A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR, chapter 46, or “The end! But still, so much end.”

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.

I honestly never thought this book would be over. And reading this chapter didn’t make me any more confident that it would. ed.—This is the same feeling I had while posting these recaps, to be honest, and copy/pasting requires much less work. It still felt like a prison sentence.

If you were wondering, this super hot, BookTok-spicy-guaranteed book delivers with another incredibly vague sex scene. I am weary, friends. So weary. Of hearing about how sexy a book is and how omg you can’t read it in public because it’s basically pornography, and then it’s… well, what we have in this chapter. An entire state in this country has banned sale of a book in this series, even to adults, because it’s so obscene. ed.—How did that pan out, by the way? I don’t support book bans for obscenity, but I might have agreed with them if they’d refused to sell it out of respect for the written word.

I’m pretty sure I might be out of a job, possibly in prison soon, if Maas is such a boundary-pushing sex maniac.

So, let’s finish damaging ourselves with this nightmare of unstoppably scandalous fairy sex orgies.

Everything was black, and warm—and thick.

Heads up, Maas knows the book is coming to an end here, so she has to pack in as many em-dashes as possible. There are two in the first paragraph alone.

You know, I’m going to keep a count as we go.

I was swimming, kicking for the surface, where Tamlin was waiting, where life was waiting.

Where all my precious em-dashes were waiting.

Feyre wakes up “lying on the cold floor,” which seems kind of mean. Why didn’t they move her somewhere else? She has Breaking Dawn, part 2 eyesight now, giving her the ability to see a chandelier more clearly (interesting choice, considering the first thing Bella sees when she becomes a vampire in Breaking Dawn is a lightbulb) and hear how people’s voices are echoing off the crystals. She’s still in the throne room.

Em-dash Count: 5. That’s all just on the first page.

I … I truly wasn’t dead. Meaning I had … I had killed those … I had …

What, are we trying to hit an ellipses quota now? ed.—Every time I have to use an ellipses or em-dash to indicate an interruption or a character who is out of breath, I hate myself and everything that has led me to this point.

I groaned as I braced my hands against the floor, readying myself to stand, but— the sight of my skin stopped me cold. It gleamed with a strange light, and my fingers seemed longer where I’d laid them flat on the marble. I pushed to my feet. I felt— felt strong, and fast and sleek. And—

And I’d become High Fae.

Not to beleaguer the Breaking Dawn comparison, but when you read the scene of Bella waking as a vampire to this scene of Feyre waking as High Fae, wow does this scene seem grossly lacking. Meyer took pages upon pages to explain Bella’s new senses, down to dust motes looking like galaxies and air tasting like things. 

Maas is like, there we go. A paragraph will do.

I mean, I loved the Twilight books at the time they came out but man oh friggin’ man, when Stephenie Meyer is a better writer than you are…

I went rigid as I sensed Tamlin standing behind me, smelled that rain and spring meadow scent of him, richer than I’d ever noticed. I couldn’t turn around to look at him—I couldn’t … couldn’t move. A High Fae—immortal. What had they done?

You literally saw them doing all of it through the convenient device of Rhysand’s stationary viewing.

By the way, we’re up to Em-dash Count: 11 by the bottom of this page.

I could hear Tamlin holding his breath—hear as he loosed it. Hear the breathing, the whispering and weeping and quiet celebrating of everyone in that hall, still watching us—watching me—some chanting praise for the glorious power of their High Lords.

Honestly, the further we go along with this chapter, the more I admire Stephenie Meyer for her skill in writing Bella’s transformation. This is just like, “Welp, my hearing is better and crystals look real neat now. Moving along.”

Tamlin tells her that the only way they could save her was by turning her into a High Fae. Uh-huh. We’ve seen all sorts of healing magic and everyone got all of their powers back, but she had to become a fairy.

I think she had to become a fairy because Maas was a Twilight fan, to be perfectly frank.

There, beneath Clare’s decayed body, was Amarantha, her mouth gaping as the sword protruded from her brow. Her throat gone—and blood now soaked the front of her gown.

