Review: Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass, #1)

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I would give this a 2.5 stars out of 5 but I'm giving it a 3 based on the hopes that after reading the next two in the series my opinions may change...

SO Throne of Glass already has a million opposing reviews and I definitely stayed away from it for this long because likewise it came with a mountain of expectations that I feared it would not live up to (I've had this happen to me before...re. Daughter of Smoke and Bone ). I finally caved when I saw that these books are on almost every YA fan's 'best of 2014' lists and that Maas' next novel is on everyone's radar as well.

Call me easily persuaded, call me a good old fashioned bandwagoner, but I thought I'd give it a chance.

The Awesome:

The map. Upon seeing the Tolkien-esque map of Erilea in the front of the book I immediately felt a twinge of excitement. Nothing gets me going quite like a clearly mapped out world that I can use to follow the characters along their journey. So that was cool.

Celaena's bad-assery, which I thought was set up quite well within the first line actually: "After a year of slavery in the Salt Mines of Endovier, Celaena Sardothien was accustomed to being escorted everywhere in shackles and at sword-point." Ooooo yes, the world's most deadly assassin, so dangerous that the mere whisper of her name sends shivers down people's spines. I'm hooked! Keep it coming.

Captain Chaol Westfall. Quiet, moral, complex (if only because we never really get a fleshed out sense of who he is other than the captain of the guard with a mysterious past he won't talk much about). Of course the minute he was introduced I knew he'd be a love interest. So that was pretty obvious. Despite the fact that we don't get a lot out of Chaol other than how Celaena views him, I like his character. He just seems like a good, upstanding young man who is rightfully scared shitless of the world's most deadliest assassin . Also it seems like he gives good hugs. Go Chaol!

Nehemia. She is kick-ass. I won't go into too many details because you know, spoilers, but I will say that she surprised me and I would have liked a view into what was going on in HER mind some of the time. She's a sneaky one.

The magic / Wyrdmarks / otherworldiness. The build-up of the different worlds was interesting, and kept me intrigued enough to keep reading on. However I must add that it was not as fleshed out or clearly explained as I would have liked...it seemed magical things happened out of convenience's sake or to help move the story along instead of helping to make the story better.

Fleetfoot.

The Not So Awesome:

Like I said, the magical aspect of the story could have been so much more. Some parts genuinely freaked me out, dismembered bodies included, but it lacked the depth that I was looking for. In the story, magic and the Fae have been almost entirely eradicated from the land years before, and people are quick to avoid even speaking of magic, let alone use it if they can. But that's pretty much where we're left on the whole 'magic is forbidden' topic. I assume (and hope) that magic becomes more of a main aspect of the story in the following books.

Celaena. Notice above how I wrote that Celaena's 'bad-assery' is awesome, but not her as a character. Now yes, I have read other's reviews on this same topic, I have read how we have to take it easy on her because she is 'only 18' and 'can't an assassin also like pretty clothes and make-up and admire herself in a mirror?' etc etc. Yes this is all true, but that's not exactly the problem. The fact is, the first two or three chapters lead us to believe that she is so deadly, so dangerous, and so unpredictable that she needs to be constantly watched and escorted around by a group of guards, including the captain of the guard himself, in order to keep an eye on her. Yet she does nothing, the entire book, to prove that she is any more of a threat than any other 18 year old girl who is at all physically fit or agile! Other than plotting how she would stab this guard or slash that guard's throat or slice this other guard's legs off, slip through the gates and escape...she doesn't do any of it. She remains captive in the castle, bemoaning her situation, floating around in her flowing dresses and curled hair, hating Dorian and Chaol one minute but swooning over them the next, and despite the fact that she doesn't really have anything super important keeping her in the castle (other than the aforementioned boys and Nehemia), she stays. Am I wrong in suggesting that if she were so super smart and deadly and a world-renowned assassin who actually hated the King so much she couldn't just go after him and finish the job? Am I ruthless? Should I stop now? Okay I will.
But then again, when looking back over what I've written above about her, Celaena's character likely frustrates so many and leaves all of us divided because we come into this story with the expectation that she will be this great, confident, ruthless woman who kills for a living and doesn't have the emotional ability to feel butterflies in her stomach when a cute boy appears, or to pine over her lack of a close female friend to confide in, or to care for an unwanted puppy who will be killed would she not take it in...so in this sense I was surprised in what I found in Celaena's character. Whether this was intentional on Maas' behalf or not in her creation of Celaena, we learn early on that Celaeana is just a typical 18 year old girl with all the same teenage angst who happens to kill people for a living.

Last but not least, the Crown Prince, Dorian. He is achingly beautiful and a known womaniser, but we are to love him anyway because he likes books (not war), is surprisingly sweet, and he connects with Celaena over their shared love of reading, eventually only having eyes for her. You get the picture. A predictable sequence of events between them ensue. Yet there is a twist in the end that surprised even me! So that counts for something.

Just a quick mention about the love triangle that is so recurrent and abundant in YA novels - yes there is one, but no it's not quite as satisfying or frustrating as you'd expect. (Good? Bad?)

Overall, this was not such a bad read, regardless of how it appears in what I've written above. However the story is almost entirely predictable; early on, in fact very early on, I had figured out what was going on with whom and why...(not bragging or anything, I just knew!) but I still enjoyed the story enough to keep reading it and even found myself stealing quick moments here and there to read a few more pages when I could because despite all of the let-downs in the assassin department I wanted to know how everyone ended up.

I will probably get the next two books...if only so I can see if Celaena finally lives up her to her Voldemort-like status (because, you know, people can't even say her name without shaking...so she must be scary...). But I definitely won't be rushing to the store.

I would recommend this to any fan of YA fantasy / romance. Be warned, like I said it's a tad predictable and the synopsis is deceiving as this story reads much more as a YA romance / love triangle that is merely sprinkled here and there with magic and spiced up with fantasy for good measure.


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