Books I Didn't Finish: Throne of Glass

I decided to take a look at Sarah J Maas’s Throne of Glass after it came up in a Kindle sale. This, alongside A Court of Thorns and Roses, is Maas’s major contribution to shaping the modern YA landscape and its romantasy off-shoot, so I figured it would behoove me as a blogger to familiarise myself with it. Maybe it’s better than A Court of Thorns and Roses!

No, unfortunately it’s even worse. Let’s go through the opening chapters and figure out why.

The book opens with a stupid fantasy map that has place names like “The Great Ocean” and “The Deserted Lands” and tells you absolutely nothing important about the setting. I’ve complained about these a lot in the past, this one is just as bad as all the rest but it’s not any worse, so whatever. The important thing to know is that we’re in a place called Erilea, which is being conquered by a scary evil empire.

Our protagonist is named Celaena Sardothien, another crime for which George RR Martin will one day be tried. She’s a slave in the empire’s salt mines, which are located right under a palace of some sort. Weird place to build a palace, but maybe this is like Minecraft and they discovered a huge sodium deposit under the floor after they had already built it. It happens. Celaena, we’re told, is normally escorted everywhere by a whole posse of guards, but this time there’s also a mysterious dude in black to bring her up to the palace for what she assumes is her own execution.

This is our first hint that Celaena is a hyper-badass assassin who’s so lethal she can take out entire squads of trained soldiers unarmed. I’ll get more into this later, but for now, just keep in mind that this is the first thing we know about our protagonist: she’s dangerous enough that any time her captors move her somewhere, they need a whole bunch of extra guards just to make sure she doesn’t hulk the fuck out and slaughter dozens of people.

One of my complaints with ACOTAR (and with a lot of recent YA, and a lot of recent fantasy, and most romantasy) is that the location descriptions are often threadbare to the point of being non-existent, and so is the case here. For example:

“At least, that was her escort’s intention, because she hadn’t failed to notice when they went up and down the same staircase within a matter of minutes. Nor had she missed when they zigzagged between levels, even though the building was a standard grid of hallways and stairwells. As if she’d lose her bearings that easily. She might have been insulted if he wasn’t trying so hard.
”

“Evil empire stronghold above a slave mine” is such an over the top idea for a location, I can’t help but imagine it looking like a World of Warcraft dungeon. You know, flickering blue lanterns, skeleton motifs everywhere, skulls on all the door handles. Maybe there’s a big central shaft leading down into the mines, just so you can hear the sad plink-plink of the prisoners’ pickaxes wherever you go. At the very least there absolutely needs to be perilous Mines of Moria-esque staircases, which to stumble upon is to face certain death via falling into a stygian chasm.

I don’t know if the book has something more subtle than this in mind, because it doesn’t tell us. If it isn’t 100% necessary to describe something–if the characters aren’t interacting with it directly, say–then it usually doesn’t get described. And it’s not like Maas can’t write decent descriptions, here’s one of the few ones we do get:

“The doors groaned open to reveal a throne room. A glass chandelier shaped like a grapevine occupied most of the ceiling, spitting seeds of diamond fire onto the windows along the far side of the room.
”

It’s not amazing or anything, but it gives you something to latch onto.

While Celaena is being escorted out of the mines, we learn something else about her.

“She hadn’t tasted fear in a while—hadn’t let herself taste fear. When she awoke every morning, she repeated the same words: I will not be afraid. For a year, those words had meant the difference between breaking and bending; they had kept her from shattering in the darkness of the mines.
”

So start of the book, barely onto page three, and the two things about our protagonist that we’ve been directly told are: she’s really dangerous, but despite that, she’s afraid of her current situation. She has to actively keep herself from feeling fear, because she’s afraid that if she doesn’t, she’ll break down.

These two facts, juxtaposed, suggest an interesting character, one you could take in a lot of directions. Maybe whoever trained her to be so good at killing didn’t also teach her psychological resiliency. Maybe she’s so used to being the most dangerous person in the room that she can’t handle being in a powerless situation, like she’s unstoppable when things are going her way but as soon as she trips up she gets discouraged and falls to pieces. Or maybe this is just a consequence of her age; she’s only eighteen after all, that’s young to be going through such hardships no matter the context.

Regardless of the specific reason, this is immediately what I want to know: what is the emotional or psychological cause of Celeana’s fear in this situation?

I don’t know, because she isn’t actually afraid.

I know the book just told us she is, but she’s not really. Mere paragraphs later, we get this:

“She peered into the darkness beneath his hood but saw nothing. Still, she felt his eyes upon her face, judging, weighing, testing. She stared right back. The Captain of the Royal Guard would be an interesting opponent. Maybe even worthy of some effort on her part.”