Her throat gone, huh? We’re just not using verbs in that part of the sentence, then? ed.—Now that I’m reading that sentence after a year away from it, I’m realizing that the issue here isn’t the lack of verb, but the fact that “Her throat gone” belongs in the previous sentence. That’s what makes it so clunky. That, and the em-dash to tell us what the reader was probably already picturing.

Amarantha was dead. They were free. I was free. Tamlin was—

Amarantha was dead. And I had killed those two High Fae; I had—

I shook my head slowly. “Are you—”

Em-dash Count: 17

“Feyre,” Tamlin said, and he cupped my chin between his fingers, gently lifting my face. I saw that familiar chin first, then the mouth, and then—

Yes, Feyre. That is the correct order of a face from the bottom up. Good job.

Turns out, Tamlin is hot under the mask. Who could have guessed?

What I had done to get to this moment, to be standing here … I shoved against the thought again. In a minute, in an hour, in a day, I would think about that, force myself to face it.

I assume that after this book, she never thinks about Clare Beddor or the two High Fae ever again.

I put a hand on Tamlin’s heart, and a steady beat echoed into my bones.

Okay, so the heart thing was part of the curse. What a stupid part of a stupid curse. What the hell did having a stone heart add to his torment? How did it affect him if he was able to go on living, anyway?

Em-dash Count: 19.

After a section break, Feyre is sitting on a bed while Tamlin tends to her wounds and heals them up for her. Feyre muses on all the things that happened since the throne room, things we don’t see even though they seem like they could be important to later books in the series.

The Attor and the nastier faeries had disappeared instantly, along with Lucien’s brothers, which was a clever move, as Lucien wasn’t the only faerie with a score to settle. No sign of Rhysand, either. Some faeries had fled, while others had burst into celebration, and others just stood and paced—eyes distant, faces pale. As if they, too, didn’t quite feel like this was real.

It’s not that I want this book to be longer, but wouldn’t all of this have been more engaging if we’d seen it happen?

One by one, crowding him, weeping and laughing with joy, the High Fae and faeries of the Spring Court knelt or embraced or kissed Tamlin, thanking him—thanking me.

“Crowding” and “one by one” don’t work like that. Feyre points out that she stands back and doesn’t respond to everyone thanking them because she’s haunted by the fact that she killed those two fairies.

Meanwhile, I’m haunted by the fact that this book has a clear “be nice enough to your oppressors and they’ll totally welcome you as one of their own and make you better than the icky thing you were that made them want to oppress you” narrative.

Then there had been quick meetings in the frenzied throne room—quick, tense meetings with the High Lords Tamlin was allied with to sort out next steps; then with Lucien and some Spring Court High Fae who introduced themselves as Tamlin’s sentries.

…since when does he have more sentries than just Lucien? We didn’t hear about any sentries at the manor. We didn’t see them. Alis said there were less than a dozen of them left when Tamlin quit sending them over the wall… where were they when Tamlin and Lucien were trying to hold the “blight” at bay and patrolling the lands themselves?

You know what? I don’t have to care. Because once this book is over, I’m having my memory erased. ed.—Still working on that. Let me know if you get ahold of an Eternal Sunshine machine.

The meetings were hard for Feyre to sit through because all of her senses are heightened now, and everything is grating on them. Same, Feyre. Same.

Anyway, that’s how she ended up in the bedroom she’s now in. Tamlin took her there when he noticed she was overwhelmed.

Tamlin is touching her bare leg and Feyre thinks:

This—this was what I had murdered those faeries for. Their deaths had not been in vain, and yet … 

Their deaths weren’t in vain, see, because now Feyre can get horny with Tamlin again! But at least now, Feyre is being intellectually honest with herself and the reader. When she was actively murdering, she was trying to rationalize that she was going to free all these poor enslaved people who desperately needed her to be their hero. Now, she’s like, ooh, he’s handsome and touching my bare leg, this is why I killed people.

The blood on me had been gone when I’d awoken—as if becoming an immortal, as if surviving, somehow earned me the right to wash their blood off me.

Okay, but in your defense, Feyre, they had to die, or we wouldn’t get to read about your horniness!

Em-dash Count: 27.

He gave me that half-smile. Had he been human, he might have been in his late twenties. But he wasn’t human—and neither was I.

