Review: Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

Rating: 3.5/5 very sad owl heads
Release date: 2 Aug 2012 (UK), 8 Aug 2012 (US)
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 404 pgs

Goodreads | Amazon UK | The Book Depository

In the dark, filthy salt mines of Endovier, an eighteen-year-old girl is serving a life sentence. She is a trained assassin, the best of her kind, but she made a fatal mistake: she got caught.

Young Captain Westfall offers her a deal: her freedom in return for one huge sacrifice. Celaena must represent the prince in a to-the-death tournament—fighting the most gifted thieves and assassins in the land. Live or die, Celaena will be free. Win or lose, she is about to discover her true destiny. But will her assassin’s heart be melted?

(Summary from Goodreads)

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This is a hard review to write. Let me start off by saying that Throne of Glass was one of my highly anticipated reads of 2012. I was hooked on the novellas before I even started blogging, and I made sure to make it my first Waiting on Wednesday. As you can imagine, I was positive I would love this. The last thing I expected was to have to write that, honestly? I was a bit disappointed. It's possible that over-hyping ruined the experience for me, as it has countless times, because a lot of what I loved about the novellas was here in abundance.

Celaena is such a complicated, aggravating, entertaining character. She's astoundingly arrogant in a way that comes from knowing you're the best, and being told so day after day, yet she's sensitive and girly and selfish in a way that only teenage girls can be. The love interests in ToG are worthy of such a complex character. It would have undermined Celaena's character to have her turn lovesick and obsessed, especially in the middle of what is supposed to be a cutthroat competition, and Maas clearly knew where to draw the line. She writes a romance (if you can even call it that) that is subtle and sweet. Both Chaol and Dorian are well-developed - a bit predictably, maybe, but it's there. Equally important, they represent two very different futures and relationships, presenting Celaena with exactly the kind of dilemma that I hope for in a love triangle.

And Rifthold, with its crowded streets and garish glass castle, is easy to imagine. There's a perfect balance between magic and technology; a blurring of our world and some other-world that feels completely natural. Like the glass castle itself; an architectural marvel built on a foundation of rock and stone, with magic in its roots. Like the contrast between the clock tower that sits in the courtyard and the mythical gargoyles that surround it.

I loved all these things. What I found lacking was the plot itself. The epic-sounding competition to become King's Champion was pretty underwhelming; consisting of a series of tasks that were about as thrilling as the tasks faced by Harry Potter and crew at the end of the Philosopher's Stone - except these are assassins, not 12-year-olds, and I didn't feel the suspense that I expected to feel. I began to hope the action was going to be psychological; surrounding the gruesome murders of the competitors and solving the mystery behind the killer, but this, too, wasn't as engaging as I thought it would be. A lot is solved through dreams and vague mythology, the workings of which I don't think I ever got a feel for. Even juicy court scandals and politics would have been enough to satisfy me, given that the novel takes place almost entirely in the castle, but that, too, felt weak. There was a dash of everything I wanted, but none of it felt developed enough to really hold my attention.

Throne of Glass just didn't come together for me. As I mentioned, a part of this may be because of my own over-hyping, so keep in mind that this review is very circumstantial. Because I was totally engrossed in the novellas, I got a bit caught up in the comparisons game - even the love interests took me a few chapters to warm up to because I still felt loyal to Sam from the novellas. Having said all that, I don't consider a 3.5 a bad rating at all, and I would still absolutely recommend this. I've seen what Maas is capable of, I've loved her stories, and I've already fallen in love the world she's created, so I hope you do too. Will I be reading the sequel? Absolutely. Unfortunately, the excitement I've felt and enjoyed these past few months has dimmed.

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Side note: UK or US cover (below)? I seem to be in the minority in that I prefer the US one, though the UK cover is definitely more badass.