The ball was a blur of waltzing and preening, of bejeweled aristos, of wine and toasts in my honor.

Riveting, really.

Why even bother throwing her a ball if the whole thing takes up one page, barely gets described, and she spends the whole time moping? This makes no sense to me. It’s like the author is grasping at straws, hoping something will catch her interest again soon, and wound up with all these boring half-scenes. Which is fine, but delete them upon editing. What is the deal with this, are publishers just so determined to jump on the “longer is better” fantasy bandwagon that they’ll leave in stuff that’s little better than notes?

The next morning (because, seriously, that ball was a page-long study in pointlessness) the family talks about how sad it is that Claire Beddor is missing and her whole family was brutally murdered. Um…random? Feyre remembers that Claire is the false name she gave to Rhys when he showed up, but even still, she’s been home for a long time now and to have this come up out of the blue is weird. Especially after so much stalling.

I pushed back against the guilt, the disgust and terror. I had to get answers

That would be a first for this book.

And if something had happened here, in the mortal realm, then the Spring Court … then those creatures Tamlin had been so frightened of … the blight that had infected magic, their lands …

Could you finish a fucking sentence? I already have little enough idea what this blight is, shit like this makes it sound like the book doesn’t know either.

Anyway, consumed by…authorial boredom, I guess, Feyre decides to go back to Prythian and tells Nesta to keep everything secret and be ready to move the family at the first hint of trouble.

and Tamlin … Tamlin was one of the last bastions keeping the other courts in check—the deadly courts.

….news to me.

“Father once told you to never come back,” Nesta said, “and I’m telling you now. We can take care of ourselves.”
Hey, I’ll take this over ‘you’re too good for us.’

She packs up and gets a horse and says goodbye to her family.

I had to get back—had to see what had happened, had to tell Tamlin everything that was in my heart before it was too late.

But…

…why?

There is no inciting action here. Okay, the Beddor’s died gruesomely, but the only thing that puts a time table on is maybe seeing if Claire can be rescued. Nothing else has changed and there’s no hint that anything has changed and there’s never been a time limit. And yet this book is trying to play things off as being tense and having Feyre rush back to fairyland as if there’s suddenly a ticking clock.

Ticking clocks are good, especially with action plots. They propel things forward and cause tension. But they have to…you know, exist first.

After a long boring ride, she gets back to the Spring Court only to find the whole place empty and in tatters. Dun dun dun!

blood. There were splatters of it everywhere, along with small puddles and smears down the gouged walls.

Um, so…this really shouldn’t be the last thing you describe? That just seems weird to me. Why would you go on about broken pottery and ripped doors and tapestries when there’s pools of blood hanging around? Lead with the most important thing first, and I’m pretty sure everyone would agree pools of blood are pretty important. Not to mention smelly. Wouldn’t it make sense, especially from a first person narrator, to have them narrate things in the order they see them? Because this order makes it seem like Feyre noticed property damage before she noticed fucking bloody carnage.

Priorities a bit fucked there, darling.

Feyre wanders around, trying to make sense of the damage, doing remarkably well for someone who’s had no experience. And no, it’s not just like ‘tracking,’ despite the book’s paltry efforts in that direction. Alis shows up to give us a random 11th hour infodump about Amarantha.

She’s the high queen of this place, but 100 years ago she was an emissary from Hybern, another fairy country ruled by a bitter ‘evil’ king. There’s a backstory-within-a-backstory about her sister falling in love with a human – oh god do not do backstories inside a backstory I beg of you – and it’s all pretty trite. Anyway, Amarantha played nice in Prythian making with the diplomacy but planning to take over and then she did. She did a spell to take people’s magic as part of her takeover plan.

“There is no blight but her. The borders were collapsing because she laid them to rubble. She found it amusing to send her creatures to attack our lands, to test whatever strength Tamlin had left.”

Well that’s…utterly boring and useless and far too easy. Who needs complex problems to solve when you can just punch someone in the face to fix things instead?

Okay, you want to know why this backstory is the worst? Not because it’s a massive infodump and super cliched, although it is. No, it’s because it’s being told – at great length and in great detail – while they’re standing in a ruined house with Feyre’s great love kidnapped. Feyre asks “what happened” and Alis goes into a hundred years of political history and Feyre lets her because the book has no choice. It procrastinated itself into this hole. But if you’d just found out your lover was kidnapped and were standing in the rubble of his house, would you put up with this? Or would you said FUCK HISTORY WHERE IS HE?????

