Crescent City
Sarah J. Maas
Overall: 4/5
Plot and themes: 4/5
Characters: 5/5
Writing style: 4/5
Attention-grabbing: 4/5
House of Earth and Blood is the first book in the new Crescent City series by SJM. And up until like five minutes ago I thought it was called Crescent City rather than House of Earth and Blood but I guess that's not really all that important. The book starts of strong by massacring nearly every single loved one that the protagonist, Bryce Quinlan, holds dear and just goes from there. It's a paranormal/urban fantasy type book, something I did not know when I started out and it's hefty weighing in at nearly 800 pages. While every page of this 800 page journey was far from riveting or even essential to the story, the ending definitely caught me off guard with how invested I got into it.
Honestly, I think this is the best book by SJM that I've read. It finally got the right balance between friendship and romance- something she tried to do in ACOTAR but in that one she forgot to add the friendships in until the end. In this one, the friendships are front and center the whole time through and they really are essential to Bryce's arc. Usually after I read a SJM book I spend the following days figuring out more and more reasons why I disliked it, but this one is really going to stick with me for good reasons.
I will say I wasn't much of a fan of the length and a lot of the repeated terminology. I think we could've cut it down to 600 pages by removing the words "party girl" and "alphahole" all on their own. I nearly DNFed like thirty times because trudging through the first like 400-500 pages was such a chore. But you know, everyone who has been telling me for the past year and a half that it's an essential read wasn't totally wrong. I did cry like three times while reading it, so while it was far from perfect it does get you feeling things.
I'm going to say I recommend it, but probably not for SJM's usual fans as this is much more solidly PNR. I really forgot I was reading SJM multiple times (probably a good thing in my case) and I think that's pretty interesting in the progression of the paranormal versus fantasy debate. But yeah, I'll be on the look out for the sequel and I won't be totally dreading reading it. Though I will just a bit cause like why do they have to be such behemoths?
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