This chapter opens up with Feyre going on about how Tamlin sent her home with trunks full of ‘giant, uncut gemstones’ that would buy her ‘a thousand estates’ and, erm, that doesn’t seem quite right to me. I mean, gems are nice and all, but mansions are super fucking expensive. I know this could be read as hyperbole, but this book hasn’t shown a propensity for…restraint in any sense of the word, so why should I assume it’s being anything less than ‘serious’ now? It’s just another over the top nugget meant to pile on specialness where it is, not only undeserved, but serving no point. The family is already wealthy again, so stacking on more wealth doesn’t actually do anything for the storyline, it doesn’t change anything.

Even his limp was improved—made miraculously better by some tonic and a salve a strange, passing healer had given him for free. I would have been forever grateful to Tamlin for that kindness alone.

Something like this is another point against the book’s heavy-handed nature. Her father’s handicap never had an emotional impact on me because it was never given space in the story to do so. The man was a stereotype from the start, and a very quiet one because the book was so intent on piling on ‘woe to Feyre’ that nothing ever served a purpose other than that. Her father’s leg wasn’t something that made his life harder, it was something that made her life harder. I wasn’t given the time or space or reason to care about her father on his own merit, so having him ‘healed’ has no emotional payoff. In fact, with this line, even his healing isn’t about him. The limp leg was about making Feyre’s life harder, and healing the leg was about making Tamlin look better, and the owner of the limp is immaterial to the whole saga. Which…is pretty much how our culture treats handicaps, but it’s still gross.

Feyre talks to Elain about random things, including the fact that Nesta went to see her but never quite made it to ‘their aunt’s house, and she’s been acting strangely ever since.

Days passed. The shadow within me didn’t lighten, and even the thought of painting was abhorrent.

Well, I mean, it’s not like it was that big a feature anyway. When every previous mention of painting was “ugh, this is so awful,” is this line really supposed to mean anything?

Even worse than my disappointment that no such thing had happened was the creeping, nagging fear that he was in danger—that Amarantha, whoever she was, would somehow hurt him.

Okay, so, villains.

This Amarantha person is a terrible villain. What do we know about her? Nothing. We have second-hand reports that she’s got some romantic history going on, and she’s powerful. But we haven’t seen her or her effects in this novel. She’s been a non-entity that gets vaguely mentioned here and there. She has had no presence in this novel thus far, so all claims of Feyre about being worried about her feel hollow and like authorial puppet-strings. If the character has an emotion that the reader can’t share in, it feels false. Now, sometimes this means that reader isn’t the audience (it’s a common problem for white editors to dismiss diverse books that would have resonated with their intended audience because they don’t share experience and/or aren’t willing to stretch) but in the case of “is the villain dangerous,” audience isn’t really the problem.

Really the problem is this book’s terrible lack of integration. It’s not telling one continuous storyline with subplots; it’s telling one story, followed by another story, followed by another story. During the love story, there wasn’t mention of monsters and danger, but it wasn’t part of the story, it wasn’t integral to the action, so it had no weight. Now that we’re getting into the next story, the book isn’t going to bother setting up the villain because it thinks it did so already with all those random mentions. But again, those hold no weight, so the villain isn’t properly introduced. (Not that I really want her introduced this far in; that would have its own set of problems.) This is why editing is so, so, so important at literally every level of writing. Even if you’re plotting and making an outline and you see problems like this, fix it then, because if you think you can fix structural problems in a second draft…well, you can, but it’d basically be like writing another first draft, and who has time for that?

This book desperately needs an entire new storyline – not new scenes, not changing around lines, a new story. One that has room for all the plot lines to weave together and be important throughout the book.

Off the top of my head…let’s say Amarantha shows up at the cottage demanding blood, and Tamlin is with her and says “I need a new jester, let’s claim her life that way instead of the death way.” Boom, we have the book’s main villain right at the start and being threatening. (Plus it fixes Tamlin’s emotional whiplash.) They get to Spring Court, and forget all that glamour thing, it really is a functioning court. Feyre has to stick with Tamlin to maintain the image of being his ‘pet’ or whatever, and she gets to see the inner workings of keeping the Spring Court safe from all these random attacks, which they slowly realize are not random at all but being coordinated. By who? Well, that’s the mystery! Feyre is rightfully upset at being viewed as a human-pet-jester, but has to stick by Tamlin to stay safe, because heaven forbid Amarantha find out they’re not holding to the deal that was agreed upon back at the cottage. That puts the two in close constant company, and a love story can develop on the sidelines of all the court/fight/mystery stuff. Also, with a whole court in play, we can have more characters than just two pretty boys not saying stuff. Maybe have Amarantha show up a few times to ‘visit’ and be menacing and drop easter eggs about how she’s really behind all the ‘random’ attacks.

