I got dragged into this book purely for nostalgia. When I picked up the first book a decade ago, A Court of Thorns and Roses, three books were already published. I got drawn into the Prythian rabbithole and drank the Rhysand cool aid. I would have never imagined then that Sarah J. Maas would be milking these characters for more than a decade to come. The way the plots are building, it might even take another decade.

So how does the latest installment in the series, A Court of Splintered Harmony, fair after my reading tastes have developed the way they have? Let’s dive in.

Where is the Plot, Sarah?

I usually do a section about the plots of the books I am reviewing to give my readers an overview of what to expect, as spoiler-free as possible. But in A Court of Splintered Harmony, I do not think the author got the memo about including the plot.

There are two things that happen in the book, one, very inevitable, the other, very confusing. You would be surprised to know that even these two little events are not completely seen through in this book. If you ask me what the 352 pages were for, I will remind you about bad writing. However, I am still left wondering where all the editors are at in this big publication house.

I, honestly, do not remember the writing being this bad in the previous books. Can an author get this bad at her craft? This is a first for me where I witness such a decline. I had genuinely liked Maas’ Throne of Glass series, it had clever characters, YA-style writing, connecting dots the readers usually did not see coming and a plot. ACOTAR, now in collaboration with her Crescent City series, has fallen off a cliff. It would have been much better if it had stopped breathing there.

The Disasterous Themes of This Disasterous Book

In the absence of a plot, I have resorted to pointing out just the themes and the characters who have lost their minds (to follow this section). Beware of spoilers ahead!

Let’s talk about the unnecessary war. Koschei is the problem for Prythian. Honestly, what the Fae on the Continent do is none of the Night Court’s business. The moral superiority and posturing do not sit well with me or even make any sense for the plot. It is a valid question that why Night Court wants to go to war on behalf of the humans on the Continent when none have asked them to. In all their meetings, they have not met with the humans, asked them what they want to do or decided to arm them. This is too American for me.
Fortunately, this issue is called out in the book and the whole matter of amassing weapons of mass destruction to stop others from gathering other Made objects is heartily objected to. Not to mention, this war Feyre wants to drag Prythian into comes only a few years after Amarantha’s rule and the war with Hybern. While Velaris had gotten away scot-free in the event before and they do not care much about the rest of their territory much, the Inner Circle has not really paid any price for their freedom and right to moral high grounds, except Rhysand. So, his solution is building walls. Too American.

There is bad diplomacy on the table before the wall idea. Feyre meets an allied delegation from the Continent and tells them to not attack the humans. Feyre meets Tarquin of Summer Court and tells him to join them against the war on humans on the Continent while Tarquin shows her how his people are just only barely recovering from the death, destruction and lost knowledge of the last war.
Nobody except Feyre is surprised when none of these parties agree to what she is proposing. I say Feyre is the perpetrators of these poor diplomatic missions because nobody else stops her on this fool’s errand. They have no leverage. They have drafted up a treaty unilaterally, something they cannot even get all of Prythian to sign, and they just want to dictate the terms of peace. The worst part is that this recently-literate 22 year-old mother is leading all of these missions.

Unnecessary secrets are kept where Rhys does not tell Feyre about the growing situation between Azriel and Elain even though she and Nesta suspect it too. For that matter, Elain and Azriel also have no intention to come clean to others, each other or even themselves about what their intentions are. I am not a fan of the miscommunication trope.
But what strikes me as the most out-of-place secret is Nesta hiding what Bryce Quinlan and her mother told her about her purpose. She guards the words about the eight-pointed star zealously while she tries to figure out where she fits in.

Amidst all of this, there is Feyre, leaking through the front of her dress. I love a motherhood representation in fantasy fiction, Amina Al-Sirafi does not compare, but when it is her whole identity in a way that implies nobody has ever been a mother before her and handled work 6 months postpartum, I cannot take them seriously. Feyre’s whole personality in this book becomes her being a mother, not just a big part of it, but the whole of it. This is very obviously a self-insert for the author, but it does not really serve the book or the series. If she writes about a book on motherhood in a fantasy setting, I might like reading that better than whatever this was.

