The naga were sprung from a nightmare. Covered in dark scales and nothing more, they were a horrendous combination of serpentine features and male humanoid bodies

So. Looks like the book did blatantly appropriate Hindu deities, mix it will-nilly with European myths, and then vilify the hell out of them.

How perfectly despicable.

These new monsters decide to sit around and taunt her a bit, because apparently they are also James Bond villains, and she has time to scream and then use her bow and arrow to slice the rope on the Suriel’s snare (???) and that sets it free.

She’s never had any formal training but she can hit a rope. Why can no one ever be of average skill in a book, even when that’s a perfectly reasonable outcome?

She runs away, hoping that her scream alerted Lucien and that she can outrun the monsters long enough for Lucien to show up and help her.

One of them sniffed at me, those slitted nostrils flaring. “Scrawny human thing,” he spat to the others, whose smiles grew sharper. “Do you know what you’ve cost us?”

You’ve got her surrounded; if you’re that mad just fucking kill her already. I don’t understand bad guys (in any book) that will give deadly and dangerous chase (which by all rights should have ended in fatality) and then at the end of it suddenly they’re all “nah, I’ll kill you slow enough to allow for an escape.” If you’re going to be swiping at her with razor-sharp claws and intent to maul, then clearly you’re down with some mauling, so do it already.

Or else be less deadly during the chasing. Or just skip all this BS right here and just skip to whatever improbable thing saves the day.

For instance, in this book she starts stabbing them with her knife and then Tamlin shows up to finish the job. That could have been done without the taunting. That could have easily been all one thing – running to stabbing to rescue – with no break in the action for needless, explicit taunting.

I mean:

“You’ll bleed,” one of them panted, laughing under his breath at the knife I lifted. “We’ll bleed you nice and slow.”

There’s just something very disturbing to me about this. I get that it’s supposed to be disturbing, but in a meta sense. The creepy delight taken in making the character creepy, the prevalence of these sorts of sadistic taunting lines. The story is reveling in threats of violence that are purely for the sake of showing off “I can say creepy lines” and “aren’t my bad guys so bad.” I’m probably reading too much into it, but it still comes off as

You know what, I’m just going to call it grimdark masturbation. That skin-crawling feeling that someone else is taking an undue amount of satisfaction and pleasure in writing something awful, not for character or story or tension purposes, but just so they can cackle over their own grimdarkness. And that’s not fair, because who can really prove why something was written (certainly not me), it’s just a feeling on my end, but it’s still there. I am entirely the wrong sort of creeped out by these lines. I’m meta-creeped-out.

Okay, enough of my super vague problems.

After Tamlin dispatches the monsters, he comes to check on Feyre and tells her he was already chasing their “pack” when he heard her scream and came to rescue her. Feyre remembers he’s a high lord, and I still say he’s little better than a groundskeeper at this point in the story because, come on, that’s still all he’s doing.

No, he hadn’t been the only one to spill blood just now. And it wasn’t just my blood that still coated my tongue. Perhaps that made me as much of a beast as him. But he’d saved me. Killed for me. I spat onto the grass, wishing I hadn’t lost my canteen.

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

I don’t understand Feyre’s problem here? It’s one that seems to pop up at random. She’s fine hunting for food, which I’m sure got her plenty bloody, and she thinks about being fine killing monsters, and she was doing very purely in self-defense, but also suddenly I’m-a-monster-ness pops up? Because…reasons?

Come on, we finally hit on a book where all the heroine’s killing is fairly appropriate, let her own it.

“Not—not just for this. For saving my life, I mean.” I wanted to tell him how much that meant—that the High Lord of the Spring Court thought I was worth saving—but couldn’t find the words.

His fangs vanished. “It was … the least I could do. They shouldn’t have gotten this far onto my lands.”

Uh, he does have a point. He was literally already hunting them anyway; it’s not that much of a stretch that he kept hunting them in Feyre’s vicinity.

But I’m sure she’ll make that deep and meaningful while continuing to ignore all the words he’s said about keeping her safe and such.

But as for the history lesson it had been in the middle of giving me, about wicked kings and their commanders and however they tied into the High Lord at my side and the blight … I still didn’t have enough specifics to be able to thoroughly warn my family.

All we’ve heard about the humans being in danger is one off-hand “maybe, I guess, it could sorta happen ish.” Like, still warn them, sure, but if this is to be our plot…kind of a weak impetus.

Later, as Feyre is being lavishly pampered by Alis for still no reason I can see, she tries to bring up some questions.

“If more faeries keep crossing the court borders and attacking, is there going to be a war?”

[…]

I twisted in my seat, glaring up into her masked face. “Why aren’t the other High Lords keeping their subjects in line? Why are these awful creatures allowed to roam wherever they want? Someone —someone began telling me a story about a king in Hybern—”

Wait…subjects? War? What?