And this:

“Oh, it’d be nice to see his blood spill across the marble. She’d lost her temper once before—once, when her first overseer chose the wrong day to push her too hard. She still remembered the feeling of embedding the pickax into his gut, and the stickiness of his blood on her hands and face. She could disarm two of these guards in a heartbeat. Would the captain fare better than her late overseer? Contemplating the potential outcomes, she grinned at him again.

[...]

The halls echoed too loudly for her to attack him without alerting the whole building. She hadn’t seen where he’d put the key to her irons, and the six guards who trailed them would be nuisances. Not to mention the shackles.
”

You know the whole “show, don’t tell” thing? There’s another important element to that beyond not just directly spelling out characters’ emotions when it isn’t warranted, which is that you shouldn’t tell the reader one thing and then show them something else that contradicts it, or they’ll start to suspect that you don’t read over your own work.

This is precisely the same issue that I had with Feyre from ACOTAR: that she felt like she was switching between personalities depending on the demands of the plot. When it was convenient for her to be headstrong and self-assured, she was headstrong and self-assured, but when the book needed to explain why her family were on the brink of starvation, it had her just passively accept being bullied by her older sisters. There was no consistency. I am getting very similar vibes from Celaena.

Anyway, the captain of the guards brings Celaena to a throne room where the crown prince of Adarlan just sort of hangs out on his throne all day, I guess. He’s young and extremely handsome, as is the captain, Chaol Westfall. To my surprise, it does not appear that these three end up in a love triangle.

We get some inner thoughts from Celaena here beyond “I’m afraid but not really” and “I sure wish I could kill these guys” and it’s…not very appealing. And not in a “she’s so dark and tormented” way, more in a “she’s the vapid mean girl in a stereotypical American high school” way.

For example, here’s how she reacts to the prince–who she fully believes is about to order her execution by hanging–being hot:

“Princes are not supposed to be handsome! They’re sniveling, stupid, repulsive creatures! This one … this … How unfair of him to be royal and beautiful.”

And here’s a description of Celaena which, keep in mind, isn’t coming from a besotted suitor or a faux-neutral detached narrator, this is how she thinks of herself.

“What a miserable state for a girl of former beauty!

At a passing glance, one might think her eyes blue or gray, perhaps even green, depending on the color of her clothing. Up close, though, these warring hues were offset by the brilliant ring of gold around her pupils. But it was her golden hair that caught the attention of most, hair that still maintained a glimmer of its glory. In short, Celaena Sardothien was blessed with a handful of attractive features that compensated for the majority of average ones; and, by early adolescence, she’d discovered that with the help of cosmetics, these average features could easily match the extraordinary assets.
”

This isn’t even the first time, just in the few pages I’ve covered so far, where Celaena thinks about how extraordinarily attractive she used to be before she got all dirty and emaciated in the mines, nor will it be the last.

So our protagonist is a eighteen year old master assassin who can take out large groups of trained men without a weapon, and also she’s super-mega hot (that “mostly average features” fig-leaf isn’t fooling me for a second), and also she has magic colour-changing eyes with golden rings, and also she’s Feisty and isn’t afraid of dropping epic clap-backs at a man who has her utterly at his mercy and who has lots of very good reasons to want her dead.

Look, I agree with the broad consensus that the whole “Mary Sue” thing is both kind of lazy as a critical shorthand and got to a point where it veered into misogyny at times, so I try to use more specific critiques instead of just throwing that label out these days, but fucking come on. The only part of this that doesn’t scream Mary Sue is that right now Celaena insists her time in the mines has ruined her good looks, and I would be willing to bet a lot of money that this will turn out to not actually be the case.

The prince and Celaena exchange some Witty Banter that just further proves that that bit about Celaena grappling with fear is bullshit, and eventually he explains why he summoned her from the mines: to participate in the Hunger Games.

Well, no, not exactly. The King wants her to be his Champion, i.e. his personal assassin and general troubleshooter, but instead of just offering her the job he’s holding an assassin competition to see if her year in the mines has ruined her fighting abilities, and the winner of that competition will be named Champion. If she’s successful, she’ll earn her freedom after six years of loyal service.

A lot about this offer seems incredibly suspicious, but I’m willing to believe that Celeana would be too tempted by the sudden ticket out of the mines to think too hard about it. What is kind of unbelievable is the fact that she actually believes the prince when he says she’ll be granted her freedom after six years of service (eventually negotiated down to four, which is even less plausible). Really, Celeana? You think this dude is going to spend years watching you effortlessly dispatch people with your sick skills, probably gain a bunch of knowledge about how the royal palace and the king’s security work, and then just let you go on your way?

This isn’t the first instance where Celeana comes across as, to be blunt, kind of an idiot. For example the prince tells her she’ll have to compete under an alias because the government covered up the fact that Celaena Sardothien is a teenager, and she’s all “Ummm excuse me how dare you???”

