Sarah J. Maas is Overrated
I’m finally ready to come clean and admit it. I am not a Sarah J. Maas gal.
I’ve kept my dislike of the ACOTAR series a secret (at least, on this blog) for some years now, mostly out of fear of the SJM stans coming at me. But also because some of my good friends really love SJM’s books. Does it make me question their taste in literature, their education, and their status as my friend? Sure. (Just kidding. Sort of.). But it’s also made me want to keep quiet on my true beliefs.
I gave SJM’s writing an honest try. After I struggled through A Court of Thorns and Roses in 2020, people told me, “the first one isn’t very good, you have to read the second one!” So a few years later, after I forgot enough of ACOTAR, I decided I was open to tackling A Court of Mist and Fury. When I finally read it, the first thing I felt was an overwhelming sense of whiplash as several main characters from ACOTAR underwent complete personality transformations in the second book. The second thing I felt was disillusionment because while I found ACOMAF slightly more tolerable than ACOTAR, I still could barely get through it.
“But wait,” the SJM stans in my life cried, “the first and second books are not that good, you really have to read the third one.”
You have got to be kidding me, I thought, who is willing to put up with two bad books on the gamble that the third one in the series will be marginally more readable? But like the fool (and dedicated bookstagrammer) that I am, I gave in and bought A Court of Wings and Ruin. Alas, ACOWAR and I were doomed from the start, when within the first 10 pages I counted approximately one billion elipses and just as many em-dashes.
I have so many qualms with this series, I’m just going to write them out in list form.
The book titles make absolutely no sense and have nothing to do with the plot. Where is the mist? Where is the ruin?
The protagonist. Feyre was the worst! She has less personality than my toaster. Her defining personality traits are that she is obsessed with painting, and... no that’s it. She has no other personality traits. If Feyre lived in the real world today she would 100% be one of those people whose dating app profiles say they “Love brunch” and are “Obsessed with The Office” and think that counts as a personality.
The characters are all cartoonishly heroic or evil and there’s no middle ground. As mentioned above, sometimes they flip from being cartoon heroes to cartoon villains on a dime with no explanation (look no further than the Tamlin / Rhys flip flop in the first two books).
The dramatic pauses and punctuation!!! These characters speak in such a bizarre way with huge gaping pauses between words that nobody would ever pause between. For example, “Yes, she…had her reasons” (ACOWAR, pg, 9). It just sounds wrong right? Every time any character says anything, and unfortunately like 80% of the books are dialogue, there are so many distracting pauses and breaks.
So many unbelievable, convenient things happen to drive the plot forward.
Example: in ACOMAF, they find a book in a language from another realm nobody on their planet knows, and they need to decipher it. Luckily, inexplicably, and also contradictorily, 1 of the 5 people they are friends with actually happens to speak it somehow!!
Another example from ACOMAF: the author needed Feyre to be able to read for the plot. But it was established in the previous book that she is illiterate, so Rhys teaches her to read in approximately 5 minutes and then we move on and it’s never mentioned again.
You know how we talk about show vs. tell in writing? One of my biggest pet peeves is when authors do show AND tell, and SJM is the queen of “tell, then show, then let me tell you again!”
Here is an example of from pg. 154 in ACOWAR, when Feyre enters a bedroom inhabited by a character who is haunted by the demons of her dark past.
“The suite was filled with sunlight.
Every curtain shoved back as far as it could go, to let in as much sun as possible.
As if any bit of darkness was abhorrent. As if to chase it away.”
Clearly the message is: this character is messed up and has darkness in her past. SJM is trying to show not tell this concept with the line about the curtains being pushed back. I could get behind that line, if it was standalone. But for some reason, she has to sandwich it between two tells. First she tells you: THE ROOM WAS SUNNY. Then she shows you: it’s sunny because the curtains are pushed back all the way. Now, in case you haven’t gotten it yet from the several prior sentences, she has to TELL YOU again: ELAIN IS AVOIDING DARKNESS.
So, yes, SJM is probably not for me. While I’d like to know what happens in the remaining books in the series, I’m not sure I could sit through 12,000 more pages of Feyre thinking about how she would paint something but then never actually painting it. And I definitely can’t sit through 12,000 more pages of 4 em dashes per page (that’s almost 50,000 em dashes if you’re following along). But I will admit, something about these stories is addicting. Maybe the suspense. The fact that the story doesn’t come together until the last moment. Maybe we’re all just suckers for silly fantasy romance stories. Unfortunately, I’ll probably be turning to Reddit for answers on how Feyre’s story ends.