Sara J Maas? Am I really going to critique the first novel of an author who has built a career off of her fantasy romance style? The book came out over a decade ago and she has written a dozen or more books since then. So why am I reading Throne of Glass?
Because of you.
Well, maybe not you directly, but “You” my YouTube audience. I put out a poll and accepted votes on what should be the next book offered up for consideration to Voidy. You picked Throne of Glass. If you don’t like what happens next, you really only have yourself to blame. The next poll ends soon.
Summary
Lately, I have wondered if my summaries are too long. I think most people just want to skip to the Worked and Didn’t Work sections. So here I go with a short summary.
Celeana, a slave in a salt mine, is taken from her imprisonment to fight in a contest to become the king’s next champion.
How’s that? Too short? Okay, how about this?
Celeana is a famous assassin who has spent many months surviving imprisonment in a salt mine. The king’s son, Dorian Havilliard, has picked her to be his contestant in the champion contest his father is hosting. Should she win, her freedom will be granted after six years of service. Celeana accepts the terms and joins Dorian and Chaol on their return trip to the glass castle at the heart of the kingdom.
While competing against the other contestants, one roided-out soldier shines as the preeminent competitor; Cain. All of the contestants know they will have to face him if they want to win the contest. All the contestants are killers, thieves, or soldiers to some degree.
Celeana befriends a princess, Nehemia, who is visiting the castle from another kingdom. She has been one of the strongest allies of a rebel group fighting against the king’s genocide against magic. Celeana and Nehemia become fast friends due to their fluency in speaking the language of Nehemia’s home country.
Some creature attacks the contestants and leaves their bodies eviscerated in the glass castle’s hallways. Celeana is trying to determine how to stop this creature after an ancient queen approaches her with a command to become the champion and stop the evil in the castle.
Chaol, Celeana, and Dorian get caught up in a love triangle as Celeana competes under a false identity. She grows close to her fighting instructor, Chaol, and flirts with Dorian over books and reading. Eventually, she has to choose to either turn the prince down or pursue romantic relations with him, but I won’t tell you the outcome.
Everything comes to a head when Celeana faces off against Cain. She fights him under the influence of a poison given to her by a power-hungry lady-in-waiting trying to catch the eye of Dorian. The poison allows her to see a separate world hidden from her normal perception. If she can’t fight through this other world and its demons, she will die.
What Worked
I believe Celaena’s love triangle is executed well compared to similar love triangles I have read. Her relationship with the prince and Chaol follows from her character convincingly. Dorian is initially drawn by the new shiny object but he wants it to be more than flirting as he gets closer to Celeana. His flirtations make Celaena initially recoil, yet she softens to them over time as he grows less shallow. Chaol couldn’t possibly be interested in her because of her vocation, but as she trains and her story comes out, he softens to her. She similarly softens to him as he shows growing compassion for her during her training.
The lore of this world seems deep. In the acknowledgments, Sarah tells us that the novel took over a decade to get published. That amount of time makes me think that the lore isn’t just surface-level, but genuinely deep. The character’s understanding of the magic system is soft, but the world has a harder magic system at play. I want to see more of the glyph magic. There are also two layers of magic (one that has been extinguished from the realm Celaena finds herself in, and one that can’t be removed because it is intrinsic to the world). The world appears narrow only in the sense that Celaena is experiencing a narrow part of it. We get hints that the world is considerably large from the political elements of the story.
Aside from the conflict with her backstory, which I talk about below, I think Celaena reads as I would expect a 19-year-old to read; overconfident in most ways, and fearful of all the things she doesn’t know. Her view of the world seems incomplete in all the ways I would expect a 19-year-old’s views to be.
What Didn’t Work
The writing could be slightly more solid. It’s not that the grammar is wrong or consistently irritating. It comes down to word choice in most instances where I think the writing could be better. Sequences of words that are hard to read back-to-back and word choices that felt slightly off make the experience not as good as it could be.
Similar to the writing, Celaena’s character isn’t convincing as an assassin. I may have missed it, but I don’t believe we are ever explicitly told who she was hired to kill. It is hinted at near the end of the novel because she sees the men who hired her to kill the same person with two separate contracts, but I’m not entirely sure it is who I think it is. Celeana appears to only care about that contract and none of the others she was hired with that built her up as the most famous assassin. Who was she before she was captured? We don’t need to be explicitly shown, but it would add to her character if she somehow thought about those early contracts during the trials. Maybe she learned things from those early hits that were useful in moving forward in the competition.
Somewhere around the mid-80s page mark, the character of Celaena has trouble understanding something that she ought to since she is a professional with great accomplishments. She can’t stand that other people don’t know how badass she is. Chaol points out how it makes it easier for her to advance in the competition, but she gets childishly pissy about it. It makes me question how she could be this renowned assassin when she appears so ignorant.
That ignorance might be because of how young she is. Her love triangle is stifled by her reticence to forget a former lover. This is understandable, but at the same time how could she have had time to have a former lover to the degree suggested with how young she is? Not only young but a highly accomplished Queen of the Underworld? Or something to that effect. Her age, position, and relationship status before her enslavement make her background difficult to believe.
Conclusion + Video
I tend to be more generous with fantasy because I love this genre the most. This is okay. My literary void doesn’t have to be your literary void. Voidy only gets to eat what I let it eat. You might throw Throne of Glass right into yours (and I would understand that choice), but I’m not going to do that…yet.
This is Sarah’s first published book. She has had a prolific career since this came out. If her following novels grow in the places I think Throne of Glass needed to grow, this book just had the developmental hurdles of a young author. If her subsequent books don’t improve and I continue to have the same issues over and over again, then I might change my mind and let Voidy eat the whole lot.
In the rest of the series, I would expect the rhythm of the sentences to flow better as her writing develops. I would expect the world to blossom into a fully realized world with religions and magic, not just the two we have been exposed to in Throne of Glass. And I would expect the characters’ actions and backgrounds to solidify as the characters become pillars of the series.
Now, here’s the video critique.
