EMERGENCY!!! EMERGENCY!!!
i've ascended to my higher purpose: being a hater
Lit fic friends, please forgive me — I PROMISE next week I will write about something different and almost completely rooted in reality without a drop of romance. Maybe a small drop.
My range when it comes to the ~romantasy~ genre is extremely limited. It was only through the machinations of Sarah J. Maas, who took me through the highest highs and the lowest lows, both in story and in literary skill via the A Court of Thorns and Roses series, that I realized this was something I could devour with relish. I have since expanded to the Fourth Wing universe, which I won’t get into here, and another one of SJM’s series, Crescent City.
ACOTAR was a journey (future books pending). The first book was trash, but kept me intrigued enough to move on to the sequel. The sequel leveled up the romance to an insane degree and provided us with perhaps the best male romantic interest to ever exist. While the writing did not particularly enamor me, the fun more than made up for it. Then the third book, which closed up the first big narrative in the series, was very boring. I don’t really want to discuss the ones that come after with other narrative perspectives because I’m biased and I don’t care for Nesta or any man who isn’t Rhysand.
The first two Crescent City books followed this pattern. The first was a huge clunker of a mess with some incomprehensible world-building that, once again, somehow left me intrigued enough to read the sequel. And House of Sky and Breath is my favorite Maas to date! It was so fun and I got really invested in it and it ended on the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers, which left me chomping at the bit for the third book.
I regret to inform you, however, that SJM has retrodden the path she created, and, sadly, House of Flame and Shadow is not a great conclusion to the Crescent City series. (There’s another CC coming out at some point down the line, but based on what she’s said, it’ll focus on different protagonists. Ergo, I’m considering this book a completion to this particular story.)
A brief synopsis for anyone not in the know (though I imagine you’ve clicked out of the newsletter by now if you are in said unknown): House of Flame and Shadow follows Bryce Quinlan and a band of other characters in a world with a combination of magic and technology and weird alien overlords and fae and angels and shit.
First of all: The entire book felt rushed even though it was NINE HUNDRED FUCKING PAGES. It is very clear that Maas did not afford herself enough runway to resolve the numerous plot points and loose ends that she presented us at the trilogy’s beginning. I’m inclined to say that she should have taken at least another book to wrap things up; however, I would be afraid that THAT book would have ALSO been about 1000 pages each, and no one wants that.
At the same time, the first part DRAGS. I never really do this when I’m on my kindle, but I started to get bored and snuck peeks of nearby chapters to see if anything would happen. Bryce, who I think is a very fleshed-out and great protagonist in the first two books, is annoying as shit here. We also barely get a real glimpse into her head. I liked the multiple narrative perspectives in HOSAB, but here, we’re simply not presented with enough reason to care about them all. It’s stretched too thin as even more POVs and THEIR complicated stories are added. In this particular genre, it really behooves the author to go with ONE first-person perspective instead of FIFTEEN TO TWENTY INDIVIDUALS each given a chapter of about 2-3 pages before they’re cycled out.
And this gets into my next point: not only are there too many characters, there’s too much going on. This results in everything feeling as though it’s been wrapped up hastily. So many plots that seemed to be set up so carefully in HOSAB are resolved within the first several chapters, and some, quite frankly, I think were forgotten about. Even the unnecessarily complex world built up in the first two books feels hollow, a mere placeholder and setting for the events rather than the freaky, dynamic city we know it to be. The stakes just did not feel high here, probably because everything was so muddled together and big reveal after big reveal kept cascading in with absolutely no time to digest it.
You may think, well, isn’t this a romance too? That often makes up for an unwieldy plot. Unfortunately, the romance here between Bryce and Hunt is immensely dull and feels needlessly shoehorned in. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d really rather it not be there at all. I actually cringed at the sex scenes. CRINGED! This core relationship was never the most exciting — honestly, I could take it or leave it — but at least there was some actual tension and steaminess in the previous books and, at least in HOSAB, a truly fun and engaging story full of discovery took the lead. Sadly, here, everything is rather grey and bleak and of the same texture, like a flavorless pâté.
I worry that when we give authors a certain level of reverence and hype, their storytelling automatically declines in quality. In this case, I am convinced that Maas’s editors are terrified of her. She said in interviews leading up to the book’s release that she scrapped her first draft entirely and rewrote the whole thing throughout the editing process and my GOD it shows. Every sentence, besides pages and pages of exposition from wildly ridiculous sources, is about three words long, and this makes me want to vomit.