How could she not tell this back when he had a mask on? Did she think the lower part of his face and the rest of his body looked young but he would take off the mask and the top half of his face would be seventy? And why do we need to know this here? We already know that Tamlin is centuries upon centuries old. Why did we need this information right now, in the middle of a conversation they’re having that keeps getting broken up by weird information and superfluous description?

It was one of my smallest concerns. I should be begging for his forgiveness, begging the families and friends of those faeries for their forgiveness. I should be on my knees, weeping with shame for all that I had done—

I’m not sure if we should build her a cross to climb up on or a cauldron to boil herself with. That’s why worldbuilding is so important: people need to know what to think when they’re rolling their eyes at your overwrought martyr-savior.

If I could ever bring myself to paint again, I would never be able to stop seeing those faces instead of the colors and light.

Oh look, it’s George W. Bush’s failed redemption arc.

Em-dash count: 30.

Tamlin touches her arm and the tattoo that’s there, and he promises that he’ll find a way out of the bargain for her.

He opened his mouth, and I knew what he would say—the subject he would try to broach.

I couldn’t talk about it, about them—not yet. So I breathed “Later” and hooked my feet around his legs, drawing him closer.

Since he just mentioned the tattoo, I assumed that he was going to ask if she had to sleep with Rhysand, but then we get to “about them,” so Feyre thought he would ask about the fairies she killed? If so, it’s a little weird that she went from woe, torment, my soul, I should be begging for forgiveness to nah, let’s do it within a few paragraphs.

Em-dash count: 36.

Tamlin kisses her.

It was soft, tentative—nothing like the wild, hard kisses we’d shared in the hall of the throne room.

We never saw them kiss in the throne room. This is the first time it’s been mentioned. It means nothing to the reader. ed.—It’s only just now occurring to me that it this references the secret kissing that Rhysand interrupts.

Now, it’s time for the sex.

Well, now it’s time for words that imply sex. Not really a sex scene.

He let out a low growl, and the sound of it sent a wildfire blazing through me, pooling and burning in my core. I let it burn through that hole in my chest, my soul. Let it raze through the wave of black that was starting to press around me, let it consume the phantom blood I could still feel on my hands. I gave myself to that fire, to him, as his hands roved across me, unbuttoning as he went.

Then she traces his face and kisses it all over while he runs his hands up and down her sides.

He eased me onto the bed, murmuring my name against my neck, the shell of my ear, the tips of my fingers. I urged him—faster, harder. HIs mouth explored the curve of my breast, the inside of my thigh.

A kiss for each day we’d spent apart, a kiss for every wound and terror, a kiss for the ink etched into my flesh, and for all the days we would be together after this. Days, perhaps, that I no longer deserved. But I gave myself again to that fire, threw myself into it, into him, and let myself burn.

And that’s… it. Like, it’s poetic, and I’m not suggesting every book has to be super explicit. My issue is that I was informed by the hype machine that this would be super explicit, that it was the naughtiest thing since Fifty Shades, that it was Fifty Shades but with fairies. I truly worry for people who read this book and then went on to read other fantasy romance from BookTok only to find it was all minotaur handjobs and now they don’t feel welcome at their bible study group.

Em-dash Count: 41.

After a section break (and a muscle relaxer for me so STRAP THE FUCK IN), Feyre wakes up.

I left Tamlin sleeping in the bed, his body heavy with exhaustion.

You’re the first-person narrator, Feyre. You can’t possibly know how Tamlin’s body feels because you’re not in Tamlin’s body. Unless you are, and you’re seeing all this through his eyes.

I knew who summoned me long before I opened the door to the hall and padded down it, stumbling and teetering every now and then as I adjusted to my new body, its new balance and rhythms.

I do like that Feyre isn’t instantly as graceful and powerful as all the other fairies.

There. I said something nice.

Feyre finds Rhysand standing on a balcony in full sunlight, and Feyre is blinded by it because she hasn’t seen light in three months. When her eyes adjust, she describes yet another thing she couldn’t possibly see.

A land of violet snowcapped mountains greeted me, but the rock of this mountain was brown and bare—not even a blade of grass or a crystal of ice gleamed on it.

