh god, there’s going to be so much of this isn’t there?
A Court of Mist and Fury Chapter 2:
Tamlin and Feyre argue about how he won’t let her go help rebuild a nearby village. She also has a very distracting side-thought about Tamlin’s horses:
Sometimes, I wondered if the horses were just to maintain an appearance of civility— of normalcy. To pretend that he couldn’t run faster than them, didn’t live with one foot in the forest.
Wait. This seems super impractical. The obvious answer is that Tamlin gets tired…but if he’s got boundless Sexy Fae Lord energy, then why bother with the horses amongst other Fae who are used to powers like teleportation existing?
Feyre also super casually works into the conversation (with herself/us) that she and Tamlin are engaged:
My grip tightened on the leather as I tugged the horse to a stop, and the golden ring on my finger— along with the square-cut emerald glittering atop it— flashed in the sun.
Man, Feyre got super angsty AND braggy this book. Then she complains about wedding planning for awhile. Yawwwwwn.
It was bad enough that I’d been required to stand before the gathered courtiers and lesser faeries while Tamlin made his many toasts and salutes. Mentioning that my birthday had also fallen on that longest night of the year was a fact I’d conveniently forgotten to tell anyone. I’d received enough presents, anyway— and would no doubt receive many, many more on my wedding day. I had little use for so many things.
Look how broken Feyre is, she didn’t even tell anyone it’s her birthday, and she doesn’t care about materialistic things! She is so deep too now. And broken. Did I mention broken?
What’s bothering me most right now is that suddenly we’re reading every story about a princess who longs for adventure and doesn’t really want to be a princess. She’s trapped! She wants to be independent. But it feels like such a weird and abrupt shift to me.
Tamlin insists that “Amarantha’s beasts” are still running around, and it’s not safe for Feyre. She finally agrees and heads back to the house to complain to us some more.
I hated the bright dresses that had become my daily uniform, but didn’t have the heart to tell Tamlin— not when he’d bought so many, not when he looked so happy to see me wear them.
[…]
At least Tamlin didn’t object to the dagger I kept at my side, hanging from a jeweled belt. Lucien had gifted both to me— the dagger during the months before Amarantha, the belt in the weeks after her downfall, when I’d carried the dagger, along with many others, everywhere I went. You might as well look good if you’re going to arm yourself to the teeth, he’d said.
Firstly, this sounds incredibly unfashionable. Secondly, since when does carrying one dagger count as being armed to the teeth? I can’t believe for one second Lucien’s standards would be that low. The out of character behaviour within the first few chapters is APPALLING.
I had that— I had centuries ahead of me. Centuries with Tamlin, centuries in this beautiful, quiet place. Perhaps I’d sort myself out sometime along the way. Perhaps not.
We get it. Please, make something happen in the story!
Ianthe. The High Priestess, as well as a High Fae noble and childhood friend of Tamlin’s, who had taken it upon herself to help plan the wedding festivities.
Oh, a new character, I’m sure she will be super interesting, and maybe there’ll even be a weird dynamic between her and Tamlin or something. I’ll take anything at this point besides Feyre whining about wearing a dress.
while Tamlin was the one who paid for my everyday clothes, it was Ianthe’s eye that selected them. She was the heart of her people, ordained by the Hand of the Goddess to lead them from despair and darkness.
Damn it.
They wedding plan, and as they do so, I’m starting to realize Maas’ strategy here. She’s going to make things so fucking boring at the Spring Court that by the time Rhys inevitably shows up to take Feyre to the Night Court, we’ll all be so relieved to get away from here.
We get a ton of exposition, which I’ll try to summarize:
- Feyre doesn’t plan on inviting her family to the wedding.
- No one knows what title to call Feyre.
- 12 Priestesses govern the Fae world, which was somehow never mentioned in the last book, but is crucial to this one.
- For some reason even though she is an important and powerful Priestess, she is also moonlighting as a wedding planner.
- “Despite being a High Priestess, she and her family had escaped the horrors of Under the Mountain by running.” This happens all the time in this book. It starts to seem like basically no one was Under the Mountain even though it seemed like every court was there.
- Ianthe is interested in Lucien, but he doesn’t forgive her for running away from Amarantha and not helping them.
Later, Tamlin and Feyre make sweet love, and we find out they still have separate bedrooms. Tamlin sleeps in Feyre’s room every night, but she never goes to his. Wha? And she’s never asked him about this? I hope he’s hiding something really creepy in there that’s revealed to us later. It better not just be he’s keeping a dress in there to surprise Feyre. I can’t with these dresses anymore.
Feyre asks Tamlin what her title will be when they get married and if she’ll be a High Lady:
“There is no such thing as a High Lady.”
[…]
“High Lords only take wives. Consorts. There has never been a High Lady.”
“But Lucien’s mother—”
“She’s Lady of the Autumn Court. Not High Lady. Just as you will be Lady of the Spring Court.
Don’t you love it when something is both sexist and confusing?
Tamlin distracts Feyre with more making out, so that’s that!
