“A Court of Thorns and Roses”
Yep. I am one of those girls who has an obsession with the “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series. But I attribute my newfound love of reading entirely to this series. I hadn’t picked up a book that I thoroughly enjoyed in years before stumbling upon these masterful novels. But, in a bit of an unpopular opinion, the last book in this universe, A Court of Silver Flowers, is my absolute favorite. The entire series is labeled as a young adult romance and I love a good romance novel — but this book in particular really hit home with the themes it presented. This book to me was such a red herring to the rest of that series in the best way possible.
We follow the whirlwind journey of Nesta, who is the oldest of the 3 Archeon sisters and is usually described as stubborn or mean. In previous books, we don’t see a lot of Nesta since the story primarily focused on the middle child, Feyre. When we do, it isn’t usually positive. And I’ll be honest, I wasn’t the biggest fan of her character while reading the previous books, so I was curious to know what Maas had in store for her. Not to mention this is the largest book in the ACOTAR series, so there was seemingly a lot to unpack about Nesta and her future.
As we enter into the world of Nesta Archeon, we discover a few things right out of the gate: she enjoys reading romance novels, as one does, and she is fighting some serious demons. As we keep learning about her, we also discover she has a lot of grit. She desperately wants to overcome the demons that have been weighing her down for so long. Coincidentally, she happens to know a handsome battalion chief who agrees to train her in combat. It is important to note that women are generally not allowed to join in fighting the war because they are seen as weak and fragile.
This lights a fire (literally) in Nesta, and she becomes determined to fight alongside her male counterparts. During this time, she also meets Emerie and Gwyn, who are both stuck in the shadows of their past like Nesta. She invites them to start training with her, and they quickly bond over their similar stories of struggle.
As they get stronger physically, so does their friendship. The girls all find training as an outlet, a way to forget about their troubles and focus more on becoming warriors. It becomes their coping mechanism, and they all slowly begin to find peace in the chaos that is in their minds.
All the sneaky underlying themes like friendship and overcoming mental health battles become so intricately laced with fun and love that they were easy to overlook initially. But I find Maas wickedly talented for being able to intertwine something like romance with real-life struggles together so beautifully into one book. We even see Nesta dealing with the weight of losing her father and having massive regrets about things she wished she would’ve done sooner with him.
Nesta had to rebuild herself as a woman of power and mold herself into a character that readers felt a connection to. Something that helped with fostering that newfound love is her blossoming relationship with that handsome trainer. I personally loved seeing their relationship blossom as their training sessions turned into therapy sessions, and we watched as Nesta opened up to someone for the very first time in the whole series and how she finally had someone who she felt was proud of the woman she had become by the end of the book. Maas said, “sometimes the greatest battles are the ones fought within ourselves.”
From Nesta’s love of reading to fighting, she becomes so relatable that I just got sucked into this crazy plot much faster than normal. This book started as a break from reality, but once I finished, I felt like I could fight a war, find love and overcome struggles in just one day. This is my favorite book in the series. I highly recommend this book, along with the series, to anyone who is looking for their own little oasis of love and female empowerment.