A Court of Wings and Ruin

my main complaint is that there's too much coincidence. too much good happening that wraps this all in a pretty bow. armen should've vanished...that is the logical next step. yet we find a loophole again so we don't have to lose any of our beloved characters. as nice as that is, its not realistic and all the devastation is immediately upended and lost. and this is not to mention just how DRAMATIC death scenes are when, in the next chapter, these people keep surviving and being brought from the dead. if the characters actually died, their death scenes would be gut wrenching. but we lose that feeling when they come back 3 seconds later. And when someone DID finally die (aka their dad), it meant almost nothing to us because we hadn't truly met him. We connected to his death for the simple fact that he was their father. So not only was his death not very emotional, but neither was his motivation for fighting for them. We just didn't see that bravery before and didn't see his journey OUT of cowardice. So his choice to sail and fight was out of character and unearned, in my opinion. Still, bringing him back was a cool choice. Maybe we might get more of his story in another books.

Unlike usual, I don't think this was too long (I genuinely don't think books should be more than 500 pages because WHY!!). I appreciated the prose (I know many people will disagree on this) and I also didn't hate the sex scenes! Maas definitely has a tendency to go a “tasteful” route with them, which I'm not sure if I love or hate. Usually, I think if you're gonna write smut, it needs to be SMUT. Because why else are we reading it if it's not actually hot? Most of all though, I was impressed at how much I truly understood and remembered with past books and characters. I usually have a hard time connecting books together when I read a series (I read the other two LAST SEPT), but the other books were so memorable that I rarely had a hard time. And all the characters were distinguishable. I had a hard time separating Cassian and Azriel in past books and this one just cleared all of that up. They have their own stories, obviously, but they blended together in book 1 and 2 for me. The fight scenes were intense but not unnecessarily gory. Their enemies were worthy opponents, which I loved. And there's tons of things left to resolve in the next books, which make me excited for what comes next. I'm particularly interested to see if the Cauldron will have any reaction to Feyre's pleading that she'd do “anything”...if she unknowingly locked herself into an agreement PERHAPS? Maybe not.