There are quite a few more projects we’d love to tackle for the blog, and you can help make that happen! What??? YOU??? Fuck yeah, check out our Patreon account. We offer some rewards already, but additionally I swear for every Patreon dollar you pledge, Feyre will spend five minutes less complaining about dresses and wedding planning.
You are 100% right. By the time Rhys shows up, I hate the Spring Court so much that I’ll go anywhere else. These chapters are so annoying. When did Feyre get so whiny. How can Tamlin never hear her vomiting all night? I’m a sound sleeper and I think I’d notice a little bit.
I get really frustrated when stories rely on tension caused because two characters who could / should clearly talk to each other just refuse to do it.
“Don’t you love it when something is both sexist and confusing?” Yes!
I think we’re meant to be shaking our heads sadly because Tamlin is clearly ignoring Feyre’s suffering and is clearly a terrible guy and she should go running into Rhys’ arms because he is her mate and secretly perfect.
Ug yes, it’s such a boring way to create tension unless it has been established from way early on that this is essential to who they are as characters. I never got that vibe from Feyre or Tamlin in this way.
LEAST FAVE ROMANCE TROPE EVER, hell fucking yeah. if you can’t figure out a better reason for tension you need to find one because i’ll probably nope out of this unless the side characters are awesome or something.
While A Court of Mist and Fury kind of made me hate Tamlin, it still really annoys me that Tamlin’s marriage proposal to Feyre basically got the yada yada treatment from Sarah J. Maas. That just doesn’t seem like something Maas should have glossed over. For the record, I think Maas is a pretty good writer, but it really annoys me that she sometimes glosses over conversations that take place between two characters that I would consider to be pretty important by simply describing in them in two or three sentences; instead of actually including some dialogue from those conversations. I had the same issue with how Maas handled the followup/resolution between Feyre and Tamlin regarding their sexual encounter on the night of the solstice in A Court of Thorns and Roses.
I’m actually intrigued by the idea of a sort of post- Beauty and the Beast story wherein Belle realizes she has no interest in being a full-time princess. I’m not sure if that kind of thing makes sense for Feyre, though. With all that she’s been through, I’d kind of expect her to want a reasonably quiet life.
Yeah, I agree, the idea of the story itself is cool. I’ve read similar stories…I think one was Cinderella and she realizes that it wasn’t actually happily ever after. It’s more the execution here isn’t doing it for me. I think we should have seen more of the transition into this mindset firstly. Secondly, based on how Feyre was at the end of the last book, I would have expected her to have an unhealthy attachment to Tamlin right now and barely want him out of her sights and then both of them realizing how unhealthy this is and how actually they’re not suited for each other underneath once all the drama has died down.
The time has come. I’m starting a spreadsheet for the vomiting in this book.
This Feyre, with all the angst and the inability to talk about her feelings or tell Tamlin no–this is an entirely new character. She killed two Fae, but she never once thinks “hey I saved like thousands and thousands of others, maybe that’s worth something?” And also, yeah, it seems like no one was really Under the Mountain, so maybe that’s why she can’t get over it. It really was worth nothing if people could just run, lol. Honestly, if it was going to destroy her so much, she should have just refused. It would have been more interesting and actually made sense with her stubborn character.
We must accept Rhys and like him, though, so here we are. Writing!
From the sound of it, Suzanne Collins pulled off a character with PTSD much better in Mockingjay. I know plenty of people were frustrated with Katniss by then, but I didn’t mind it at all and thought it was done fairly well. This seems to be beating people over the head with Feyre’s SADNESS and SELF-LOATHING. She has plenty of reason to feel all that, but an author’s job is to balance a true state of the character’s being with something readers want to read.
Not to mention that it’s a bit of blow to readers who made their way through the first book and don’t even get a glimpse of Feyre and Tamlin being happy together after fighting for their love. Nope, just straight into misery-land. What a bummer to read.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Katniss’s PTSD was the only good part of the Hunger Games sequels. The Catching Fire and Mockingjay books never convinced me that they were stories that needed to be told, but the progression of Katniss’s mental state worked. It felt earned in Hunger Games in a way that it isn’t yet in ACOMAF. Every line from the prologue that Ariel quoted sounds like a Linkin Park lyric.
“FEYRE’S BECOME SO NUMB (she can’t feel you there)” ~ ACOMAF, page every single one.
Agree about PTSD in Hunger Games vs ACOMAF. I feel like this is a Patreon post waiting to happen (shameless plug).
This makes me think Maas had a very clear concept of the series, and then the first book ended in a way that wasn’t conducive to what she wanted to put in the second book because a finished story is never the same as the original concept, but then she just plowed ahead with the original plan anyway.
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My book was a freakin misprint missing chapter 5, which is how the all powerful google brought me to this hilarious synopsis. And now I am laughing and glad that other people feel the same about the beginning of this book. I like it, but I’m also judging friends of mine that claimed these books are the most perfect thing they’ve ever read?!? The sudden forced tension between Feyre and Tamlin within the first 40 pages was enough to make me question if I was drunk while reading the first book. Like I’m begging for her to mate with Rhysand after 4 chapters???? But, hey, I’m completely invested. Also, this blog stating Belle from Beauty and the Beast had Stockholm syndrome… I died.