Author: Sarah J Mass
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WARTY!
So here's yet another story drinking from the well of the TV series Merlin where the king detests magic and persecutes its practitioners for one reason or another, and everyone is in secret and in hiding and whatever else it takes to avoid notice. It’s quickly becoming a tired trope. But hey, we have a title and an author's name which rhyme: Throne of Glass by Sarah J Mass! That's a novelty. Or maybe not - I guess it depends upon how Maas is pronounced, doesn't it? But then it also depends upon how glass is pronounced! If it's pronounced the way some Londoners might do it for example (glah-ss) then we're good too, if not too good.
Apparently the roots of this novel came out of fiction which Maas was publishing at Fiction Press, a site I wasn't even aware existed until I started looking into this author. This does show that there is so much there is out there, and that there is little hope we have of even becoming aware of it, let alone of getting a handle on it!
One question which arises from this is: who is the real Sarah Maas? The impression I got reading this novel was that this is really just wish-fulfillment. Maas is really writing about herself: seeing herself as the main character in this novel. Don't believe me? Check out an image of Maas and an image from the book cover side-by-side. Is this resemblance coincidental?
There is a better image for the cover, much more dramatic, but far less representative of the poor excuse for a hero which we actually get:
Anyway, this novel is the first in the Throne of Glass series and is succeeded by Crown of Midnight which I've also reviewed. It's essentially The Hunger Games goes fantasy, with hero, eighteen-year-old Celaena Sardothien (because you know that there's no way in hell that a fantasy novel main character can ever have a name which even remotely approaches ordinary!) coming to the King of Adarlan's castle to fight in a sudden death (lol) competition with 23 other assorted assassins, thieves, and warriors, the winner being declared 'greatest assassin' and king's champion, so it would seem. In short it's exactly the plot of The Hunger Games. Now why a ruthless warrior king would even need such a person is a mystery, but let me ask this: are there three countries in a row on their map: Oma Adarlan Clementine?! That would be cool!
'Celaena' reminds me far too much of hyaena, which is more commonly spelled 'hyena'. That's not a great image to have in mind regarding your main character's name. OTOH, female spotted hyeanas do have some really interesting genitalia, so perhaps this is suggestive of something about our character's machismo?
We start in the salt mines where Celaena has been held prisoner for a year because she killed her "overseer". Why that level of crime wouldn't result in her being killed outright for it is something of a mystery, especially since she's a known master assassin (the best in the "world" so we're repeatedly reminded). So you steal, you get sent to the salt mine, you fail to pay your debts, you get sent to the salt mine, you murder, you get sent to the salt mines. Way to boost the murder rate y'all! If there's no difference in penalty, then why would anyone refrain from murdering in furtherance of a crime? One more question. Just one. How on Earth did they ever capture the world's very best assassin? Just asking...!Celaena's constant whine, when she's not whining about how dirty she is, is how abused she's been in the salt mine over the last year. The problem is that she shows no evidence of infirmity or major weight-loss, or even discomfort (if we discount the dirt) from her long year spent hacking salt out of the rocks and uttering, no doubt, a few salty phrases in the process. But Celaena apparently has an out, because the prince of the realm himself has arrived at the mine to invite her to be his champion assassin. She's led to the room where he awaits her, through a multi-story building where her captors lead her up and down staircases, and back and forth along corridors to "fool" her, but she isn't even blind-folded, so what the heck they thought they were doing is an amusing side-show.
Superficially, Celaena's constant planning as to how she would defeat the people around her and escape, seems like something an assassin would do, but I don’t honestly believe that this is the way it would be. Obviously I don’t know how an assassin thinks, but that's not what's important. This isn't a documentary, it’s a novel, and it’s the writer's job to make me believe. Maas failed here for two reasons. The first is that it seems to me that an assassin would be much more likely to operate on instinct, with "operational plans" constantly running through their mind on a low-level rather than occupying their foremost active thought processes, so Maas's rather primitive habit of having Celaena consciously think through weapons and tactics became a bit tiresome after a while. What was more tiresome however, and this is the second issue which bothered me, was the fact that Celaena accepted the prince's offer to fight for him, to become his champion, and to be set free after four years (or was it to go forth after three years?). So why was she constantly planning attack and escape? It made no sense, unless she was not only being dishonest with the prince, but also being dishonest with herself!
Another depressing factor is that it was patently obvious that there would be a sad trope of a love-triangle here, between the captain of the guard, with whom Celaena will have to work, and the prince, for whom Celaena will have to work. It’s a bit pathetic that the assassin has nothing better to think of than how hot the captain and the prince are. Seriously: she's been badly abused (purportedly) and under-fed (supposedly) in captivity, literally working in a salt mine. Although the king stated that she was not to be harmed (since he wanted her to live long and not prosper), she was routinely and viciously whipped (so we're told, although all evidence is to the contrary), putting her at risk of a potentially deadly infection (although with all that salt around, her chances of actually being infected with any common vector of disease would seem rather low to me) and none of that has seemed to have any noticeable effect on her!
