House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas
House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
Author: Sarah J Maas
Genre: Fantasy Fiction
Date: 05 August 2021
Rating: 3.5 stars
Review: There is a lot going on in this book that even after spending an entire day thinking about it I cannot really wrap my head around the entire thing.
House of Earth and Blood follows the story of Bryce Quinlan, a half-human, half-Fae and full badass girl. Two years ago Danika, her best friend and an extremely powerful werewolf, was gruesomely murdered along with her entire pack of wolves in the apartment Bryce shared with her. Now, similar murders have started taking place across the city and they seem to be connected to Bryce. The Governor of the city asks her to find the killer and Hunt Athalar, a hot angel and assassin slave, is assigned as her bodyguard / crime-solving partner.
There is no easy way of describing the world SJM has created in this book. Right from the get-go, she paints a picture of this vivid world that is both futuristic and rooted in magic. I found the approach to be fresh and interesting to read about but even my ability to keep track of details has its limits even if SJM’s doesn’t. There are so many different species, so many caveats to every piece of information, a cast of characters that is even bigger than her two other series and the world seem to work on these mythological rules and patterns that she could not explain clearly even in the huge tome. I literally skipped some paragraphs of world-building that just got too wordy for me.
Credit where credit is due, the mystery itself is quite interesting. I was interested till the end to find out how it would be solved. Even though she is a little heavy-handed with the foreshadowing. If done well foreshadowing can help to build anticipation and hint at the end sometimes right from the beginning of the book. But the way SJM does it in this book made me guess several plot twists really early on, even if I didn’t guess who the killer was.
Like the ACOTAR series, the world in HOEAB unpacks a lot of discrimination based on caste. In this case, it is between the human and the Vanir (those who are of breeds other than human and have some form of magic). My one problem with the ACOTAR series always was that though she kept hinting at this divide she never quite made it an issue in the book. It always came off as just something she added to make her story seem a little ‘woke’. But in HOEAB this is a major plot point. I liked the way the reactions of the characters revealed their prejudices during the climax scenes. The division within the city and the different living quarters for different breeds made for interesting reading.
Once again SJM has written a love interest for the protagonist who is centuries older than her. This is a running theme with all her books. The one thing that I do not understand is that logically a 200-year-old angel should have very little to no things in common with a 25-year old. Yet, Hunt finds Bryce to be riveting and even though the book has a bit of an enemies-to-lover trope their love story is very quick. How is that something readers all over just roll with and do not find problematic? Secondly, I would expect someone who has been on the earth for over 200 years to be more sorted. In all three series, SJM repeatedly creates female characters who are magical versions of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. They are the ones who completely change men who have been alive for centuries. Again, how is this representation not considered problematic?
And maybe it is just me but I really was expecting there to be a little more spice in this book than there was. The first ACOTAR book was spicier than this and it was labelled YA.
Anyway, even though there are things about this book that I didn’t like it was a fun journey. Will I read the next books in the series? Hell, yeah! Like her other books, this is a fast read that will bring you out of a reading slump or be a nice summer read. My only tip would be that you might want to keep a notepad and pen handy while reading the book just to jot down the infodumps of world-building on every alternate page.