This book keeps pulling things up out of the blue and talking about them as if they’ve been part of the worldbuilding all along. Have monstrous type fairies always been part of the society? Because they’ve been treated like actual, literal monsters thus far. We’ve had no hint that they’re being ruled (in any way but the “keep off my lawn/forest” way) and no hint that any of these monsters belong to another governance. But now all of a sudden Feyre’s talking of subjects and wars and rulers actually doing some ruling instead of border patrolling? Hell, we don’t even see any hint of a society at all outside of this one palace, which has a mere four named characters in it total. You can’t have a world this thin and then throw that shit out as if we’ve been following along with your nonexistent ‘society’ all this time.

Alis tells her not to ask questions, because that’s what makes an interesting book, and then we learn instead that she’s basically adopted her dead sister’s two kids. Except not really, they live “somewhere else – far away.” So…in essence Alis has nothing to do with those kids except maybe sending them her paycheck? Who takes care of them? Feyre decides not to ask, because this book, y’all.

“I didn’t mean to question your dedication to them,” I said quietly. When she didn’t reply, I added, “I understand what you mean—about doing everything for them.”

Well I don’t. Sounds pretty abstract to me, since she’s not actually doing any things for them, someone else is doing all that. Which, I’m not saying is wrong, maybe those kids have another relative who is better qualified for childcare and Alis just loves them a whole whole lot but this arrangement is best. That’s fine. But Feyre talks about it like it’s similar to her situation, when Feyre was pretty bitter about having to physically carry the whole family’s tasks, so she should be well aware of the difference.

Feyre goes to dinner, there’s some mild banter, and when Lucien says she looks nice she brings up how fairies can’t lie.

Lucien leaned back in his chair, smiling with feline delight. “Of course we can lie. We find lying to be an art. And we lied when we told those ancient mortals that we couldn’t speak an untruth. How else would we get them to trust us and do our bidding?”

This book just cannot handle its own history, can it? It so badly wants to be a myth, to have fairies hold the same place in this world as they do in our own myths, but it’s just not possible when fairies have been a real, brutal, integral part of human history in this worldbuilding. Because if fairies can lie, I’m pretty sure SOMEWHERE in their long history of enslaving and killing humans, someone would have figured this out. Unless all fairies everywhere got together to agree to be as truthful as possible to keep the fiction alive, which seems quite a stretch.

“Iron?” I managed to say.

“Doesn’t do us a lick of harm. Only ash, as you well know.”

They fought a whole war against each other; this has to be known by now.

There’s some banter about what happened that day, and Tamlin reveals he found her list of “words I don’t recognize in writing so I’ll figure it out later,” at which point Feyre gets her hackles up and tries to leave. Tamlin stops her by talking about her family and how noble it is that she’s done everything for them.

“You actually snared the Suriel. A human girl.”

Despite myself, despite the afternoon, my lips twitched upward. “Is it supposed to be hard?”

[…]

he said with a half smile. But the smile faded. “A human who can take down a faerie in a wolf’s skin, who ensnared the Suriel and killed two naga on her own …” He choked on a laugh, and shook his head. The firelight danced along his mask. “They’re fools. Fools for not seeing it.”

Feyre has a point; it wasn’t that hard. Hit them with an arrow and a knife and then run away. Set a snare as instructed. She didn’t do anything outside the realm of human ability, common sense, or what Lucien told her to do. Like, I wouldn’t be able to do that, but that’s just because I don’t know how to tie snares or shoot arrows. And sure, she kept a measure of functionality while under stress, that’s always worth brownie points. But he’s saying it like it’s wildly impressive that a human being could do these things, instead of just impressive. And heaping on excessive praise like this, ironically, makes me think less of the character because my brain is railing against that excess. I’m forced to say “calm your tits, Tamlin, it wasn’t that good,” which discounts actions that were certainly worth a nod of respect.

Less is more, people. Don’t bludgeon your readers, or they’re going to get pissed at you. If your character was impressive, the reader will be impressed. If the reader wasn’t already impressed, throwing a parade isn’t going to change that.

Tamlin also drops the bomb that back in that war 500 years ago, some fairies actually liked the humans and joined their side, which is how they lasted long enough to actually get a treaty out of the deal. Which, while it does at least patch that hole, is boring. Sometimes (and I know this isn’t true, I’m being facetious) I feel like the only fantasy reader who actually likes humans. Can they just for once be able to hold their own against monsters, fairies, wizards, and the like? (I had this problem in Harry Potter, too.) I get the escapist fantasy of secretly belonging to the special class and leaving behind the boring normal world, but…um, the human world in this setting isn’t actually boring? Or it doesn’t have to be. It shares a wall with a country that leaks monsters; if you can’t make something interesting out of that you’re not trying.

Tamlin also says he altered her family’s memories so they don’t have to deal with worrying about her or having that night be something traumatic, and apparently that makes Feyre feel good enough to ask for paint and brushes so she can engage in her hobby. Tamlin says okay, seems happy to find out she actually likes something, and offers to show her their art gallery later.