A Court of Thorns and Roses

This reading experience was very similar to when I accidentally picked up 50 Shades of Grey thinking it would be a mystery/thriller (it had handcuffs on the cover! I was so young and unaware!). I thought this was going to be a YA fantasy, and based on its popularity, a fairly good one.

Wrong!!

This is 100% fantasy smut. It was both a terrible romance and a terrible fantasy. The world-building was hand-wavy and horribly incomplete; the magic system is never explained, at all, based completely on the author's whims of romance and necessity of plot. Characters' motivations do not make sense and there is little to no complexity in thought. It's a macrame of cliches from the fantasy/romance canon: some mixture of Hunger Games, Beauty & the Beast, and Game of Thrones (among others). Nothing feels original. No character has a personality.

I had several other issues with the plot line; for one, Feyre had no complicated feelings whatsoever when she found out (through blatantly expositional dialogue) that her lover, Tamlin, had captured her because the love of a human would break his court's curse. Wouldn't that make one wonder, at least a little, about that ulterior motive? And the sexy scenes are just... not for me, I guess.

And when it comes to the trials Feyre must face at the end – for our “strong” heroine, I found it frustrating that she really only survived one based on her own merit. Everything else was accomplished through some other character helping her through completely unexplained “poof!”-type magic.

All in all, this series just isn't for me.