Das Reich der sieben Höfe : Dornen und Rosen

Die erste Hälfte liest sich gut weg, danach schwächet die Erzählung für einen Moment und man fragt sich wo das hinführen soll, doch nach einem kurzen Höhepunkt konnte ich das Buch dann im letzten Drittel einfach nicht mehr weglegen. Das Buch dreht sich viel um Beziehungen zwischen den Charakteren, was mir sehr gut gefällt aber hier doch ein wenig zu sehr im Vordergrund stand. Nichtsdestotrotz eine absolute Leseempfehlung, da mir das Buch sehr viel Spaß gemacht. Wer allerdings Sex in Büchern nicht mag oder überflüssig findet, wird hier einige Seiten überspringen müssen. Ich hingegen werde das nächste Buch auf jeden Fall demnächst lesen.

Easy to read in the first half, has a slow part after that but I couldn't put away the last third. The book has intrigues within intrigues and many different layers. Most things aren't what they seem to be and there is character development. I really enjoyed reading this. There is quite a bit of sex, so if that turns you off, you might want to skip those parts. I will definitely pick up the next book as soon as I can.

I enjoyed this book so much, just tore through it! I read it right on the heels of Throne of Glass and while I enjoyed that book, you can just see how much Maas has improved as a writer. I'd also note that while Throne feels very YA in plot, characterization, tone, etc. Court could easily have been marketed as adult fantasy rather than YA (which is probably why I liked it more).

The plot is an interesting mash-up of the traditional version of Beauty and the Beast and the ballad of Tam Lin: Feyre (= Fair = Beauty, btw, took me a while to pick up on that) is the youngest daughter of a failed merchant, and while hunting to feed her family she kills a giant wolf she knows is one of the Fae. As a result, the high lord Tamlin, in the form of a huge beast, breaks into their home and demands that she come back into Faerie with him. Feyre is suspicious, but after days/weeks of Tamlin being nothing but kind to her she starts to trust and eventually love him. But then the larger plot kicks in and we find out that the Fae are being oppressed by a Hybernian High Queen, who has a special need for Tamlin. Tam sends Feyre home, where she finds herself and comes to terms with her mean older sister before returning to Faerie to save her love. To do this, she has to pass three trials and/or answer a riddle, while acting as a servant in the court in the meantime. After coming close to death, she accepts the help of Rhysand, the queen's (secretly reluctant) bad-boy boy-toy and assistant, and finally beats all three trials and solves the riddle, freeing Tamlin who then goes on to free everyone else from the queen's tyranny. Sadly, none of the trials involves holding onto Tamlin while he changes into his beast form, which was a disappointment as I was waiting for that Chekhov's gun to go off. There's also a strong Howl's Moving Castle influence, in that Feyre has to figure out a mystery contract that the people involved can't tell her about, a contract that turns out to involve Tamlin, who's been casually called stone-hearted, literally having a heart of stone.

Have to talk about Lucien, Tamlin's right-hand man. In any other book I suspect he would have been the love interest, as he's charming and has his own tragic past, but who can over-charm/over-tragic Tamlin? Feyre starts to trust him much earlier than Tamlin and I could read a whole book of the two of them being buds.

And Rhysand. Ah, Rhys. We first meet him as a terrifying threat capable of reading or shredding Feyre's mind; at the court, he's a somewhat ambiguous figure who offers Feyre a deal that's better for her than it needed to be: he will heal her if she will spend two weeks with him out of every month. She haggles down to one and they agree. He then proceeds to treat her as his property, a toy to play with in front of the court and Tamlin, in a particularly iddy turn of events. It turns out that he was doing it all to make Tamlin angry enough to take down the queen once he was freed, although I think this is reaching a bit for justification of iddiness. Yeah, I checked Wikipedia and I know the series is overall Feyre/Rhys and not Feyre/Tamlin. I literally cannot imagine how this works given everything Feyre and Tamlin just went through for each other ... but Rhys is pretty spectacular, and I have already ordered the next book from the library to find out.