I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.
As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.
As Stormy K and a couple others pointed out on the chapter twenty-nine recap, “Look, darling….paaaaaaahverty,” is a thing that one of my friends said on a trip to, I wanna say it was Costa Rica? They were on a tour bus with a bunch of people who, let’s just say they’re not used to anything beyond gated community living, okay? And this friend and her companion were making fun of how those people were reacting to a village they were driving through. In her best impression of Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island, she goes, “Look, darling…paaaaaahverty,” but that just happened to be the moment the entire motor coach went totally quiet, and nobody but her and her companion knew it was a joke at the expense of the other people on the tour and not like, an actual observation made in the most ridiculously offensive way possible.
And it’s the PERFECT story to open this chapter’s recap.
I had one task left to do before I returned to my father’s manor. The villagers who had once sneered at or ignored me instead gaped now, and a few stepped into my path to ask about my aunt, my fortune, on and on.
So, it’s not just Feyre’s family that’s been glamoured about her being missing. It’s the entire village. But remember, making a table short is so taxing upon Tamlin’s dwindling magic that it exhausts him. But why has Feyre gone to the village?
The impoverished of our village didn’t ask questions when I handed them the little bags of silver and gold. They tried to refuse, some of them not even recognizing me, but I left the money anyway. It was the least I could do.
I grudgingly admit that Feyre’s got a good heart when it comes to this. Remember, the community is so poor, it’s every man for himself. She even worried that someone would kill her for the animals she’d killed, at one point. Rather than thinking, pff, why should I help people who never helped me, she puts that aside and tries to make things better for these poor villagers.
But that gets pretty much obliterated for me in the next paragraph.
As I walked back to my father’s manor, I passed Tomas Mandray and his cronies lurking by the village fountain, chatting about some house that had burned down with its family trapped inside a week before and whether there was anything to loot from it.
Watch, that family will end up being the family whose name Feyre gave to Rhysand. But for now, let’s focus on the notion that this village is so desperately impoverished, it’s every man for himself, someone once seemed ready to murder her because she was carrying a dead rabbit, but looting? The line has been drawn there.
Like, wtf is the dead family gonna do with their burned up shit, Feyre? You’ve got too much money to mind other people’s business.
He gave me a too-long look, his eyes roving freely over my body, with a half smile I’d seen him give to the village girls a hundred times before. Why had Nesta changed her mind?
Yeah, why? When you make it clear that he’s so appealing.
Feyre then runs into her barnyard booty-call, Isaac Hale and
[…]a pretty, plump young woman who could only be his new wife.
Reader, it is important for you to know that Isaac did not get an upgrade from Feyre because while his wife is pretty, she is also fat. And he’s, ugh, gross, a human.
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.
More of that super weird, “gross, he’s not like our oppressors” stuff happening there.
The smile Isaac had was about being in love with his wife, but when he saw Feyre, he stopped smiling. And Feyre can tell, just by looking at her, that his wife is super threatened.
His wife looked between us, perhaps a bit nervously. As if whatever she felt for him––the love I’d already seen shining––was so new, so unexpected, that she was still worried it would vanish.
They have not spoken a single word to each other. Like, none of them have. Isaac’s wife just sees a woman and has a relationship crisis, Feyre can tell.
He’d been a boy when I left, and yet this person who now approached me … whatever had blossomed with his wife, whatever it was between them, it had made him into a man.
That’s great but I don’t care. Nobody cares. Not a single person who read this book thought, “I wonder what Isaac Hale is up to.” He’s only been mentioned because we need to see that while he’s hot now, his wife is “plump” and insecure, and Feyre doesn’t want him anymore.
Nothing––there was nothing in my chest, my soul, for him beyond a vague sense of gratitude.
A few more steps had us passing each other. I smiled broadly at him, at them both, and bowed my head, wishing them well with my entire heart.
So, this is nice and all. But what is the point? We already know she didn’t love Isaac and that she’s fallen in love with Tamlin. Why do we need this, when we’ve been in her head the whole time?
