At Feyre’s request, Tamlin takes her to a study to…I have to admit, I have no idea from this passage what she plans to do in there. She seems to want to write a letter home, which is fair enough, but that’s not what she’s doing.

Asking them to write it would be too humiliating. I could hear their words: typical ignorant human. And since Lucien seemed convinced that I would turn spy the moment I could, he would no doubt burn the letter, and any I tried to write after. So I’d have to learn myself.

I guess she’s teaching herself her letters, but…why would that circumvent Lucien burning them? Does she think there’s some method of posting such letters that DOESN’T go through the people in charge? Does she plant to give it to a helpful songbird?

It wasn’t entirely my fault that I was scarcely able to read. Before our downfall, my mother had sorely neglected our education, not bothering to hire a governess. And after poverty struck and my elder sisters, who could read and write, deemed the village school beneath us, they didn’t bother to teach me.

This is some super contrived bullshit right here. Like, super-duper contrived. Why not just say she was 3-4 or so when they hit poverty? Because then her mother’s deathbed promise wouldn’t make sense? Well it doesn’t make sense already, so that’s no great loss. Why not just say she learned, but it’s been a decade spent without any reason to need her letters, so she’s very rusty? That is very much a use-it-or-loose-it skill, especially if she wasn’t a study-minded eight year-old to begin with.

This book is trying way too hard to make Feyre’s family terrible, and I’ve yet to see any narrative payoff for giving her a terrible family. The story would be playing out exactly the same if everyone in her family loved and supported her. There is no need for this, but more to the point there is no effect from this.

With a shaking hand, I did my best to copy letter after letter onto the ever-growing list I kept beside the book. There were at least forty words on it, their letters malformed and barely legible. I would look up their pronunciations later.

Is this learning to write, or is this learning penmenship?

Also, Feyre is an artist, wouldn’t straight-up copying of letters be pretty easy for her? Blind scribes are a thing; you don’t need to know what a word means in order to write it prettily.

I suppose the study was more of a library, as I couldn’t see any of the walls thanks to the small labyrinths of stacks flanking the main area and a mezzanine dangling above, covered wall to wall in books.

Yeah, my brain went directly to the Beauty & the Beast library. Also that sounds like a HUGE space to have stacks AROUND A MAIN AREA and also a mezzanine; why call it a study to start with?

While wandering around and looking at the rose garden outside the window (because of course) she finds a mural that tells the creation story of Prythia. Basically the world was dumped out of a magic cauldron.

The map spanned the entirety of our world—not just the land on which we stood, but also the seas and the larger continents beyond. Each territory was marked and colored, some with intricate, ornate depictions of the beings who had once ruled over lands that now belonged to humans. All of it, I remembered with a shudder, all of the world had once been theirs—at least as far as they believed,

Well hang up, earlier you said a large chunk of the world IS still ruled by the fairies. So why now talk about it like the rule of the fairies is off in some mythical time period that no one is sure if it’s real or not? Could you please keep you canon straight, book?

The book seems to want a very standard urban fantasy of “fairies living in a secret separate world,” which is fine, but once you start introducing all this other shit YOU’VE ENTERED A DIFFERENT KIND OF FANTASY. It’s literally a different subgenre. And frankly it’s one I like better so I’m rather pissed at all this secret world fairy tale bullshit getting in the way of my FAIRES RULING THE EARTH AS MALEVOLENT MASTERS MWAHAHAHA. Because that would be awesome, but no, we only get tantalizing hints that are then crushed by the plot holes.

It was hard to look at the next panel. It was so simple, yet so detailed that, for a moment, I stood there on that battlefield, feeling the texture of the bloodied mud beneath me, shoulder to shoulder with the thousands of other human soldiers lined up, facing the faerie hordes who charged at us. A moment of pause before the slaughter.

The humans’ arrows and swords seemed so pointless against the High Fae in their glimmering armor, or the faeries bristling with claws and fangs. I knew—knew without another panel to explicitly show me—the humans hadn’t survived that particular battle. The smear of black on the panel beside it, tinged with glimmers of red, said enough.

Then another map, of a much-reduced faerie realm. Northern territories had been cut up and divided to make room for the High Fae, who had lost their lands to the south of the wall. Everything north of the wall went to them; everything south was left as a blur of nothing. A decimated, forgotten world—as if the painter couldn’t be bothered to render it.

Yes, the humans were being slaughtered by the thousands by the fairies who far outmatched them in strength and magic and then…the humans won?

I still don’t understand this. More to the point, I don’t understand why Feyre doesn’t question it. Like, if this was just the fairies’ version of things and they kind of glossed over losing the war, fine, countries do that all the time. But this is clearly Feyre’s understanding of things as well, has been from the very start, and yet she’s NEVER like “but humans must have done something badass to be able to win and all that.”

Apparently there are seven ‘territories’ in the fae section of Prythia, and the part that was given to the humans was “Spring Court” lands. Also they are currently in what remains of Spring Court lands. So…does Feyre just already know about these courts and just never bothered to mention it to us before? Because the map isn’t labled; she’s getting all this off symbols.