Feyre. You cannot possibly see a whole mountain you are standing on. You just can’t. It is impossible. There is no way it can be accomplished.

Feyre asks Rhysand what he wants but she can’t bring herself to be unpleasant to him.

Not as I remembered how he’d fought, again and again, to attack Amarantha, to save me.

Feyre. He was trying to save HIMSELF. He was clear as a vat of Windex on that point when you discussed it in your late-night jail chat.

Rhysand just wants to say goodbye to her since they’ll never see each other again. And even though this would be a good time to keep her fucking trap shut and just be thankful that he forgot about their bargain, Feyre reminds him of it. And then he’s like, “‘How could I forget?'” and I’m like, “Because your author is trying to make this parting fraught with emotion and she can’t due to parameters she set earlier in the book, so she had to make you forget.”

I stared at the nose I’d seen bleeding only hours before, the violet eyes that had been so filled with pain. “Why?” I asked.

He knew what I meant, and shrugged.

Can you clue me into what you meant, Feyre? I assume she’s asking why he defended her, judging by his answer and the thing about his bloody nose, but going by the dialogue in their conversation, that doesn’t necessarily follow.

“Because when the legends get written, I didn’t want to be remembered for standing on the sidelines. […]”

Oof. Bad news about chapter forty-five, buddy.

Rhysand tells Feyre that he also didn’t want her to die alone, and she thinks about the fairy who lost his wings and died at Tamlin’s house. Then they talk about how Rhysand is going to get home, and about his wings, which are out.

“You never told me you loved the wings—or the flying.” No, he’d made his shape-shifting seem … base, useless, boring.

He shrugged. “Everything I love has always had a tendency to be taken from me. I tell very few about the wings. Or the flying.”

WOW YOUS GUYS I THINK HE MIGHT LOVE FEYRE I WONDER WHERE THIS IS GOING.

He asks Feyre what it’s like for her to be High Fae now. She tells him, with as many em-dashes as unnecessary.

“I’m an immortal—who has been mortal. This body … ” I looked down at my hand, so clean and shining—a mockery of what I’d done. “This body is different, but this” —I put my hand on my chest, my heart—”this is still human. Maybe it always will be. But it would have been easier to live with it …” My throat welled.

So… does that mean she’s vomiting?

“Easier to live with what I did if my heart had changed, too. Maybe I wouldn’t care so much; maybe I could convince myself their deaths weren’t in vain. […]”

You just said in the previous scene that their deaths weren’t in vain because you got to fuck your boyfriend.

Rhysand begins to fade away but stops when this happens:

His eyes locked on mine, wide and wild, and his nostrils flared. Shock—pure shock flashed across his features at whatever he saw on my face, and he stumbled back a step. Actually stumbled.

“What is—” I began.

He disappared—simply disappeared, not a shadow in sight—into the crisp air.

She’s pregnant isn’t she? That’s my bet. She’s pregnant. ed.—No, even more ridiculous. According to people who read the next book, he sees that she’s his fated mate or whatever.

Let’s check in on the em-dashes.

Em-dash Count: 56.

After a section break, Tamlin and Feyre have left Under The Mountain, and the High Lords destroy the whole place and seal it up.

I still didn’t have words to ask what they’d done with those two faeries.

IDK, try, “What did they do with those two faeries?”

Interestingly enough, while Feyre is obsessed with the bodies of those fairies, she doesn’t even mention Clare’s body. We hear about what happened to Amarantha’s body in the same paragraph as the line above, but she does not consider how Clare’s remains were disposed of, because Clare is now superfluous as Feyre has fairies and not a random human to martyr herself over.

Standing on the hill above the ridge in the ravine on top of a glacier beside the meadow in the clearing deep within the forest, they see Alis chasing her boys through a field. Feyre and Tamlin stand there in an embrace until the sun goes down and Lucien yells out to them to tell them it’s time for dinner.

Alas, a dinner scene that we will not get to see. I know there have been so few chances to enjoy dinner at the manor. You’ll have to read on into book two, I guess.

I stepped out of Tamlin’s arms and kissed him softly. Tomorrow—there would be tomorrow, and an eternity, to face what I had done, to face what I shredded into pieces inside myself while Under the Mountain. But for now … for today …

“Let’s go home,” I said, and took his hand.

And that’s it. Oh my god, that’s it. Thank you Jesus, Mary, and all the saints. Bless the Cauldron we are done.

Em-dash count: 65.

That’s just for THIS ONE CHAPTER.

But it’s over. It’s finally over. Let’s head to the Jealous Patrons Book Club Book Club for my final wrap-up.

ed.—Surprise! Here’s the wrap up post from Jealous Patrons Book Club Book Club:

So, how do we feel about this book?

People often say that you shouldn’t judge an author by the books they write. A lot of times, they’ll pull the Stephen King card as an argument. “Do you think he’s REALLY out there DRESSING UP LIKE A CLOWN and MURDERING CHILDREN?”

And I point out that two of his biggest hits have been about white male writers. One becomes unhinged by constant interruptions to his writing routine and tries to murder his family with a cricket bat. The other is captured by an obsessed fan and has his legs chopped off with an ax. Sure, King isn’t going to try to bash his wife’s brains in because a particularly grueling Maine winter makes him go bonkers. Still, it’s ridiculous to suggest that writers are removed documentarians recounting the comings and goings of fictional characters faithfully and without real-world bias.

This brings me to the toxic relationship between Feyre and Sarah J. Maas.

Feyre is described as looking exactly like her author. Feyre had a childhood of wealth and privilege in the magical world of Prythian before her family’s downfall; Maas was raised in New York’s wealthy Upper West Side. Feyre is unpleasant and selfish, a description that doesn’t stray too far from whispered rumors about her author, who has had several high-profile falling-outs with friends she once praised in her pages-long acknowledgments sections as essential support for getting these books out there.

So, is it any wonder that Feyre, a hard-scrabble Polly Pureheart who will do whatever it takes to survive, doesn’t ring true as a character throughout the novel? When Feyre is hunting and providing for her family, she centers herself. Oh no, she is tasked with caring for her family, who does nothing to help her, despite all the ways the individual members have chipped in. Woe, Feyre is put upon, and no one understands her art, which she has painted on every surface, including one of the few pieces of furniture she’s meant to be sharing with her siblings, without any regard for the others who live in the home. She resents her father’s disability (it’s widely believed that Maas has some incredibly ableist tendencies of her own after a particularly nasty comment about Leigh Bardugo was attributed to Maas by the YA fantasy fandom at large), and she resents that her sisters aren’t as resilient as she is. From the very first page, the author paints us a clear story: Feyre is good because Feyre suffers, and no one else does. If they do suffer, their suffering only makes Feyre suffer more.

Her father was beaten until he could never walk right again; this causes Feyre suffering, more suffering than her father, because Feyre had to witness the beating.

Nesta is depressed and despondent because all hope of a good marriage and a comfortable life has been snatched away from her; this causes Feyre suffering, more suffering than her sister, because her sister does not hunt and did not witness their father being beaten.

The youngest sister, whose name I have forgotten (Elf? Ingrind? Elspeth? Eiflemay?), still has hope; this causes Feyre suffering because she must witness that hope.

As the book drags on, that theme continues. A fairy dies in front of Feyre, but it’s Feyre’s suffering we’re supposed to be the most concerned with. Tamlin and Lucien grieve the loss, but it’s presented to the reader through the effect it has on Feyre, and how wounded she is by her inability to heal that grief. How that inability tortures her.

Nearly all of Feyre’s suffering is presented as a reaction to the suffering of others. It’s clear that the intended effect was to make Feyre seem selfless and caring. For that to work, it must be written by someone who understands that selflessness can’t center one’s self. It wasn’t. And yes, I’m judging the author here: an author who made their main character an avatar for their own involvement in the story and then framed everything that happened to other characters as affecting, grieving, or tormenting their avatar more than the characters who actually experienced these hardships.

This book was written by someone who does not realize they are not the main character of the universe.