To give the novel some credit: I stayed up all night to read this, so it wasn’t so bad or boring that I wanted to put it down. It’s a testament to Maas’s world-building that I remained invested in the characters and the story as a whole. I was rooting for them, and I even got a little emotional at the end. So props for that. And there are some fun references that I enjoyed and am keen to learn more about when I break down and read CC4 somewhere down the line.
I guess shouldn’t have expected SJM to pull this one off, given her track record, but I just had such high hopes following HOSAB and I really thought she was on the right path. Just for the sheer, sheer disappointment of it all, I am settling on a 2.8/5. Not the worst book (or even the worst fantasy book) I’ve ever read, but it might be the sloppiest by a long shot.
I’ll discuss a few more points in detail at the bottom of the newsletter that involve some light plot spoilers/spoilers for the series at large for those who have read this or never plan on reading it.
Thank you for reading. I hope I am able to entertain even if you have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about. If that’s the case, I envy you.
STOP READING HERE IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE VAGUE PLOT OF HOFAS AND THE CC SERIES AS A WHOLE!
THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE!
Okay, mentally ill friends, the normies are gone. Let’s discuss. Light to moderate spoiler talk:
I said this before, but I was never invested in Bryce and Hunt’s relationship and I really just don’t buy that they’re mates. That wasn’t really an issue for me in the last book because I was pretty engaged in the story at hand. Here, their romance falls flat; there’s no chemistry between them. Also, I get so irritated when they call each other mates because it simply does not fit in this world that SJM is trying to build. I wasn’t even rooting for either of them to get with anyone else, which just goes to show how little I cared about them as a pair.
Ruhn and Lidia felt promising, but were swallowed up by the chasm of this book’s endless plot points and loose threads just waving in the wind. These two really should have been their own book if they were going to be this big of a part of the story. As it stands, the secondary and tertiary love stories are just irksome.
The ACOTAR crossover was incredibly disappointing. I saw a reddit theory (yes, I’ve been scouring r/crescent city for validation) that SJM’s first draft was wayyyy more of a crossover with that world, but she rewrote it because she realized that it was moving away from being a real Crescent City novel. Personally, I think she ended HOSAB with a mic drop and had zero plans of how she’d actually use the characters. As it stands, it was incredibly boring and didn’t give us anything to work with. Bryce sucked so bad in this part that she made me like Nesta. Nesta!!!! My friend Bella called that whole part clickbait, and I couldn’t agree more. There was very little reason for her and Az to be there. This better have been in service to his ACOTAR book that we have been PROMISED!
Wayyyyy too many MAJOR reveals with absolutely no time to process that are simply tossed away. Hunt’s parentage? The fucking Fendyr heir? Tharion in love with a dragon and then maybe whoever he got arranged married to?? Lidia’s fucking kids? Did she need to have KIDS?
INFO DUMP INFO DUMP INFO DUMP. There are literal fucking holographic videos that they watch that answer every single question they have about their world’s history and defeating the Asteri. It’s simply insane. I think someone on reddit compared it to Star Wars, so now I can only associate this scene with Nute Gunray and his friend whose name I forget walking down the hall being tormented by a mobile Palpatine:
Everyone gets too powerful too quickly! The final showdown is pretty anticlimactic! There’s no real personal sacrifice on anyone’s end! Nothing feels earned! All local enemies stand down and help them! I’m a sucker for a happy ending, of course, and I thought it wrapped up sweetly, but perhaps a bit too sickly-sweet, even for fans of the genre. I thought they were supposed to be up against conquerors of worlds. Instead, Ithan becomes a Prime at the same time Hypaxia takes over the world of the dead and Bryce somehow taps into absurd amounts of power that help her melt brains out that simply feel unearned. I just … nope!
On that note, we get a parasite antidote that unlocks everyone’s powers about two chapters after learning about the parasites for the first time. There is so much fucking Deux ex Machina in this book it’s almost unreal.
If you want to discuss this in even greater detail, perhaps exchanging theories from the pit that is r/crescentcitysjm, get in touch anytime. And send this to your friends who may be experiencing the same feelings as us.