So the problem is that she's tired and weak, and she's under-fed, her body wasted and hurting, yet all her mind can think of his how hot these two guys are? That’s truly pathetic, and it made me lose all respect for Celaena as a character and Maas as a writer. Does Maas, as a woman, honestly think that all women think about is how hot or not guys are? Or does she merely think that YA readers are so undemanding and stupid that they don’t require anything better? Neither suggestion becomes any writer. I think in her position, Celaena would have a lot more pressing things on her mind than men and I think it’s insulting to women to write her as though she does not. If a guy had written this character this way, he would have been rightfully held accountable for the wrong-headedness of it. A female writer should be no less accountable, and I would argue perhaps more so.
I found it odd that the prince tells Celaena at one point that she needs to operate under a fake name in the coming competition (to disguise her true identity), yet one of the first things he does as they enter the castle grounds is to use her real name out loud in a quite public place where anyone could hear. In the words of Hermione Granger: What-an-idiot! So now Maas has me convinced that at least two of her three main characters are sad excuses for the real thing.
Celaena gets a luxury suite of rooms? I found that quite weird, but it wasn't totally absurd - that is until we discover that the suite has a games room (yes, a games room, although Maas tries to give it some cred by terming it a "gaming room" without appearing to understand that 'gaming' and 'games' are not the same thing.). The gaming room has a billiards table (very much like a pool table). Billiards does have quite an ancient history. It was an outdoor game as early as the twelfth century, and it was an indoor game by the fifteenth, so it's technically possible, but it felt to me like the only reason Maas put it there was to give Celaena some billiard balls and cues to use as weapons, but in the first 150 pages it gets no use, so maybe there's no reason for it to be there.
It did offer a point of competitive interaction with the prince and the captain, but as I said, it's not used in the portion I read. This lining up of weapons which Maas appears to be conducting here suggests to me that she's forgotten her own plot: that Celaena is there to train as a "champion" for the prince, and will have access to all the real weapons she requires! So why this squirrel behavior, trying to sock away sad little weapons in her room for some unspecified (and unnecessary) fight in the future? Is she an assassin or not? Shouldn't she be able to make a weapon on the spot, out of any old thing? Hey, Jason Bourne could do it, so why can't Celaena?
There's another really amateur event on p45. Celaena is enjoying one of her frequent self-admiration events when an old woman walks in on her and surprises her! This is the world's greatest assassin (so we're told) and yet an old woman can sneak up on her? This parallels a prior event on p7 where she's overpowered and thrown to the ground before she can even turn sufficiently to see her attacker. It's also largely duplicated again on p144 where Dorian accidentally sneaks up on her while she's playing her anachronistic pianoforte. Some hero this Celaena is.
Oh, and before I forget, Dorian the prince says "whom"! Honestly? I touched on the who vs. whom question in another review. I know very many writers are obsessed with being grammatically correct (all though not all of us succeed in this!), but there is a difference between the writer using 'whom' in descriptive passages, and having a character actually say it. No one actually says 'whom' any more, unless they're really pretentious, yet we writers keep on writing it. It's like a giant seed growing in our guts and we can't vomit it up. For whom the boll tells! I think it's time to dispense with it, and believe me I try to, but I still discover from time to time, that I've written it; it's a hard habit to break.
As the competition begins, the tension notches up. One competitor is killed: quite literally shredded to ribbons the night before the first test. Another is killed by the guards as he makes a run for it. Celaena does well in the first test. We discover that the castle has an "orchestra"! This is another problem I have with this novel - the anachronisms. Maas failed to establish a date for the action, so she leaves us only guesses based on the "technology" in use, which suggests this is, in Earth chronology, four hundred to a thousand years ago. But the minuet is less than four hundred years old, so the orchestra couldn't have played one.
I guess you can argue that this is an alien world, so things are alien to us, so let's run with that. The King is a frickin' barbarian, rampaging across the continent of Erilea, sacking one country after another, yet this barbarian supposedly maintains an orchestra, and has rooms in his palace with a billiards table, and a piano (which is another anachronism - the piano forte - or even the fortepiano is only a couple of hundred years old). And this barbarian king leaves alive the kings and princes and princesses of the nations he overruns? None of this makes sense. One of those princesses is even invited to the palace with the idea that she will marry Prince Dorian. Finally, we had a character in this novel who I liked and who really interested me: the Priceless Princess from Eyllwe, named Nehemia (seriously? She really needs a more worthy name!). This was a character I could really warm to (based on initial introduction), but she figures far too little in the story (at least in the first third).
In the end I couldn't stand to read any more of this trashy excuse for a "romance". It was honestly pathetic and made me want to toss the book at the wall, it was so bad. But it's a library book, so I tossed it on the return pile instead. I'm done with this and I rate this nonsense WARTY!
