“The forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice. I’d been monitoring the parameters of the thicket for an hour, and my vantage point in the crook of a tree branch had turned useless. Hunger had brought me farther from home than I usually risked, but winter was the hard time. The animals had pulled in going deeper into the woods than I could follow, leaving me to pick off stragglers one by one, praying they’d last until spring. They hadn’t.”
Those are some lines from chapter one of Sarah Maas’ fantasy A Court of Thorns and Roses. The narrator is nineteen-year-old Feyre. She and her family live in the Mortal Lands. There’s a wall that divides the Mortal Lands from the Faerie Realms, put in place after a treaty was signed between the humans and the faeries.
The Faerie Realms have seven High Lords that reign over different courts: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Dawn, Day and Night. As the story begins, Feyre is hunting to try to feed her starving family. She has a deer in her sights when a large wolf draws near, and Feyre succeeds in killing both. The next day Tamlin, the High Lord of the Spring Court comes to collect Feyre as punishment for killing the wolf, a Faerie in disguise.
This is a Beauty and the Beast story on steroids. There’s good and bad Faeries, romance, an evil queen, a fifty-year-old curse, a riddle, and three tasks that must be met for all to be well. This book was published in 2015 and is the first of a four-volume series that is still sought after.
If you’re looking for a new fantasy series to lose yourself in, then you must read A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah Maas.
