Glass Throne series finished

[fub]

I haven’t been posting here for some time now, because composing a blog post would cut into my reading time. Remember kids: if you are determined enough, you too can turn reading into a vice!

When I was a Young Adult myself, YA was not a distinct category, and thus I read Old Adult sci-fi and fantasy. So I read Tanith Lee, Frank Herbert, Jack Vance, Ursula LeGuin, and many more. In retrospect, I don’t think all of them were appropriate for a 15-year old, but hey — I got away with it because the adults didn’t care, in true Gen X fashion.

I’m reading for fun, so I’m not looking for anything too heavy, and there is a lot of YA fantasy. So it seemed like a good place to start, and there are thousands of websites with lists of recommendations of what to read. And I thought that, once I got underway, I would find more books to read that are similar to the ones I started out with. And one series that consistently pops up in those recommendation lists is the Glass Throne series by Sarah J Maas. And my local library has all seven books (in the Dutch translation) so I set out to read that — the first book in the series is the first book I tracked on the Storygraph and might be the first book I loaned from the local library.

I read other books in between, but today I finished the last book in the series, and I have Thoughts.

In The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya, the expert swordsman, sees the Dread Pirate Roberts approach. He thinks to himself that it would be fun to fight left-handed, as a way to challenge his own skill. And to his surprise, his opponent fights left-handed as well — such an interesting situation! But his opponent is better than him and pushes him back towards the edge of the cliff where they are fighting. Then Inigo smiles, and when asked why he is smiling as he is losing, he says: “I’m not left-handed!” and switches to right-handed fencing. Now, Inigo drives back the Dread Pirate Roberts, but when he has been cornered, he confesses: “I’m not left-handed either!” and switches to right-handed fencing too and re-gains the upper hand! (I read the book, did not watch the movie, but this clip is of that part of the movie.)

To us, “I’m not left-handed either!” is shorthand for something being revealed that the reader (or viewer) had no way to know beforehand, an underhanded narrative trick. It’s funny in The Princess Bride because Inigo is playing this trick and then the trick gets played against him — but if a character in a story shows (or unlocks) an ability just in time, it’s a bit lazy. For sure, negative things happening to a character can be a great way for personal growth and sudden realizations, and of course you need a way to let the reader come down from that tension arc in some way. But if the only way you know how to do that is by having the character shout the equivalent of “I’m not left-handed either!” and do something that the reader had no way to see coming, then it becomes irritating.

The thing is that Sarah J Maas is so very good at it. She is well-versed in creating these desperate situations. The set-up is certainly grand and epic and sweeping, so there is a lot of room for evil plots coming to fruition and for the good guys to get into dire straits. And the series starts slow, so the tension arcs are longer and you have more time to think things through. But by the third book things heat up, and especially the last book, which has to resolve so many plot lines, has 900+ pages of these tension arcs, one after the other, almost all resolved by “I’m not left-handed either!” That made the first part quite a slog, but I was determined to finish the series, and as it progressed I fell for the trick, even if I saw it happening.

For example, the main character sends some letters out. And then in a later book, a fleet arrives to assist in a battle, and it is revealed that she called in some old favours and this means they narrowly escape destruction! As a reader, you had no way to know that one of those letters was to the commander of one of these fleets, and that they would heed the call. It’s just a deus ex machina, a ploy to save the characters from whatever dire fate was closing in on them.

And so the series becomes some kind of “desperation porn”: all seems lost and the enemies are closing in, and surely the characters won’t be able to escape this time. But lo and behold, it is revealed that one of the characters (it’s often the main character) is actually not left-handed either, and they get away semi-unscathed! And as the series progresses, that loop speeds up. By the last book, we get such a loop every few pages, it’s pretty exhausting.

I don’t think Sarah J Maas is a good writer. Her characters lack depth and most of them are kinda unpleasant (with Elide being the only notable exception). The characters are one-dimensional actors in a grand plot.

The real star is the plot — it is certainly grand, and I like that. In all fairness, some things were plotted out in advance and then the pieces of the puzzle fall in place and suddenly some things make a lot of sense. I liked that. I think she is very good in thinking of a plot and how that develops and gradually opens up, but it would have been better if someone else had done the writing of how characters in that world actually experience that plot.

There are also some… concerning… patterns in the book. Of course romances are part of the story. But almost all of them have a huge age gap — sometimes hundreds of years. And while she seemed to try her best to be ~diverse~, all the relationships that get any kind of space in the books are very heterosexual. In fact, all the main characters that do not end up in a ‘safe’ heterosexual relationship are killed off in the battles at the end. All of these are certainly some choices the writer made!

Was it a waste of time? Certainly not, I enjoyed my time reading the series even though there were quite a few eyerolls in there too. Do I recommend it? No, I don’t think I would — surely there’s better stuff out there. Will I read anything else by Sarah J Maas? No, I will not.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Comments

[andrewducker]

"Ooh, that sounds interesting, I should add that to my reading list"
...
"Maybe not!"

[fub]

If you have a short attention span and need that dopamine hit of a (narrow) escape every so often, then it would really work well for you. I prefer more character-driven narratives myself.

Like I said: I don't regret reading the series, but it's certainly not something I would universally recommend.

[tabular_rasa]

Maas's Court of Thornes and Roses series has also been so hyped, but I find it amusing how my friends who have read it but know my taste are frankly like "you wouldn't like it" 🤣

It sounds like Maas is good at planning out the entire story from the beginning and planting the things she will need for later, but that's a shame it sounds like the resolution was mostly just about all of the loose ends coming together and a lot of last-minute "twists." (I do enjoy being surprised in my stories, but too many books seem to make "I bet you didn't see that coming!" their whole mode of operation, often to the point of being outlandish or compromising the themes they were otherwise going for). I wonder if this ties into your complaint about the lack of character development; I guess in lieu of significant character arc and growth, you have to create a timeline of ~circumstances to drive the plot instead?

[fub]

You are right on the money: Maas is really good at plot. In the latter part we learn something vital, which was unexpected but fit with everything we knew up to that point. That is, in my book, good plotting. But she is weak in character-level plots: how are the characters learning this, how are they experiencing the plot?

Right now, my ideal combo would be to have a plot designed and paced by Maas, and character-level stuff written by Leigh Bardugo. Bardugo is really good in showing characters and their relationships with each other, but weak in describing impactful plot developments. Bardugo will happily spend 200 pages talking about the preparations for a battle and how the characters feel about that and each other, but then the battle happens and it's over in about 6 pages!
(I still have 3 books to go in Bardugo's "Grishaverse", I will give a similar review when I have read it all. But that will take some time.)