This is what happens when people write their book while envisioning the inevitable movie version. This is a scene straight from a Masterpiece Theater adaptation of a Regency-era story. It’s probably four seconds of the characters looking at each other, and the audience being able to tell that the heroine is unbothered by this one-time love interest moving on to someone new.
The only reason this scene exists is to show us that Feyre’s replacement is fat and jealous of Feyre. Isaac had already been written off by the scene where Feyre shows Tamlin the paintings.
There’s a section break and we hear about how busy the house is because Feyre’s father is throwing this huge ball that’s super expensive and huh, I wonder how he ended up so badly in debt in the first place. And that’s kind of Feyre’s attitude, as well. She sees the ball as a total waste.
I would have begged him not to host it, but Elain had taken charge of planning and finding me a last-minute dress, and … it would only be for an evening.
How selfless of you, to let your family throw an enormous party in your honor. And how not hypocritical of you, to criticize your father’s spending and then turn around and buy a new dress when we’ve already heard about the chests and chests of clothing you brought back from Prythian. You’re not like other girls, Feyre.
An evening of enduring the people who had shunned us and let us starve for years.
Right, like…wtf is going on with that? Did Tamlin use the magic he doesn’t have much of to glamour the rich people, too? On the other hand, I assume rich people actually could be dicks like that and feign selective amnesia, even in a fantasy book. ed.—I was way too gracious here, assuming this was not a massive plot hole. This book didn’t deserve my grace.
Feyre notes that she does menial tasks in the garden because all she can do is sit around worrying, otherwise.
I hadn’t felt like painting since I’d arrived––and that place inside me where all those colors and shapes and lights had come from had become still and quiet and dull. Soon, I told myself. Soon I would purchase some paints and start again.
Tamlin sent you home with chests of gold and jewels and frilly finery, but not those paints.
JFC this book is painfully, painfully bad. ed.—This keeps me awake at night. How did she not take the paint? Painting is supposedly the most important thing in her life, the one joy she has, her entire reason for being, but SHE DIDN’T PACK THE FUCKING PAINTS?!
When Nesta sees Feyre’s hands, she makes a remark about how Feyre will never fit in unless she wears gloves, and Feyre is like, I don’t want to fit in with these people. Nesta asks why the heck Feyre is bothering to stay with them, then, and Feyre says it’s because it’s her home. And then while they’re arguing, Nesta throws this absolute bombshell twist at her sister:
“There is no Aunt Ripleigh.” Nesta reached into her pocket and tossed something onto the churned up earth.
It was a chunk of wood, as if it had been ripped from something. Painted on its smooth surface was a pretty tangle of vines and––foxglove. Foxglove painted in the wrong shade of blue.
That’s right. Nesta has, gasp, a reason for being a cold bitch.
“Your beast’s little trick didn’t work on me,” she said with quiet steel. “Apparently, an iron will is all it takes to keep a glamour from digging in. So I had to watch as Father and Elain went from sobbing hysterics to nothing. I had to listen to them talk about how lucky it was for you to be taken to some made-up aunt’s house, how some winter wind had shattered our door. And I thought I’d gone mad––but every time I did, I would look at that painted part of the table, then at the claw marks farther down, and know it wasn’t in my head.”
This is honestly a great twist. I can’t wait for Feyre to explain how it’s somehow worse for her, personally, and that Nesta has no right to be upset or whatever will inevitably happen. ed.—I’m actually shocked that there wasn’t a page and a half long explanation about how actually, Feyre’s will is much stronger than Nesta’s, but the magic was just like, afraid of how strong Feyre’s will is and it worked extra super hard on her because she matters more.
Nesta snorted, her face grave and full of that long-simmering anger that she could never master. “He stole you away into the night, claiming some nonsense about the Treaty. And then everything went on as if it had never happened. It wasn’t right. None of it was right.”
My hands slackened at my sides. “You went after me,” I said. “You went after me––to Prythian.”
“I got to the wall. I couldn’t find a way through.”
So far, Nesta is the only character in this book that I care about or can tolerate. She doesn’t get along with her sister, but she knows for a fact that it’s not cool to just kidnap people.