It’s getting harder and harder to make sense of the worldbuilding gaffes in this book as they just keep piling on top of each other. Everything is so unconnected and just plain weird that it becomes impossible to keep track of what’s “supposed” to be in this world.

Anyway, the other courts listed are Autumn, Summer, Winter (obvious enough) Dawn, Day, and Night. (Why is there no Dusk?)

Also there’s a magic mountain somewhere in the middle of the world.

Good lord, this is a lot of infodumping via mural. Like, we’ve had the world explained to us several times (and in several variations) so far, but none of this could have been worked in earlier? It’s really like the author just remembered/thought of all this just now and thus wrote it all in one dump. This is what editing is for, people! So when you think up “cool” things halfway through a book you can go and fix the first part instead of trying to mash a round peg into a square hole!

With that thought, I went back to my little table.

Infodumping sidebar over, I guess. Moving on.

You know something is important to the book when at the end of it you have to write in a “so anyway, moving on.”

Tamlin comes in to offer to teach her to read/write better, and they bicker for a while about how she doesn’t trust him. …and then once alone again, Feyre mopes for several pages.

Real scintillating storyline we’ve got going here. Just, yup, I’m on the edge of my seat. Info dumps and moping.

After deciding that she does, in fact, need to work with the people who know things in order to learn things, she…seeks out Lucien. Odd choice, given he doesn’t like her but Tamlin keeps offering to help. Sure, she says she doesn’t trust his motivations, but…why is Lucien better? He actively hates her; does knowing someone doesn’t like you actually make things any better?

Twenty minutes later I had tracked down Lucien in his bedroom. I’d marked on my little map where it was—in a separate wing on the second level, far from mine

But how did you know it was his, rather than any other random bedroom?

She randomly and awkwardly asks him how to catch a Suriel (????) and he gives her all the information she needs and also a knife, because haha conflict what’s that?

Apparently a Suriel will answer any question asked of it if you can catch one, so she heads out “to get answers,” but not after a full page of more moping. Because we are setting a blistering pace here.

Lucien, I decided as I crept up to the faerie in the birch glen, really, truly wanted me dead.

She says, right before launching into a description of the thing she just caught using his advice. (it’s basically a Dementor.) Except how do you figure that, when he warned you against going, then gave you defensive advice once you made it clear you intended to do it anyway? And the beast is well and truly snared, so even if it looks scary, I don’t think that counts as Lucien wanting you dead.

He’s had plenty of other ways to kill you, come on.

Anyway, she asks the Suriel if there’s a loophole to get her home, it says no, then she asks about Tamlin. Turns out he’s the “High Lord” of the Spring Court. Given how much Feyre has gone on and on about how ‘empty’ his place is (conveniently every time she wants to wander around) I find this really, really…well, silly. And BORING. Seat of government being used as nothing but set dressing? *yawn* God, what even is the point of this book?

Also for someone in charge of a seventh of this ‘country,’ he sure does have a lot of time to sit around and do nothing. All we’ve seen him do is deal with fairy-monster incursions. He’s a fucking groundskeeper, not a “High” anything.

“And what can be done about this blight that has spread in Prythian, stealing and altering the magic? Where did it come from?”

Want to know why this is all exceptionally boring? There’s zero amount of nuance or care. Feyre (and by extension the book) is treating these questions and these issues are all or nothing concepts, so every time they come up that’s all we get. Bludgeoned with the entire concept at once. If it’s not a whole answer all at once, then we get nothing, and since we can’t have the whole answer this early in the book, we get nothing. It’s just a repetition of some broad concepts that we’ve already heard, with very little (if anything) added each time we hear it. Plus, with Feyre not giving a shit about any of the smaller aspects, it makes her sound like she doesn’t care. “I got questions. Oh, um, and I guess can you answer the meaning of life? No? Eh, whatever, shot in the dark anyway.” If Feyre doesn’t care enough to pick apart the matter and really understand it, then it doesn’t seem like a real plot. There’s not enough weight and meat there to make it an active part of the story, instead it’s something that gets brought up quickly and dismissed quickly, which kind of by default relegates it to side plot territory.

Also apparently there’s some super mean king in a human-free island across the sea that will be a villain at some point. (How did he get to be human free but not any of the other places? I mean, they clearly wanted to keep their land, they fought a war over it. GIVE ME ANSWERS, BOOK, THIS IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM FOR YOU.)

But then DUN DUN DUN, there’s a new monster coming.

“The naga—faeries made of shadow and hate and rot. They heard my scream, and they smelled you. Free me, human. They will cage me if they catch me here. Free me and return to the High Lord’s side.”

Shit. Shit. I lunged for the snare, making to put away my bow and grab my knife.

Uh, Feyre, why? Just run. Do you really care if one monster eats another monster? I mean, will something bad happen if you don’t let the Suriel go? (That’s a legit question, by the way, we have no idea what status this thing has. Lucien didn’t bother much with her snaring one except to say it’s dangerous, so we can kind of assume it’s somewhere near beastial levels, but still. It talks and knows things and says its older than the Courts, so…???)

Alas, no answers for us. We never get answers. Sigh.