““So I’m slaving in this miserable place for a name and title that don’t even belong to me? Who does everyone think Adarlan’s Assassin really is?””

Celaena don’t you have more important things to worry about right now

““I’m capable of quite a lot, thank you,” she said, picking at her jagged nails. She tried not to cringe at all the dirt beneath them. When was the last time her hands had been clean?
”

No really Celaena now isn’t the time

I think this is meant to show that she’s Feisty and rebellious and headstrong (and also scared, remember), but it just makes her seem like she’s not paying attention to what’s going on around her. It’s so acute that I started to wonder if her being a dumbass was deliberate, but the other characters don’t act like she’s being stupid, they act like they find her at least amusing, if not impressive.

Here’s another example:

“It was nonsense, of course. How difficult could it be to outshine, outsmart, and then obliterate her competitors? She didn’t smile, for she knew that if she did, it would open her to a realm of hope that had long been closed. But still, she felt like seizing the prince and dancing.”

Celaena why are you like this, seriously.

In addition to making the protagonist look like an idiot, this also robs the story of all tension. Celaena faces down the second most powerful person in the evil empire without a trace of fear (except for when the book says she is afraid), and she’s 100% certain she can wipe the floor with the other competitors and land the job, even though failure will mean she gets sent back to the mines. She doesn’t doubt herself for even a second, she’s just instantly like “yep, gonna win the assassin contest for sure, done deal.”

Now, obviously this isn’t actually going to be the case, because otherwise there won’t be a story (...right?), but even still, the fact that the main character isn’t worried about it means the reader won’t be worried about it. We’re in her head, we’re experiencing the story through her eyes. We take our cues from how the protagonist sees the world.

In addition to being denser than a neutron star, our heroine is also kind of an asshole:

“After being roughly bathed by brutish servants, the wounds on her back throbbed and her face felt like it had been scrubbed to the bone.”

You were just complaining about being dirty, now you get bathed and you’re complaining about that as well? And “brutish” servants, really? She also complains about the food they give her because while it’s better than the slave food, it’s not that good. Look, I don’t need my protagonists to be good people or even likable, but they should be fun-bad or interesting-bad instead of annoying-bad. This is annoying-bad.

The next morning, after getting dressed in fancy clothes and spending five minutes admiring herself in the mirror, Chaol drags her off to be transported to Rifthold, presumably wishing the King had chosen someone else for the contest. There’s some fluff that’s not important, and then Celaena and a retinue of soldiers and the prince pass through a forest region, which is apparently inhabited by the descendants of THE WITCH KINGDOM. Hell yeah, I want to know more about that. Let’s ditch Celaena and read about the Witch Kingdom instead.

Unfortunately that’s not on the cards, we have to keep following Celaena as she flirts with Chaol:

“He nodded. “And how old are you?”

“Eighteen.” But he said nothing. “I know,” she continued. “It is impressive that I accomplished so much at such an early age.”

“Crime isn’t an accomplishment, Sardothien.”

“Yes, but becoming the world’s most famous assassin is!” He didn’t respond. “You might ask me how I did it.”

“Did what?” he said tightly.

“Became so talented and famous so quickly.” “I don’t want to hear about it.”

Those weren’t the words she’d wanted to hear. “You’re not very kind,” she said through her teeth. If she were going to get under his skin, she’d have to push a lot harder.

”

Am I supposed to find this charming? Or funny? She comes across like one of those annoying anime characters whose entire personality is based around acting like a child.

The retinue stops for lunch, which gives me a chance to highlight how dull the writing in this thing is:

“Chaol remained close beside her while a fire was kindled and food prepared from the boxes and sacks of supplies. The soldiers rolled logs to make small circles, where they sat while their companions stirred and fried. The Crown Prince’s dogs, who had dutifully trotted alongside their master, approached the assassin with wagging tails and lay at her feet. At least someone was glad for her company.
”

The landscape and environments are non-existent. The people who aren’t main characters are faceless outlines. Apart from “I’m good at killing people” and “wow he’s hot”, Celaena has absolutely nothing going on in her head. This reads like a very rough first draft.

It’s the almost-total dearth of interiority from our viewpoint protagonist that really bothers me. This is her first time beyond the castle walls in over a year. How does she feel about being outside again, out in nature? What stands out to her particularly strongly? We do get some description of the forest shortly after this, but it’s entirely for the purpose of backstory and worldbuilding exposition.

At this point both my will to live and my desire to keep reading departed, never to return. This is much worse than ACOTAR, which I guess makes sense on some level–it was published three years prior and probably written a good deal earlier still–but that doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s so crushingly dull. Sarah J. Maas is an incredibly prolific writer, so I can fully believe she’s improved greatly in the intervening years. But this is a snapshot of when she was either deeply inexperienced, or rushing to feed the market.