Oh god, is that how low the bar is set for this one?
So, Nesta went out and found that mercenary from the earlier chapter as a guide to the wall, because that’s the only person who believed the story about Feyre being kidnapped.
Nesta’s eyes––my eyes, our mother’s eyes––met mine. “It wasn’t right,” she said again. Tamlin had been wrong when we’d discussed whether my father would have ever come after me–he didn’t possess the courage, the anger.
He was also physically disabled and under a spell that made him think you were totally safe but yeah, fuck that guy, amirite?
My hateful, cold sister had been willing to brave Prythian to rescue me.
I still haven’t figured out why Nesta is hateful. I really haven’t. The only examples we’ve been given are that she doesn’t particularly enjoy hard work, but she does it, and she wasn’t thrilled that Feyre painted all over their last remaining bit of stuff. I guess just not celebrating Feyre every second of every day is aggressive hatred.
“What happened to Tomas Mandray?” I asked, the words strangled.
What does that have to do with the current conversation like…at all?
“I realized he wouldn’t have gone with me to save you from Prythian.”
And for her, with that raging, unrelenting heart, it would have been a line in the sand.
This makes Feyre realize that hey, Nesta really doesn’t revel in this new life and she has zero patience for anyone who would hurt her family but maybe, just maybe, she had other emotional shit going on.
Who had shrouded the loss of our mother, then our downfall, in icy rage and bitterness, because the anger had been a lifeline, the cruelty a release.
Oh wow, now imagine if you’d even considered the possibility that other people have feelings and deal with them differently than you, even once in that decade of poverty. Once in, what, eight years? Just one time, you needed to think to yourself, wow, maybe Nesta is cold and closed off because she’s just been through THE SAME GOD DAMN CIRCUMSTANCES THAT I DID.
Nesta asks Feyre to tell her the story of what happened in Prythian. We are spared a full recap, Cauldron bless, but just before the section break, Feyre notes that Nesta asks for painting lessons.
Supplies were easy enough to come by, but explaining how I painted, convincing Nesta to express what was in her mind, her heart …
Supplies were easy to come by? You just said, in this chapter, that you were going to have to buy some new paints.
Meanwhile, Elain has been decorating for the ball, with so many garlands of flowers she might as well be Isabela Madrigal.
Nesta and I slipped up the stairs, but as we reached the landing, my father and Elain appeared below, arm in arm.
Nesta’s face tightened. My father murmured his praises to Elain, who beamed at him and rested her head on his shoulder. And I was happy for them––for the comfort and ease of their lifestyle, for the contentment on both my father’s and my sister’s faces. Yes, they had their small sorrows, but both of them seemed so … relaxed.
Suffer more, father who was beaten nearly to death and sister who powered through tragic circumstances with toxic positivity. You’re not as sad and broken as Nesta and Feyre and it’s obnoxious.
“There are days,” Nesta said as she paused in front of the door to her room, across from mine, “when I want to ask him if he remembers the years he almost let us starve to death.”
The ableism in this book is such that I hope I never meet the author in person. Because I will not be able to stop myself from screaming in her face until blood comes out of my mouth and every vessel in both my eyes are exploded. How fucking dare this person. How fucking dare she. What a fucking waste of life she is. ed.—I believe this may have been before I knew that she’d used Breonna Taylor’s death as an Instagram publicity stunt with absolutely zero consequences. Sarah J. Maas is just one of the most selfish people I’ve ever heard of. A real life, grown-up Veruca Salt.
Feyre points out that Nesta spent a lot of their money, too, and Nesta is like, meh, I knew you could get us more, which. Nesta. Come on. Do your part and stop buying shit, but turns out that she held a grudge against their father for much longer than Feyre has. Nesta believes that her dad should have scoured the world for a cure to their mother’s illness, and because he didn’t, their mother died. She even thinks he should have gone to Prythian to beg for help.
So.
Are the fairies like.
The Godfather?
