Buy on Amazon
(4 / 5)
A Court of Thorns and Roses #1
A masterful retelling of Beauty and the Beast, this started off closer to the original than I expected. Though the details had changed, much of the pacing and feel of the story was nearly scene for scene the same tale of Beauty that I knew and loved. But the story slowly began to change halfway through, turning more into the faerie story that I was expecting. While I felt that the pacing was a little awkward in the beginning, it seemed to find its stride about halfway through, ending in a flourish of beauty and elegance (if a tad predictable). Strangely, I think that Rhysand turned out to be my favorite character (I would call him a kind of anti-hero in this novel), there is so much depth of him left to explore.
There is one thing that bothered me about this book, and that’s that I think it feels a bit too sexually explicit for Young Adult. I’ve read a lot of Young Adult novels, and while sexual intimacy is a common theme in the genre, it is usually done with a PG-13 mentality or as I like to think of it the “fade to black” moment. That was not the case in A Court of Thorns and Roses and upon reading it I have to say I was surprised that it was given a Young Adult categorization instead of New Adult (especially as our main character is 18, typically the starting point for the New Adult genre).