I’m not going to lie, I am brand new to the writing of Sarah J Maas. I first heard of her when a friend sent me some videos of an ballroom event that took place in Montreal. The crowd had absolutely gone all-out in their efforts to look as glamorous as possible, and my interested was piqued. I had to read the books that had inspired such dedication and effort.

I started off by checking my local library. There was something like… 280 people in front of me in line? OK then, obviously I was the only person in the world who wasn’t familiar with this writer. Next I checked Kobo and fortunately they were having a sale on the ACOTAR bundle so I was able to get the whole series in one purchase.

The story is told in the first person, narrated by Fayre Archeron who is the protagonist of the story. She is the youngest of three sisters and they live in a threadbare shack along with their father. The family was once rich but has now fallen on hard times. She describes her life as a series of impossible situations – she is bound by a deathbed promise to her mother to take care of her sisters, but her sisters do their best to make her task incredibly unpleasant if not actively impossible. So she teaches herself to hunt and to track, to skin and preserve the things she kills, and in that way she manages to keep her useless family alive. And honestly at this point in the story they are almost cartoonishly useless. Things looked to continue that way until they all die of terminal passivity but things change when she kills a giant wolf for it’s fur. The wolf turns out to be a fae in disguise and she is required by the treaty between fae and human kind to give her life in return – or so she is told by the fae who comes to collect her.

And that’s how she finds herself living with Tamlin, the High Lord of the Spring Court and his companion / second-in-command Lucien.

Things start off about as well as you might imagine, given that Feyre is being held against her will and as far as her fae captors are concerned she’s a dangerous murderer. When no actual murders happen everybody gradually starts to relax and get to know each other. I joked to a friend about Stockholm Syndrome, but really who else does she have to talk to while she’s there? She can’t even see most of the servants who work in the building. And given that there is something out in the woods that wants to kill her every single time she ventures outside of her bedroom, it’s somewhat inevitable that she starts to feel that her captors are the only people she can rely on. I also feel like there is also something to be said about the fact that she started providing for her family at 14, and now not only does she get to eat every day without fear of freezing to death or getting injured doing it, but she is also guarded by somebody who has the physical prowess to kill monsters in order to protect her. That’s heady stuff for somebody who is essentially still a teenager. She’s also young enough and inexperienced enough that all that Brooding Over The Weight of the World On My Shoulders energy still looks attractive in a man.

Look, I’m not going to claim that I predicted Tamlin’s character arc, because I didn’t. But a man who has ZERO friends except for the one guy who can’t say no to him because he’s also his boss? That’s a red flag right there.

Tamlin of course, falls for Feyre because she is literally the only person he has ever met who won’t do what he tells her.

And this is the part that doesn’t really make any sense to me, Tamlin is days away from breaking the curse and instead he decides to… send Fayre home? It’s not like home is a safe alternative, Amaranth is absolutely going to invade and kill all the humans. She proves that when she goes after the Beddor family. What is the logic in sending her back to the human realms to be slaughtered at leisure? I can only think it’s because now that he knows he loves her he feels like that’s a decision he can make on her behalf – and maybe he can’t ask Feyre directly given the constraints of the curse, but he’s also making that decision for every single person who lives in the realm of the Spring Court and I’m pretty sure he didn’t canvas them for their informed consent. This is why he has no friends.

Lucien and Alis were mad at Fayre for not confessing her feelings before Tamiln sent her home but I’m 100% sure she would have within the next 48 hours . (And there are ways of getting people to tell you their feelings even if a fairie curse prevents you from just asking. If you’ve dated enough you figure that shit out. A guy who is 500 years old and who has never had a girlfriend? Also a red flag.)

Like many people I did not like Nesta through most of the books. Feyre claims the only thing Nesta cares about is middle sister Elain and that Nesta would “do anything for her” but apparently “anything” did not include getting off her ass when they were all slowly starving to death. She is described as somebody who has a will of steel but all she seems to use it for is being pissy. Still, I have to give her credit for trying to get past the wall when she is the only one who remembers what really happened to Fayre. I also have to give her some credit for telling Feyre not to look back once she gets back into Prythian – Feyre needs all her focus to survive what is waiting for her and Nesta is smart enough to know that.

Of course Feyre is captured once she is under the mountain and of course she is immediately imprisoned – she’s a mere human in a universe where even the most looked-down-upon members of the fae race have much more strength, speed, and healing ability. But I think she introduces one important factor into the mix that tips the balance of power away from Amaranth, and that’s the fact that she’s unpredictable. Amaranth controls the other fae by chaining their power, through the very magic that is the reason they are so much more powerful than humans. Being human, Feyre can’t be controlled at her core, she has to be controlled by mere physical constraints.

Mind you, physical constraints are almost enough to kill her. She is beaten and injured, underfed and kept cold, exhausted, and hopeless. She is set impossible tasks and kept in solitary confinement. She would not have survived at all except for the help of a very small number of the fae – Lucien heals her and Lucien’s mother helps her with one of her tasks. And then there’s Rhysand.

I won’t pretend I saw what was coming when Rhysand’s character was introduced, but the way he was described definitely flagged him as somebody who was going to be important. He very much seemed to have his own agenda in the court under the mountain, but he also got the guards to leave her alone, got her out of that cell for a week, (even if just to get her drunk) and gave her somebody to argue with in a way that I think she really needed. And of course, at the very last he fought Amaranth to try to save Feyre’s life.

Any other story would have ended there with Tamlin and Feyre riding off into the sunset together. But the saga of Prythian is not over yet.