Because seriously, we’ve heard all along that the humans the fairies don’t hang together and that humans don’t want to interact with fairies at all, unless they’re totally out-there cult members who are never heard from again once they get to Prythian. But here, Nesta is like, dad could have just gone off and asked the fairies for help, if he really wanted to. Is this because it’s a possibility or just this expectation that Nesta has that her dad could have found a way to save their mom if he’d just braved breaking this treaty that’s a huge fucking deal?
But there I go again, expecting consistency or even like, mediocrity from this book.
Nesta shoots down Feyre’s argument that their dad loved their mom by saying that Feyre would go to the ends of the earth to save Tamlin, and Feyre is like, yeah, I would and goes off to get ready for the ball.
I think you misposted, there’s no chapter 29.
Uh, where’s the chapter 29 recap?
I’m sorry, I’m expected to know how to COUNT now?! Counting AND reading?! LOL, yous all get a bonus today, I’ll post it real quick in a second here.
Ok, if they dropped the idea that the father is lazy because of his disability, and maybe just made him kind of a lazy guy in the first place, I would have loved a story about Nesta, the eldest sister of a lazy git who let their mother waste away and die, then expected his daughters to do all the work. Nesta, who hates cleaning, and resents it, but does it anyway because she has to, then, one day her sister gets taken away by beasts and suddenly their whole lives improve. but Nesta knows it’s all a glamour and fears her sister is in danger and tries to save her. Only to find out her sister is just fine and living it up with some hot fairy in his mansion. Then Nesta goes ballistic and in a whole weird timey wimey thing, she ends up becoming the Queen of the Night Court and seeks vengeance against the sister she sees as ditching them to go live in fairy land.
Then Nesta and Lucien can get all hot and steamy and show her dipshit sister what smut really is. Cause, for a supposedly smutty fairy book there has been very little smut.
I would read this
This is fantastic and now I’m angry that it doesn’t exist when Maas’ drivel does.
Yeah focusing on Nesta or Elain, revising the dad one of two ways, and simply reworking events to not make Feyre the protag improves everything by so much.
But even if you did that and kept her as the heroine, it’s not hard to make Feyre an anti-hero or simply not an apologist and remove all the most problematic stuff (with the smut being consensual kink.) Purity culture, nepotism (wouldn’t surprise me if that helped create the first book deal for the Cinderella stuff even if it was super popular fanfiction) and entitlement without any contemplation or intersectionality awareness truly ruins everything, not just for Maas but a lot of young creatives who end up getting professional money on their early projects.
There are a few older chapters missing too. I’ve just finished reading them all through.
I just went through and checked and couldn’t find any missing older chapters.
(I’m able to look at a list of all my posts and their status in one place, and they were all listed as published, rather than drafts)
Same, I thought I noticed chapter 4 missing, but I could have just overlooked it.
“A real life, grown up Veruca Salt” seems a great way to describe this author. If you want some real ableist rage fuel you should try reading her Throne of Glass series where one of the major characters get paralysed (don’t worry, he’s magically cured later so he can strut around being manly). It’s so god-awful I can’t believe it was actually published.
Given Maas’s privileged upper class-ness bleeding through, I’m surprised Feyre didn’t decide against giving money to the poor villagers because they’d probably just use it to buy drugs and alcohol.
Wait, we could have seen Nesta’s adventures with the lesbian mercenary instead of chapter on chapter of Feyre eating breakfast?
Right? I would have read the hell out of that story. I bet even their breakfast eating would be more interesting, since they wouldn’t have a magnificent spread magicked for them each morning and they’d probably be a lot more grateful for it. The only question I have is, would they be able to paint it?
I bet Nesta would fucking be able to paint and even when she didn’t, she wouldn’t focus on it so much. Nesta, Elain, and the Mercenary need to run away together and open a business and assist their community because this probably isn’t the only shit-hole in need of assistance but at least there won’t be any trauma involved from old friends/acquaintances.
lol also maybe Nesta got pissed off at Feyre because she’s always bemoaning her art and supplies or something and it got tiresome.
