A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

Summary: A retelling of Beauty and the Beast in a modern (spicy) romance/fantasy format.

Recently my local school district removed A Court of Thorns and Roses and the rest of the series from all of the school libraries. I was unfamiliar with the series and so I looked it up. I saw that the first book is a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I read the original short story about fifteen years ago and was very familiar with the Disney movie and the live-action remake. As I was looking up information about it I saw that the audiobook was free to me in the Audible lending library for members. So I picked it up and fairly quickly decided to just buy the Kindle edition.

There is a good discussion in the YA author community about the role and purpose of young adult and middle-grade fiction. I think KB Hoyle, cofounder of Owl’s Nest Press has done the best at discussing the changes to the category “Young Adult Literature”. There are a variety of podcasts and articles where she has done that. But I will highlight this article and this podcast about the need for a real middle grade and YA category and this post about why retellings of classics are useful. To summarize her point, with the rise of adult interest in young adult stories (Twilight, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Divergent, etc), there has been a shift to writing coming-of-age stories for adults and it is included in the category of “young adult books.” There are a number of reasons for this, but the coming of age story is a popular format. The rise of the internet seems to have pushed interest toward simpler stories. Then these books sold well. And then there was the mega-success of Fifty Shades of Gray, a type of coming-of-age story that included sex as a central theme.

KB Hoyle started Owl’s Nest Press particularly to address the ways that middle-grade children and young adults were getting ignored in their own category of literature. I have read every one of KB Hoyle’s books, many of them more than once, so I definitely think that books written for pre-teen or teen readers can still be read by adults with great enjoyment. But that category of books, the adult-oriented coming-of-age novel which includes sex is still being written and remains popular. And it is one type of book that is being targeted for school book bans. I am not particularly in favor of school book bans, in large part because the act of banning draws attention to the books. My local library now has over 100 people in line for the ebook of A Court of Thorns and Roses and that doesn’t include the print or audiobook waits. When I looked the estimated wait time was 18 weeks.

I am not going to give away significant spoilers but I did read the whole book in two days and it was good enough that I started the second book. But the quickness of the read and my shift from audiobook to print was in part because this was a simply written book. It read quickly because there was not a lot of subtlety and complexity.

But there were two sex scenes. The later books likely have more sex because this first book is about the meeting of the couple who you know are going to end up together by the end. Previous books banned by my district have largely been queer-affirming books, so I did think it was interesting that a fairly tame heteronormative book was banned. I also can say that I think that the two scenes were far less problematic than many of the male-oriented sci-fi or fantasy oriented sex scenes that I read as a teen from authors like Piers Anthony and Robert Heinlein. Here there was consent and love. The male character was an immortal Farie who was about 500 years old and the female character was a human who was 19, so there was a difference in age and experience, but the book was clear that this was not the first sexual experience of either character.

I don’t think there is a way to write about sex that doesn’t have some sense of cringe to it. And clearly, since the books were banned and the ban was for sexual content, someone was offended. But there are many other books that were not banned which have more pages devoted to sex (this might have been six to ten pages total) and more problematic views of sex (rape, violence, coercion, sexual objectification, etc.) While the book didn’t need the sex scene as a necessary plot point, it also wasn’t completely out of left field or just gratuitous. On the other hand, I do think there was a choice to include the sex scenes so that the book could be considered a “spicy” fantasy.

Again, I am not saying that books NEED sex in them. I am of the opinion that there needs to be more books that have the more traditional coming of age as a growing awareness of the need for selflessness and considering of others and the complexity of the world instead of reducing coming of age to simply first sexual experiences. I think this book was mostly about the right kind of coming-of-age maturity even if it did also include sex.

Instead, my concern here is that what is driving book bans like this are concerns by some adults that teens should not have any access to material about sexuality. The district superintendent is on the record suggesting that people opposing book bans are trying to sexualize children and groom them and he uses the stark language of good and evil to suggest that anyone opposing book bans are evil adults trying to harm children.

I have mostly been writing about the bans and not the book. This is a retelling of the story of Beauty and the Beast. There are a couple of interesting tweaks to the story. They might be considered spoilers, but the original story is almost two hundred years old and the Disney movie is nearly 40 years old. We do not know until nearly the end, but the curse in the original story is based on the Prince being unkind. That is not the case here. The Prince was cursed because of an evil character, not because he brought on the curse as judgment for negative actions.

In the Disney movie, the beauty’s father is incompetent, scatterbrained, and loving. Here, the beauty became the protector and provider of the family but there was a sort of curse on her that came about as a result of her actions. For most of the book, we do not know about how her family was reacting and whether or not they really were loving toward her.

These types of fantasy/romance stories almost always have a plot driven by poor communication and misunderstanding. In this case, there is a curse that prevents the beast and others in the household from talking, but also the Beast character uses magic to protect the beauty from being scared by fairie world, which does cause problems. Similar to current “princess story” trends, Beauty is capable and can often save herself and in the end, she is the one who needs to save the prince. Also part of the trope of these types of stories, belief in herself is part of what has to change within herself.

I like the fact that the Beast points out to her that she has a history of doing what it takes to care for those around her. She loves those around her, but she also somewhat resents that she has to be the one who does the hard things to care for those around her. That seems like a valid point of conflict in the book and becomes a plot point at the climax of the story.

I don’t think this was the best written book. There is little nuance or subtlety here. I like the fact that I can read any of KB Hoyle’s books and find references to other books or subtle foreshadowing and depth that encourage rereading. I do not think that is the case here. There are a couple of annoying writing crutches beyond the sex scenes. She uses variations of the line “My bowels turned watery” five times and a good editor should not have allowed that.

More positively I did appreciate that there was some discussion of meaning and vocation. When Beauty comes to the castle, she doesn’t know what to do with herself because she no longer needs to care for her own family at every waking moment. Connected to that, beauty and goodness have a role in healing. There is a good in beautiful music and paintings and life that I think points to goodness as something intrinsically good and helpful not just as decoration.

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook