Danielle

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.

Patience pays off with this book. I struggled to get into it for the first 100 or so pages; the world-building is slow and sometimes painfully opaque, and it's hard to get invested in characters. I actually considered dropping it to read something else, but other reviews encouraged me to stick with it and I'm glad I did!

I love books that offer new or fresh perspectives. This is the first fantasy book I've read A) by a black female author B) that has a trans character and C) that explores a spectrum of sexuality in a non-stigmatizing way. The author plays with timelines and character development in a different way that kept me engaged, and often surprised. The writing is straight-forward, casual, and accessible, so it reads much faster than your average fantasy.

But above all, it's the message of this one that really resonates: humans aren't destroying the earth – the planet will go on. We're destroying ourselves.

Can't wait to read the next one – it ends with a lot of questions.

Beautifully written. Really fucking powerful. A must-read.

45 HOURS of audio book COMPLETE! All in all it took me about 3 months of commutes (though I didn't listen to it every commute). This was my first time listening to a fantasy book (other than my mom reading to me as a kid), and I'm not sure I liked it — but that could also be unique to this book. I found it hard to get into a good rhythm with it. The interludes were more confusing. I got kind of bored during the bridge crew sections and during battles, probably would have skimmed if I were reading. The narration was also super cheesy and the male narrator's “feminine” voice made me cringe, along with every time he said “NOOOOOOOOO!!!” (See: cheesy). The female narrator was less monotone, but pronounced names inconsistently and differently from the male narrator, which was distracting.

In terms of the book itself: I didn't find this universe's magic system as compelling, or easily grasped, as Sanderson's others. There were few moments when I felt truly engrossed and like I needed to know what would happen next — but again, this could be because I listened to it disjointedly and never for long enough to get in a rhythm.

At some point I'll finish up the series, but I don't think I'll listen to any more as audiobooks. I gave it 3 stars to mirror my enjoyment level. Sometimes felt like a chore and while it was at times enjoyable, I'm excited to move on to something else.

An English major's wet dream. If nothing else, DFW's review of the dictionary is inspiring and provocative for anyone interested in the politics of language and usage.

However, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who is not a fervent lover of words, writing, literary criticism, and the like. Otherwise, it's probably too dense and uninteresting. Even I found myself skimming - particularly the piece about McCain, as I'm just not super interested in political pieces, and it was quite long (though I still found the writing itself to be engaging and superb).