ACOTAR was a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale at its core. Maas harks back to her origins and unsuccessfully attempts to incorporate a Sleeping Beauty trope in a confused manner in ACOSH.
Nyx’s Naming Day is the central event of the plot. When the High Lord and Lady do not invite foreign royals and delegates, curses are hinted at. Then, the ceremony is disrupted as Bryaxis makes a random appearance back in Velaris to take her usual residence at the library. She torments the people at the ceremony first. Why? We do not get to know. Do the characters care? Not very much.

Let’s move on to characters.

Why are All the Characters Going Through Identity Crisis at the Same Time?

I talked about Feyre in the context of motherhood because that is all she has become. The little personality she had, it has been sacrificed on the altar of young pregnancy. However, Nyx sleeps through the night, so that is a win.

The possibility of Rhysand becoming the High King of Prythian is revisited. While he gives his reasons for rejecting the idea as the loss of work-life balance, the core reason should be incompetence and not just his alone. Rhysand does not get between Feyre and Amren, his High Lady and third-in-command, to support either, like it’s a personal squabble and not a political meeting. Rhysand cannot keep his Spymaster under control. Rhysand does not know Mor took Elain away with her.
Rhysand needs to hire more people and not get involved in their lives. His loss of aura is the worst character arc I have ever read. While he thrived on the dangerous veneer of mindless cruelty and torture, he has not only lost that reputation, but he has also not thought ahead. This disappointment is not new; he got on this slippery slope when he tied his life to his mate’s and now one dies when the other does. While this is a more FMC-centric narrative, do we really want the smart man in the room, who has been doing the politics for more years than Feyre can spell, to take the backseat and just change diapers? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want Feyre to be just feeding her son too.
If Feyre is taking the lead, there needs to be a lead up to it. She needs to learn about politics, leveraging and how to speak without letting power roil through her. We completely gloss over this part and the way she handles herself, I do not even think this learning curve took place at all. Feyre is never training. Nesta stops training. Elain is still in the garden. It is very poor writing to ignore all the powerful weapons at home to go seek new ones.
So now the Night Court has loose cannons: Feyre, Azriel, Mor, Elain and Lucien. I don’t see the end coming at all and this is the sixth book in the series.

If you expected more of Azriel in this book and properly disappointed because you got exactly what you asked for, I am on your team. This powerful person is as sappy as anybody can get.
As the Spymaster, the Shadowsinger is supposed to be the busiest during this time of brewing conflict, but no, he is moping about because his master/brother said he cannot have what he wants. What kind of spymaster is not intelligent enough to notice that he himself is getting played? What kind of spymaster falls for a rebound and prioritises it to the point that he blows up diplomatic relations?
Getting hit on the head with a stone did not help him see what was right in front of him.

I am completely surprised by how little of Gwyn we got in this book and then, what we got. Gwyn getting completely withdrawn after all of that build-up feels like a complete waste of pages.

Amren is elusive in A Court of Splintered Harmony as she makes only 3 appearances, in the initial meeting where she argues with the High Lady, at Nyx’s Naming Day ceremony and finally, a heart-to-heart with Nesta. This secretive behaviour felt needlessly conspicuous.

Elain played the victim card as she does but lost a supporter in Nesta for her actions. I would say, rightly so. I liked that she took charge of her life and fate, I don’t like how she does this illicitly, putting other people in harms way.

More than the structural issues of too many different POV chapters and not one casualty of war in the Inner Circle even as it expands, the book felt unnecessary in its whole existence. The plot seemed to consist mostly of recaps of previous books in this series and the Crescent City series, which was wholly unpleasant to read through. I can see how this would make sense in the context of the next book releasing in January 2027, all the readers are updated on who stands where but who needed a new book for just that?

I could not say I was excited for the next instalment in the ACOTAR series after this mess of a release. My steam for nostalgia has long dissipated for this series but even I was surprised by how far the fall has been. Even though I remember the writing being poor all along, but I also remember there being clever plots and banter dialogues and a cohesive narrative. None of those were present here.

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Have you read any of the ACOTAR books? Are you continuing with the series? If you want to check out A Court of Splintered Harmony by Sarah J. Maas for yourself, pick up a copy here.

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