REVIEW: A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES

"A Court of Thorns and Roses" by Sarah J. Maas, published by Bloomsbury in 2015 is about this girl Feyre, who lives in a little hut in the woods. Her life is all about providing for her family, her crippled dad and her two sisters. She does that by hunting, what she´s really good at. 

One day in winter she enters the forest and comes across a wolf, who appears to be a fairy from the neighboring country called "Prythian". When Feyre notices the wolf´s nature, she kills him out of hatred for his kind. 

But Feyre doesn´t go unpunished: she has to pay the price when another fairy crosses the border between Prythian and the human world to get her. A life for a life.

So much for the plot.

Let´s get to the point where I talk about my opinion on the book.

- no spoiler -

When I first saw the cover, I honestly felt a little reluctant about this book. Even though everyone kept saying that the cover looks gorgeous, I personally thought and still think that it looks crappy. It looks very high-fantasy and kind of gothic, what was very deceptive to me. Only by judging this book by its cover, I expected a cheap story.

Fortunately I listened to everyone on youtube telling me that it is absolutely worth reading it - and they were so right!

When I read the first few pages, I wasn´t really sure what to think about it, because you already knew what was going to happen by what is written on the back side of the book and it didn´t seem to be very thrilling or something. I was so wrong.

Even though I usually don´t like fairies, especially when they are male - it just doesn´t seem to be very masculine and attractive to me -  I kept reading.

Although mask-wearing and shape-shifting faeries are not my favorite kind of characters, I condoned them. And at some point they even stopped bothering me, because there was just too much suspense to pay attention to something that unimportant.

The main characters I did like very much, even though Feyre seemed to be a little weird in the beginning. In the early stages I didn´t get why she did so much for her strange and cold-hearted family, but little by little you got to know her and her situation and I started to like her. 

After I read the first half of the book, I was addicted to it and I couldn´t stand not to go on reading it. I thought it was just about Feyre - whose name I pronounced so horribly wrong in my head - staying with the feary-guy to pay for her misdoing. 

Honestly, I didn´t expect this huge dimension the story had. There was such a strong love, so many complex characters with complicated relationships and an epic history of the whole empire. 

The best part of it was that all of this was unforeseeable, but still not out of clear sky. All the time I was wondering about the mysteries and secrets Feyre was wondering about as well; and when Feyre and thus me discovered the truth, I was amazed by how intelligent Sarah J. Maas plotted the whole story. It didn´t seem like she made up a weird and abrupt plot twist. It was there all the time, I just didn´t see it. All in all, I loved it despite my aversion at first.

                           

At goodreads I rated it five stars.
See you!