If you couldn’t tell by the lack of “Rant” in the title of this review, I actually enjoyed reading “Throne of Glass” by Sarah J. Maas.
The book has a basic enough plot; it’s high fantasy about a female assassin who is trying to buy her freedom by winning a competition to be the King’s right hand killing machine. Simple and easy, right? Wrong.
There is so much more to the story.
It opens with the main character in a prison, a deadly one at that. Don’t worry, I won’t go into any spoilers yet, but you can imagine what being in a prison at only 18 will do to someone.
Celaena is a hardened killer who is recruited to fight in this competition that turns very deadly. When she gets to the palace and the game actually begins, competitors keep ending up dead left and right. This is a nice little subplot that keeps the time in between the different events nice and full.
I really enjoyed Throne of Glass because life always seemed so full. Even if Celaena wasn’t doing anything, you could tell that there were a thousand and one things happening everywhere else, even just within the palace walls. A princess from a far off country trying to bring peace, a girl who wants nothing more than power and love, a man who wants nothing more than, well, power, a King who is trying to calm a kingdom, a Prince who wants respect, and a Captain of the Guard with a name I still can’t pronounce. Life is full to the brim in Throne of Glass and I love it.
I mostly enjoyed the characters in the story. With Celaena, sometimes I loved her and sometimes I hated her, but I’m usually that way with leads. I loved the side characters, specifically Nox and Nehemia, and Chaol and Dorian weren’t the worst in terms of love interests.
Speaking of which, I didn’t hate the love triangle! It was cute and I was kind of rooting for both guys whenever they were around. I still don’t know which I would pick for Celaena, so I’ll have to keep reading the series to make a more hardened decision.
Celaena was the one I really wasn’t sure about and she’s a large portion of the reason this book didn’t get higher stars from me. She just seemed to perfect in every way. For a more detailed review of Celaena, look below to paragraph eight of the Spoiler Zone.
Another thing that dropped the rating for this book was how much I didn’t know. I know you’re not supposed to know everything at the beginning of a book or even at the end, especially when its a series as long as this one is, but there seemed to be so much going on that I wasn’t aware of. The magic system was unexplained and the history was mostly vague half-answers to questions I wasn’t even sure I had. I was left with more questions than I started with. Maybe I missed things that explained everything a lot better, but I was very confused for a portion of the middle and end.
If you want to hear more details, full of spoilers and all things of that sort, feel free to keep reading!
Spoilers ahead! Beware!
I cannot tell you how much I have heard about this book, especially from the Teen Librarian at my public library and my best reading buddy. They rave about the series constantly. When I finally decided to read it, my buddy made sure to warn me that the first book was cliche and I might not like it, but I should give the whole series a chance.
So I did.
There were issues I had with the first book, like everyone being in love with the main character, the main character’s “absent-mindedness” about certain things, and the confusing plot. However, despite these few setbacks, I actually enjoyed reading the book.
Let’s start with the plot.
An assassin competition for freedom? I’m all for it. Especially when the main character, a female, is participating. What I didn’t understand, however, was how there could be only one woman taking part in the competition, but I digress. I expected a more “Hunger Games” style competition, but even though I didn’t receive one, it didn’t matter because the competition was sort of pushed to the sidelines.
What seemed more important to the plot was the mysterious deaths of many of the competitors. While killing your competition was never explicitly cheating, as competitors started dying, it was clearly not expected by anyone.
While these murders were written off by everyone else in the book, the main character, Celaena, always thought they were something more because of the strange markings that surrounded the marred bodies and the gruesomeness of the killings. It was strange to me why no one took the deaths seriously or how they could assume they were nothing more than animal attacks. I guess it goes to show how much smarter than everyone else Celaena is.
Celaena was pretty hit or miss for me in this book. Some scenes I really liked her character and other scenes I really didn’t. I really liked her when she was training with Nox, taking part in the actual competition, or talking individually with Chaol, Nehemia, and Dorian. Many of her qualities are intriguing.
However, so much of who she is as a person is clouded by her mysterious past. I’m sure that it gets explained a lot more throughout the rest of the series, but there was a lot obscured which made it difficult to understand her. There seem to be three stages of Celaena’s life when the book starts; her life with her family before they died, her life as an assassin before she was betrayed, and her life at the prison. Since we know so little about all three stages of her life, it is hard to discern anything about her.
We know that she is a mere 18 years old and that she is one of the best assassins in the book. This was hard for me to look past simply because I couldn’t believe someone could become “the best” in a mere few years (she was 16 when she was sent to prison). Aside from that, we know that her parents were killed and maybe a specific friend of hers. She may have come from a magical family, but she at least lived in one of the countries that the current king conquered. We know she likes to read, she likes candy (revealed in probably the worst part of the book), and she likes dogs. These are all things that are nice to know about characters because they seem simple and unimportant, but it’s a lot easier to like and relate to a character you know the little things about.