Again, the acknowledgments section is more than ample proof of this mindset. When looking for words to describe her relationship with her once best friend, Susan Dennard, Maas provides a list of no less than fourteen fictional duos, none of which bear resemblance to each other in any cohesive way other than “this person and this person rely on each other in their stories,” provides a list of the duo’s “inside jokes” and says their friendship was written in the stars like a prophecy. The entire paragraph about her friend is solely about how that friendship compares to fiction and which fictional characters Maas sees in herself.

Another friend, Alex Bracken, is mentioned in the context of an extremely privileged journey: “There are moments when it still feels like we’re fresh out of college with our first book deals, wondering what is next for us […]”. This paints a portrait of Maas’s struggles in the industry: none.

But still, she goes on to list all the people who believed in this little book, who helped her “write all those riddles and limericks” (good god, it took more than one person to come up with all that nonsense? And that was the result we got?), the agent who “changed my life forever with one phone call,” as if she’d previously wallowed in the depths of her Upper West Side beginnings, Hamilton college degree, and three whole agent rejections and had been miraculously lifted from that pit by this phone call.

Throughout the acknowledgments, Maas spins a story of the little book that could, inventing obstacles and fears that ACOTAR would never see the light of day, despite the fact that she’d begun to write it just a year before her first published novel was contracted. It was published three years after her first novel hit #2 on the New York Times best-seller list. The narrative of Maas as an underdog is thick and patently false.

So, why wouldn’t Feyre approach the world in the same way: Feyre, the underdog, the survivor, who goes through such enormous hardships as having to go live in a palace where her every wish is granted while her once-poor family is showered with riches. Feyre, who constantly creates her own problems and puts herself into danger, but who is ultimately saved again and again, Feyre who is so beloved by all for the scenes of Mel-Gibson-in-the-Leathal-Weapon-franchise-level of physical torment she endures that her one-time oppressors grant her the gift of immortality.

If Feyre is wrong, it’s someone else’s fault. It’s not Feyre’s fault that her plan to trap a dangerous fairy goes awry and she almost dies. It’s Lucien’s fault for not protecting her, for not preventing her from going. When Feyre goes to Calanmai, it’s not her fault, but the fault of the fairies and their magic for drawing her there.

The only time Feyre is held even partially responsible for her actions is when those actions can be used to elicit sympathy for Feyre from the reader. Yes, Feyre gave Clare Beddor’s name and caused the entire family to be slaughtered and Clare to be tortured to death, but it’s not Feyre’s fault. She was forced to endanger an innocent person because she needed to protect her family. She was forced to kill those fairies in the throne room and her grief is so great she can’t bring herself to face the families of those fairies later. She even goes on to justify those killings as not being “in vain” because she… gets to have sex again with her fairy boyfriend.

The industry rumors about Maas aren’t so hard to believe once someone has read A Court of Thorns and Roses. That it appeals to so many readers, who see Feyre as a strong, kick-ass hero and likeable heroine is unsettling in the extreme. A reader who can enjoy this book without seeing Feyre as narcissistic and immature is either unable to see these qualities as unacceptable, or is burdened with so much patience and optimism that it’s made them colorblind to red flags.

Which bring us to the narrative of oppression and acceptance. Feyre begins the book hating fairies, and ends as their savior and one of them. The insinuation is that the poor shouldn’t hate the wealthy, but pity them for the hardships they face in their struggles for more wealth and more power. When Feyre returns from Prythian to find her family is no longer in desperate straits, she finds the human world flippant and unimportant, and longs to return to the world of her oppressors, where they have real problems, real dangers, real fears. Only after she has given up everything, including her life, has she proven herself useful and worthy to the affluent and powerful, and she is welcomed into their circle. The hidden lesson in ACOTAR is: sacrifice yourself for your oppressors and they’ll give you your dreams. 

This has never worked in real life. It will never work in real life. But Maas, with her privileged background, spins that false narrative of the American Lie—we’re all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires—into a romantic modern fairytale, then tries to apply that story to herself as she thanks a host of equally privileged industry insiders.

A Court of Thorns and Roses isn’t the worst book we’ve read together, and Maas is not the worst author whose work has been featured. But (at the risk of angering the gods and cursing us all) Feyre is certainly the worst heroine, so far.