The seductive and stunning #1 New York Times bestselling sequel to Sarah J. Maas’s spellbinding A Court of Thorns and Roses.
Oh. My. Gosh. Let me start by saying: SPOILERS AHEAD!
GO NO FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WANT SPOILERS!
BE WARNED: THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS A COURT OF MIST AND FURY BOOK REVIEW!
One of my biggest complaints about the first book in this series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, was that it was kind of… flat. Boring. For a lot of the book. It did a great job building the world during that time, but it didn’t feel like much… happened. Until things DID happen, which was about 60% of the way through and I was HOOKED.
I was trying to figure out how to get the next book when I realized my Spotify listening hours had reset and I could start to listen there! Once I realized that, I dove in and was immediately hooked.
Like I said in my review of the first book, I’d absorbed spoilers at some point, and the spoilers were: there was a character with an R name who was a big deal. So when Tamlin was presented as the love interest I was kind of… meh. And then. And then RHYSAND showed up. I knew where to invest my time 🙂
Here’s a quick recap of how we got to book 2: Feyre, a human, lives in a land dwelled by humans right below a wall separating human land with Faerie land. The faerie land, called Prythian, was being ruled by an evil queen named Amarantha. She’d cursed a faerie named Tamlin and his whole court (he is High Lord), the Spring Court (which is basically his territory). This happened and that happened and they thought Feyre might break the curse. Until it didn’t and Tamlin, Feyre’s love interest, ended up with Amarantha in a place called Under the Mountain. Feyre finds him there and offers herself up to participate in 3 challenges in an attempt to free Tamlin.
Again, more of this and more of that happened. Rhysand, who is the High Lord of the Night Court, seems to be Amarantha’s willing servant. After the first challenge, Feyre is in real bad shape with a busted arm and death on the horizon. Rhysand appears and offers Feyre a binding agreement – he will heal her in exchange for her spending one week a month at his court for the rest of her life. She eventually agrees.
More of this, more of that and before I knew it, Feyre died! She’d completed all 3 challenges, the last one requiring her to take innocent lives – and yet Amarantha sucked so much that she killed her. Then Tamlin convinces all the other High Lords to give her a drop of their power and revive her. Hooray, she is back!
Oh. and now she’s a faerie.
Now we find ourselves at ACOMAF (Y’all, these abbreviations). Feyre is trying to adjust back to “normal” life but is clearly suffering from PTSD, which gets completely brushed over and ignored. There’s a lot of just trying to go back to life as normal, but Feyre has done things that have changed her normal. She’s different, more broken. Dark and twisty, as Meredith Grey would say. and Tamlin’s response is to keep her locked up, to protect her. He loves her too much to lose her again.
So when she finds herself approaching Tamlin on her wedding day, feeling overwhelmed and uncertain and trapped, she internally screams into a void asking for help, for someone to save her. It is that very moment that Rhysand decides to appear and make good on the bargain she’d agreed to Under the Mountain.
and that is how Feyre finds herself in the Night Court with the most powerful and seemingly twisted High Lord of them all.
I won’t (and can’t, honestly) go through every part of the book. But I LOVED this book. I’d known going into the series that there was a pretty significant and well-loved character with an R name, so I didn’t get emotionally attached to Tamlin and I think that made the second book so fulfilling. Sarah J. Maas does a beautiful job of slowly helping readers fall in love with Rhysand and understanding why he is the way he is.
We’re also introduced to Rhysand’s chosen family, a little group of misfits who are fiercely loyal to each other and to their secret city hidden in the Night Court – Velaris.
This book is a lot of setting the stage for a war that is to come in a later book, introducing villians beyond Amarantha, expanding on history and showing the division between the faeries who believe humans should be slaves and those who believe they should be free.
My friend who convinced me to read ACOTAR told me I’d probably like the second book more than the first and she was so right. The pacing took off immediately, and there was less world to learn.
No surprise, then, that I immediately… and I do mean IMMEDIATELY, cracked open the third book once I finished this one.