But Celaena frankly seemed like a Mary Sue. I don’t really like to use that term much anymore with people throwing it around here and there to describe any powerful female they dislike (example, Rey from the Star Wars sequel series or Carol Danvers from Marvel’s movie, “Captain Marvel”). However, everything about Celaena seemed too perfect. She is a skilled assassin after having only trained for 6-8 years (I can’t really remember all the ages from the book, so if this number is wrong, please let me know). She can read (something that seems like a luxury). She befriends not only the Captain of the Guard (who is also exceptionally young for his position) but also the crowned Prince and the Princess of another kingdom. Celaena, despite years of supposed emotional abuse by her assassin trainer, murdering countless people in her time as an assassin, and after years in a cruel prison, Celaena still manages to be warm and make friends easily. She is also willing to sacrifice the only thing that will grant her freedom from that prison for the sake of those people. And all of this is excluding her connection to a long-dead, magical queen who may or may not be related to her family.
I believe this is too much power for one character to poses. She is kind and warm yet hardened by years in prison. She is open and accepting, despite being a ruthless murderer. She is intelligent and level headed as well as being a skilled fighter. The only people who don’t seem to love her are the antagonists of the story, which is hard for me to believe. Even the guards outside her room and her seamstress dote on her.
Now, surprisingly, the love interest in this book didn’t bother me all that much. Celaena’s two main love interests are the Prince, Dorian, and his best friend, Chaol Westfall. Dorian and Chaol are both really interesting characters to me who each have their own relationships with Celaena and they each like her in different ways. I genuinely enjoyed their scenes together, especially when all three of them were in the same room. It was awkward and uncomfortable as the reader who knows each of the others’ feelings, but at the same time, it was cute and romantic in many parts. I think my favorite scene of the book was when Celaena was dying from the poison and from being beaten and Chaol was urging her on, encouraging her and trying to help her survive. It was such a heartfelt moment and I can totally see that part on a movie screen going in slow motion with dramatic, Enya-style music in the background.
In contrast to my most favorite part, my least favorite part was a moment with Dorian. It was an incredibly simple and unimportant part, but it still infuriates me to this day.
One day, when Celaena wakes up, there is a bag of candies beside her. You would think, as a trained and skilled assassin who has shown slight paranoid tendencies in the past, that she would be cautioned against eating the candy. However, she doesn’t even seem to think about the possibility of the candy being poisoned (even though many of her fellow competitors have been murdered in recent weeks). The scene improves a lot more when Dorian comes in and claims that he was the one who gave the candies to her, but it doesn’t make me any less angry that Celaena completely disregarded the fact that she could have died because of something so simple as candy.
With the main characters out of the way, I want to talk about Nehemia and Nox. I really wanted to like Nehemia, but her character fell a little flat for me. I understood what she was attempting to do and her main goals, but I wasn’t as interested in her as I hoped I was going to be.
Nox, on the other hand, was probably my favorite character. I’m not entirely sure what it was that I liked so much about him. Maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t in love with Celaena or just his witty personality, but I enjoyed reading almost every scene that he was in. He was an underdog in the competition and I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog, so that might be the reason I grew attached to him. I really like the way he was written and he was a great character.
I don’t really remember much about the villains other than the girl who wanted to marry Dorian helped poison Celaena in the last battle so that she would lose and that the guy she was fighting was turning into a raging beast and murdering his competition. I believe the main antagonist of the entire series will be the King and his one advisor, but that is just what I infer from the first book. The villains didn’t really leave a lasting impression on me.
One last thing I want to talk about is the magic system and the queen/goddess reveal at the end. The magic really didn’t make any sense to me in this book. The author spent little to no time explaining anything about magic or how it worked or who had it. The only thing remotely discussed were the Wyrdmarks, but I found it difficult to understand the markings without understanding the magic behind them. I hope it will be explained more in other books because I’m pretty sure it will be integral to the plot.
Along with the magic point, the ghost of the woman at the end of the book who communicated with Celaena was also a little confusing. A common flaw I’ve found with this book is that the author attempts to keep some things secret so that the bigger picture can be seen later. However, I don’t think she found the balance between withholding information while still making sense to the audience. This flaw is shown during the scenes between Celaena and the queen. It simply didn’t make sense to me why any of it was happening or why Celaena was the one the queen chose to speak to.
Overall, I enjoyed a good portion of the book. For the most part, the characters and their goals made sense, the main plot was clear, and the writing was decent enough.
I would recommend giving this book a try! I will definitely be reading the rest of the series and I’ll keep posting updates as I work through the series.
***
Reminder! These are my opinions and my opinions alone. Feel free to disagree. I’d be more than happy to see your response to this book.
Have the most wonderfulest of days,
Caroline Noelle
Psalm 119.93
