I’m not going to blurb this because if you like Sarah J Maas, you’ve definitely already read it, and if you haven’t read Sarah J Maas, you probably don’t care at all about this review. So it will have SPOILERS, BEWARE. Heads up – I wrote this back in February, just days before ACOSF was published.

For those who care, I hate ACOTAR and love ACOMAF. I’ve read ACOMAF several times, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to re-read ACOTAR. The best I could do is this time around I decided to re-read just the parts of ACOTAR that Rhys was in because I wanted to see how I perceived him in the first book having now finished the series.

Anyways, I couldn’t help myself from launching into ACOWAR right after finishing ACOMAF (that cliffhanger!). Undeniably it is just not as good. I did really like some parts, but as a whole, this book is long and to be honest, kind of boring. The beginning is a fun ride with Feyre being so empowered, but then it turns out she pretty much completely f*ed Tamlin over, and consequently Prythian, so it kind of takes some of the joy out of it.

After that it’s a lot of running around. I mean, ACOMAF was a lot of running around too, but it was balanced out by all the awesome character development. Maas is soooo good at writing tension and flirting, but ugh her sex scenes CRINGE. Like can we talk about the fact that after Feyre leaves the Spring Court she basically wanders the wilderness for a full 7 days with no food, before being brutally attacked. Then when she finally winnows back to Velaris, her mate is like, ‘you smell, but let’s get it on’! Like girl, go eat some food first!

Then it’s just preparing for war, yada yada, a million battles, yada yada, Cassian staring at Nesta, yada yada. For a book with so much action, it’s surprisingly slow. Also, I feel like I’ve read this before, you know? Like, we already tried to destroy the cauldron once; we already had an amazing 7-high-lords-resurrection; and literally every romantic reaction is the exact same. Soulful brooding with deeply obsessive, creepy mating behaviour.

Here’s the excerpt Maas released on her instagram from ACOSF today “The first time I saw that look on your face, you were still human… and I nearly went to my knees before you”. I can only assume this is Cassian talking to Nesta, but like, WHO TALKS LIKE THAT?!? And also, how is this any different from Feyre and Rhys, I could literally believe that was Rhys talking to Feyre. Why are all Maas relationships so all consuming? There’s something said for having a bit of balance in your life, but every relationship in her books is this creepy possessive mating thing. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Rhys, but there’s only one Rhys. Can we get some variety here?

Anyways, I’m clearly going off on a tangent rant. You know what I did like about this book? Tamlin! I’m glad Maas redeemed him a little – poor dude has still some issues to deal with, but at least we saw some growth here. I also was into the whole bone carver/weaver/library demon thing, that was a nice side plot, as well as what Maas decided to do with Eris in this book. I love when authors take an evil character and give them more dimension. They can still be evil without it being the entire summation of their character.

So will I read A Court of Silver Flames? I am very much on the fence. I guarantee I won’t be re-reading ACOFAS, because that book was trash, but I am on the fence about Silver Flames. Apparently in my review for ACOFAS I said I would be reading the next book, but so much time has passed I’ve kind of lost my zeal for the series. I’m tempted to read it because these books are now fresh in my head, but I don’t really like Nesta that much and Sarah’s little blurbs on social media are not convincing me that she’s going to do anything new or interesting in the next book. She did leave some doors open at the end of ACOWAR for where the plot can go, but as for characters, I’m not sure how much more I can grow with these people. They have great characterization in books 1-3, I just don’t want to keep beating a dead horse.

I definitely won’t be paying money for the book, it’ll have to come from the library, so I guess only time will tell if I continue with the series or not. Sorry to all the dreamers out there. I gave this a 4 as my initial rating. Now I think it’s probably closer to a 3, but I’m going to leave it as a 4 because it is still a pretty epic series and even though it was somewhat lacking in execution, Maas did create something magical.