There was ZERO point to withholding all of this information thus far in the novel, as evidenced by the fact that it’s just hastily rushed out to no effect here. And now that it’s being shoved into the wrong spot here, it’s utterly killing the tension of Tamlin’s kidnapping.

“Where’s my boyfriend?!?!?!?!”

“Well, you see, in the beginning…hold on, I have charts.”

No. Don’t murder your own emotional scene like this.

OMG you guys this backstory isn’t over. We also get all the details of how the mask curse thing happened. Amarantha got the tinglies for Tamlin, he didn’t want her, bullshit bullshit bullshit happens, Lucien loses his eye, she says “I’ll throw a party to make it all better, bring your people and wear masks,” Tamlin rejects her at the party and says he’d rather marry a human.

Odd that Alis was fucking at this party and yet has nothing to say about it except the typical infodumping stuff. It’s a pretty soulless rendition of this information, which makes it all the more awkward and dump-y. It’s just…monotonous. There’s no tension (since we’ve decided to break for a fucking history class) and so few personal details or emotions from either character that I might as well be reading the author’s notes.

She said he had seven times seven years before she claimed him, before he had to join her Under the Mountain. If he wanted to break her curse, he need only find a human girl willing to marry him. But not any girl—a human with ice in her heart, with hatred for our kind. A human girl willing to kill a faerie.” The ground rocked beneath me, and I was grateful for the wall I leaned against. “Worse, the faerie she killed had to be one of his men, sent across the wall by him like lambs to slaughter. The girl could only be brought here to be courted if she killed one of his men in an unprovoked attack—killed him for hatred alone, just as Jurian had done to Clythia … So he could understand her sister’s pain.”

Well that’s…convoluted, but I can get behind it. I mean, I could have if it had been worked into the plot instead of just dumped on me, because when you introduce it all at once it sounds silly. But imagine her actually working to slowly find out that Tamlin was deliberately sending his men out hoping one would get killed? Imagine her confronting him about why he would do such a thing? Dramatastic.

But nope, it’s just a line.

This does make it even weirder that Tamlin showed up busting shit down and screaming about killing people way back in Ch 2, though. Like, dude, what was that even for?

Amarantha knows humans are preoccupied with beauty, and thus bound the masks to all our faces, to his face, so it would be more difficult to find a girl willing to look beyond the mask,

Yeah, a jewel encrusted piece of artwork is just so off-putting.

Oh my god, Alis is still talking . Telling us all that drama stuff that would have had so much more impact at literally any other point in the story. None of this is actually important and Tamlin is still kidnapped.

This fucking book. This fucking fuckity fuck fuck of a book. You guys, why would anyone do this? Why would any publisher let this go? It’s a whole book of no one talking followed by the character that wouldn’t fucking shut up.

“And where are they now? Are they allowed to live on their lands, like Tamlin was?”

Really, this is a question you ask BEFORE asking where Tamlin is NOW?

First she doesn’t notice blood pools, now she doesn’t care about her kidnapped lover…are we sure Feyre is even human? Like, maybe she’s some almost-perfected-but-not-quite version of AI?

Three days in, Andras finally ran into a human girl in a clearing—and you killed him with hate in your heart.”

But I had failed them. And in so doing, I’d damned them all.

1) and I will never stop saying this, but she didn’t have hate in her heart. She was hungry and numb.

2) she didn’t really fail so much as was COMPLETELY UNINFORMED. For as long as this backstory is, not one word of it says Feyre couldn’t have been clued in at some point.

Hell, given the rules as we’ve heard them, Tamlin could have posed as a human and rolled into town saying “I caught a fairy, which one of you lovely ladies wants to have the honor of killing it?”

But no, no one wants to think of loopholes, that wouldn’t be playing fair. I guess.

“All you had to do was say that you loved him—say that you loved him and mean it with your whole useless human heart, and his power would have been freed. You stupid, stupid girl.”

SHE

DIDN’T

KNOW

Fuck you.

and seized him, along with most of the court, and brought them Under the Mountain to be her subjects. Creatures like me are too lowly for her—though she’s not above murdering us for sport.”

I tried not to visualize it. “But what of the King of Hybern—if she’s conquered Prythian for herself and stolen his spells, then does he see her as insubordinate or as an ally?”

Okay, has anyone thought maybe Feyre doesn’t love him after all? I mean, that’s not really a…well, any kind of emotional reaction to finally getting the news of what happened to the guy.

Or is she just absurdly fascinated by history lessons?

Finally – finally – after a whole chapter of backstory and a brief summary of her musing over the book so far (it really doesn’t take long) Feyre demands to be taken to Under the Mountain.

Sheesh, took you long enough.