But, ya know, then there would have to be a major female player actually on the page that isn’t Feyre, so apparently we can’t have that?

Back to the book we have. Feyre goes back to their old cottage to reminisce and be morose.

The front door—shattered and broken the last time I’d seen it—had been replaced, but one of the circular windowpanes had become cracked.

Wait wait wait wait.

You had windows? As in…glass windows? In a preindustrial society while being totally dirt poor?

….dafuq?

I gazed again at that sad, dark house—the place that had been a prison. Elain had said she missed it, and I wondered what she saw when she looked at the cottage. If she beheld not a prison but a shelter—a shelter from a world that had possessed so little good, but she tried to find it anyway, even if it had seemed foolish and useless to me.

She had looked at it that cottage with hope; I had looked at it with nothing but hatred. And I knew which one of us had been stronger.

Okay, so, I agree that keeping up hope during dark times is a sign of some immense strength. That kind of optimism and fortitude and such is truly impressive.

But being mad at bad things isn’t a sign of weakness. Anger, when used properly, begets change. Besides which, unfair things should make you angry; that’s perfectly right and natural. And the idea that anyone should look at a horrible situation and smile is a tool of oppression, literally. Promoting this idea through general culture and media is how people in power get to shame and belittle and silence those who are angry at injustice. (The idea can’t come directly from them, because if it’s too obviously self-serving it all falls apart. If it comes from ‘the world in general,’ it looks a normal thing. IT’S NOT.) If you can oppress people with horrible living conditions and an unfair economy and biased laws, then have people from practically every level of society say “sit down and shut up” when they get mad about it…I mean, that’s systemic oppression. That’s the top tier of society getting the middle class to do their dirty work.

You can be angry without being cruel and capricious, and if anything, Feyre actually represents that pretty well. The sisters are a good spectrum, with Elain being the smiling accepting, Nesta being cruelly-angry, and Feyre being in the middle. But instead of presenting her as such, the book is acting like she’s weak and cruel, which plays right into that harmful narrative.

Feyre goes into the old village and hands out money to all the poorest people. Which should make us feel good about her (I guess???) but it’s…like, half a paragraph and most of the words are given over to how exhausted she is. And she moves right from that to boys as she sees Isaac walking about town.

Also, it’s really hard to feel good about Feyre giving over ‘small bags of silver’ when last chapter carried on at length about her wealth. Also, also, ‘small bags of silver’ don’t do shit in the long term if systemic problems are still there. Why not give up a fist-sized ruby or two and make improvements to the whole village so it can be a bit more self-sufficient, eh, Feyre? Or at least hire someone who knows more about that.

Granted, a straight-up bag full of money can be very helpful to a poor family…if they have the environment to do something with it. I’m sure there’s lots of improvements that can make a farm more productive with a one-time influx of cash, or a small business that can be started. But she has consistently presented this entire village as being poor and run down and just all around sad that I find it hard to believe the ‘dump of cash’ approach would do long-term good for those families. What good is a small business in a place where everyone is too poor to do more shopping? Probably the best thing those people can do with her bags of money is pay to relocate.

Not that this book has ANY FUCKS AT ALL to give, because again, it was half a paragraph followed by more boy stuff.

Human—he seemed so human, with his gangly limbs, his simple handsomeness, but that smile he’d had moments before had transformed him into something more.

God, even your offensiveness is getting boring, book.

The ball my father was throwing in my honor was in two days, and the house was already a flurry of activity. Such money being thrown away on things we’d never dreamed of having again, even for a moment.

But you’ll spare no more than half a paragraph for those poor people.

If there was indeed a surge in the blight happening over the wall, if that Amarantha woman was sending out creatures to take advantage of it …

If, if, if, if only we could actually know a few things instead of having our plot hang on ifs…

Anyway, Nesta shows up to inform Feyre that Tamlin’s glamour never took hold on her; she basically refused to let it and used a piece of their destroyed table to remind herself periodically. She went to try find Feyre in Prythia and couldn’t get in past the wall. It’s a nice little moment, with Nesta showing a genuinely emotional side without budging on her stiff personality to do it. The two sisters quasi-bond, and Feyre even tries to teach Nesta how to paint.