The highly anticipated third instalment in Sarah J Maas’s Crescent City series, House of Flame and Shadows hit the shelves in late January of this year.
The book represents powerful themes of freedom, rebellion, survival, and love, as we follow the multi-dimensional lives of Bryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar. The 850 pages deliver a satisfactory conclusion to the ambitious plot, despite the repetitive characters and painful-to-read moments.
Warning: Contains Spoilers
The book opens in a world familiar to most readers – the Night Court, the land we know from A Court of Thorns and Roses. Bryce has used the slightly complex rules of intergalactic travel (duh) to create a gate to Velaris, the secret city of the Night Court. She has left her mate (husband, lover, whatever), to be brutally tortured in the dungeons of the Asteri. The Asteri are the trilogy’s villains and are intergalactic parasites which feed off the magic of the inhabitants of the planet. Are you keeping up?
Maas’ worldbuilding is impressive. It has become universe-building. Immersive, thorough, and unique, it’s a marvel to experience. With nods to her first book series Throne of Glass scattered throughout the novel, and directly incorporating lore and magical items from A Court of Thorns and Roses into Crescent City, it’s a wonder there aren’t a million magical plot holes. And of course, there’s more to come, with ACOTAR 6 confirmed.
The characters were at times frustrating, and often predictable. It feels as though Maas has copied and pasted a template of sassy, ‘unpredictable’, powerful, part-human, part-fae women into each of her books, and sure they all have a different hair colour, but the baseline is the same. All of them come with a sexy, strong, winged male as their lover. It is beginning to get a little repetitive, and House of Flame and Shadow indicated no sign of changing this. However, there was a mild improvement in diversity – keyword mild – with two queer couples making frequent appearances despite being side-line characters. It was hard to tell anyone’s ethnicity, but the book felt very white-person-heavy. In a world of mermaids, dragons, and Pegasus, surely there’s some ethnic diversity in there?
‘An ambitious and engaging plotline’
Despite this, the book delivered everything you would expect from a Sarah J Maas fantasy novel. An ambitious and engaging plotline to overthrow a greater evil, some graphic descriptions of torture (including the knawing off of someone’s hand – not a great moment for me), wild and impressive magic, and effective storytelling which certainly immersed you in this wild and wonderful world.
It was refreshing to see the book move away from the smut the author is renowned for, with only a couple of short scenes which I felt were clumsy and uncomfortable, but were over quickly – with more focus on the literally magical orgasms than anything else.
The battle scenes at the end felt slightly rushed but provided a satisfactory conclusion to the planning and scheming of the characters. The destruction of the Asteri was questionable – I struggled to grasp the concept of forcing them into a black hole. It makes for an effective way of killing the villains, but was a challenging concept to get behind, physics aside. This did break the spell of the book.
Maas’ fear of killing off characters remained. Not one main character died. They came close, but they did not die. This was disappointing. Surely it would be more effective to kill off someone in a huge, world-altering battle? Anyone? An emotional scene or two would have pushed this book up a star, rather than making for a bit of a predictable drag.
To conclude, House of Flame and Shadow is a wonderfully exciting and immersive book but leaves a lot to be wished for. Give it a read if you’re up for braving the multiverse of Sarah J Maas. To help you out, we recommend Braw Magazine’s guide to Sarah J Maas.
Despite my criticism, I will be purchasing and devouring the next instalment.
Featured Image Credit: Alice Pollard
Journalism student at the University of Stirling & BRAW Magazine editor 24/25 and 25/26 🙂
You can see my portfolio here: https://www.clippings.me/alicepollard