Also like for fuck sake I’m sure other supplies exist like the precursors to pencils (or just goddamn chalk/charcoal) and of course old school dip pens which are also more practical since they can be used for correspondence as well. Painting doesn’t have to be the only thing and you can make paints. Historically, that’s what artists did, they made their own paints from the world around them, before commercial brands existed! Feyre couldn’t made her own limited palette of like browns, greens, yellows, and maybe reds, then be so excited when she gets some good blues and convenience purple and in general more lasting pigments because handmade stuff is simply not as lasting as say fucking cadmium (which is toxic) and maybe some of the whites like titanium. A lot of strong paints were health hazards or rare materials. And all of this is on top of Jenny’s comment that you can make a wide variety of colors if you have good primaries to mix and have been taught how to do so. BUT ALSO canvas typically uses oil paints. There’s other types of paint like watercolor and tempura and gouache which can potentially be used on paper. Canvas is also a process and expensive and also not vegan because it needs some kind of primer lol most of this shit involves animals and stuff, from the brushes to the paints to the canvas. Feyre could’ve been snaring squirrels, turning their tails into brushes, or boars bristles or even horse hair and glue and just… IDK. Literally no real thought or research when into the painting aspect. I’m with Jenny, this bitch ABSOLUTELY would’ve packed the fairy paint up and regarded it as precious and a loving reminder of her beloved and to leave it behind implies she gives NOT A SHIT about those paints or Tamlin as more than a dick and an idea and she’s unconcerned about her belongings because they mean nothing to her. And considering how hard it was to GET PAINT growing up in poverty, you’d think she’d know to appreciate all of her supplies and take good care of them and just… ugh.
To clarify, I meant to say that I think the tempura can be used on paper; not a hundred percent but pretty positive it can. I know watercolor and gouache is bwahaha. ^_^;
oh yeah fucking arsenic transformed into white that’s the other one I think haha. Not to mention arsenic in some old school make-up but that could only be certain parts of the globe. I’m too lazy to check the details cuz I’m not writing a book here, I’m just typing up a goddamn comment.
I suspect magic would make some SUPER SPECIAL paints btw like those pencils/markers/crayons with multiple colors in one?? THAT’S probably how you paint all the shit Feyre thought she could never paint holy cow!!!!
” I’m too lazy to check the details cuz I’m not writing a book here, I’m just typing up a goddamn comment.”
And yet you already put more thought into it than the writer of the actual book did.
I’m pretty sure Fayray isn’t happy unless she’s complaining about something, so bringing her fairy paints with her would have taken away her one true happiness, complaining about not having paint and/or how sucky mortal paint is.
Yeah lol. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if she worked as an assistant to a faerie painter to learn how to make the special magical paints? She could crow about how super special she was as a human to learn and preen over it in human land. I mean, it’d be awful but IC and she could teach Nesta how as a super secret sister thing. And they could both paint a bunch of magical flowers for Elain.
Lead made a solid white paint (even for face makeup, euughhh), while arsenic made some vivid greens. And cadmium yellow, as you mention.
And while stretched canvases weren’t always available, let’s not forget that you can easily apply oil paints to wood.
One of the most expensive paints was ultramarine, because it was made from lapis lazuli. So this woman, who was found with particles of lapis in her teeth, must have been a painter of some repute: https://web.archive.org/web/20190110010515/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/the-woman-with-lapis-lazuli-in-her-teeth/579760/
I genuinely loved the twist with Nesta having seen through the glamour and having a side to her that the POV character wasn’t aware of – or, more accurately, how mismatched the reality of Nesta and Feyre’s view of her turn out to be. Because yes, sometimes you get a version of a person stuck in your head and you interpret them in the most uncharitable way possible, and it might turn out you had them all wrong, or at least partially wrong. Nesta has been characterised by Feyre as a bitch up until now, and it was genuinely nice to see that the other side of it is that she didn’t get glamoured and also didn’t take no shit. People’s strengths are often mirror images of their flaws, after all.
But like all other things with this book’s wasted potential, there’s too little legwork done to make this genuinely compelling or insightful, because the author simply doesn’t care enough about any characters other than Feyre