Review: "Throne of Glass" by Sarah J. Maas

I regret to inform the world that I was unable to finish this book. I tried, I really tried. After falling asleep countless times and nearly getting my eyes stuck in a permanent upward-gazing position from rolling them too much I decided to give up.

Please note that I do not intend to “hate” on this book in this mini-review. Indeed, I will only be going over a few of the more egregiously offending aspects. All books are not written for all people, and I am far outside of the demographic age bracket of this book. I’m sure I would have loved it if I was a pre-teen. I bet I would have found the male characters swoon-worthy and the main female awesome.

Alas, I'm not and I didn’t.

The main male characters, Dorian and Chaol (whose name I still don’t know how to pronounce), were like wooden blocks. I thought they were virtually indistinguishable from one another. About all I can tell you about them is that one has Daddy issues, one takes his job too seriously, and both like the main female character for reasons that are never really explained. I suspect it’s just because love triangles were popular at the time this book was written but who knows for sure?

Also, people, can we please stop saying that such-and-such human character “growled”? Humans can’t growl. Nor can they truly hiss. I see this a lot in YA and it bugs me. Let’s just break out the thesaurus and find some more appropriate words to use, okay? It’s not hard.

As for the main female character, Celaena . . . I think it’s easier if I simply say that there was nothing about her that I liked rather than list everything I didn’t like. Surely it’s quicker at the very least. I do not exaggerate when I say she was one of the most vain, annoying, self-righteous, know-it-all characters that I’ve had the misfortune of coming across. Nothing about her character was believable.

The rest of the characters either liked/hated Celaena with no middle ground between. Surprise, most fell under the umbrella of the former. This is a YA book, after all. The main character is supposed to be liked because she’s beautiful, troubled, and talented at something (in that order).

And as this is a YA book I’m not going to address the writing style. Any stylistic choices were solely made at the discretion of the author. It’s not my place to judge. I will say that it read fairly smoothly, but for some reason it couldn’t hold my attention. I kept falling asleep over and over which is unusual for me when reading.

That being said, if you’re in the right age bracket or you’re already a fan of SJM because of the “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series you might enjoy this book. Otherwise, I would give this book a hard pass.