A Court of Mist and Fury

The story continues in this thrilling sequel. Feyre must heal from her torment and learn to control her newfound power. Feyre has saved Prythian from the evil tyrant Amarantha, and she has been reborn as a faerie. As Feyre adjusts to her new faerie body, she uncovers new powers she has been gifted from the high fae. Feyre struggles to overcome trauma causing her relationship with Tamlin to become increasingly strained. As their relationship deteriorates, Tamlin becomes more controlling. Eventually, Tamlin uses magic to trap Feyre inside their home. When Feyre calls for help, Rhysand, the high lord of the night court, hears her plea and saves her. Rhysand takes Feyre to the night court where her next chapter begins.

While Feyre begins to heal from her broken relationship with Tamlin, she finds an unlikely ally in Rhysand. As Feyre heals, her bond with Rhysand grows stronger; however, she must ready herself for an approaching threat. Dark plans are revealed, and Feyre realizes she might be the key to stopping an imminent war against Hyburn, an ancient land that is plotting a war to take over Prythian and the human lands. Will Feyre ever recover from her trauma? Will she let herself have feelings for the beautiful high lord of the night court? Will Feyre be able to master her new powers in time to save Prythian?

 A Court of Mist and Fury is a stunning sequel to A Court of Thorns and Roses. Feyre is a strong female who leads the fighting and demonstrates great powers among the faeries. A Court of Mist and Fury focuses on the inner workings of the night court and introduces new, funny, and vibrant characters. As Feyre’s adventure continues, her new powers begin to make her a target among the high fae. Instead of backing down, she trains to control her powers and to protect herself. Feyre’s powers put a feminist spin on the series because the high lords need Feyre’s help to save Prythian. With this sequel, Maas creates a story that is even better than the first. A Court of Mist and Fury continues to dive into the rich history of the faerie world and the different courts.

Maas develops her characters in a realistic way that allows the readers to relate to her strong characters and fall in love with them. Maas allows her protagonist to have multiple relationships and friendships, showing that a broken heart is not the end of a character’s story. She allows Feyre to have multiple loves, with many highs and lows, to show a more realistic look at what it is to find love. These different love interests and friendships display the true difficulties of relationships and that, ultimately, everyone has to do what is healthiest for themselves when it comes to love. These relationships make the story more genuine and powerful, even though the setting is in a magical world. With Feyre’s heartbreak and her healing from physical trauma, the story touches on her mental health and the effects of depression. While Feyre is healing, she goes through a mourning process and comes out the other side stronger than ever. This novel delves into the raw emotion of heartbreak, depression, and the healing that everyone, human or faerie, must go through in their life.

Sexual Content

• Feyre and Tamlin have an intimate moment. Feyre “moved on him. Lightning lashed through my veins, and my focus narrowed to his fingers, his mouth, his body on mine. His palm pushed against the bundle of nerves at the apex of my thighs, and I groaned his name as I shattered.” The scene is described over two pages.
• To distract the court, Rhys and Feyre pretend to be a couple. They put their “show” relationship on display and Rhysand’s “hand slid higher up my thigh, the proprietary touch of a male who knew he owned someone’s body and soul. He’d apologized in advance for it- for this game, these roles we’d have to play. But I leaned into that touch, leaned back into his hard, warm body.” This exchange goes on for three pages.
• Feyre and Rhysand stay in an inn, and they share a bed. “The fingers he’d spread over my stomach began to make idle, lazy strokes. He swirled one around my navel, and I inched imperceptibly closer, grinding up against him, arching a bit more to give that other hand access to my breasts.” They decide to not go any further sexually, as they are in the beginning stage of their relationship. This intimate moment lasts two pages.
• Feyre and Rhys’s mating bond snaps into place, and they have sex for the first time. Rhys “deepened the kiss, and I wrapped my legs around his back, hooking him closer. He tore his lips from my mouth to my neck, where he dragged his teeth and tongue down my skin as his hands slid under my sweater and went up, up, to cup my breasts. I arched into the touch and lifted my arms as he peeled away my sweater in one easy motion.” The scene is described over three pages.

Violence

• Rhys tells the story of how Azriel got his scars on his hands. “For the eleven years that Azriel lived in his father’s keep, she [Azriel’s stepmother] saw to it that he was kept in a cell with no window, no light. When he was eight, his brothers decided it’d be fun to see what would happen when you mix Illyrians quick healing gifts with oil and fire. The warriors heard Azriel’s screaming. But not quick enough to save his hands.”
• Rhys and Feyre are flying when arrows attacked them. Feyre “felt the impact—felt blinding pain through the bond that ripped through my own mental shields, felt the shudder of the dozen places the arrows struck as they shot from bows hidden beneath the forest canopy.”
• Feyre attacks a camp of faeries that have taken Rhys hostage. “The others around them shouted as I dragged my ash arrows across their throats, deep and vicious, just like I’d done countless times while hunting. One, two—then they were on the ground, whips limp. Before the guards could attack, I winnowed again to the ones nearest. Blood sprayed. Winnow, strike; winnow, strike.”
• Valerian is attacked, and Feyre witnesses a woman impaled on a light post. The woman’s “body bent, her back arched on the impact.” As the city is being attacked, Feyre hears “screams, the beating wings, the whoosh and thud of arrows erupted in the sudden silence.”
• Feyre attacks the Attor, a winged monster, before he can escape the attack on Valerian. The Valerian “shrieked, wings curving as I slammed into it. As I plunged those poisoned ash arrows through each wing . . . the Attor could not break free of my flaming grasp.”
• Jurian “fires an ash bolt through Azriel’s chest” that almost kills him.
• Feyre, Rhys, and the rest of his court try to infiltrate Hyburn and nullify the Cauldron before it can be used for evil. When they get to Hyburn, they realize it is a trap. Tamlin has sold them out to the king. The king kidnapped Feyre’s human sisters, who were “gagged and bound.”
• The king forces Feyre’s sisters to go into the cauldron to be transformed into fairies against their will. “Elain was hoisted up between two guards and hoisted up. She began kicking then, weeping while her feet slammed into the sides of the cauldron as if she’d push off it or knock it down. The guards shoved my sister into the cauldron in a single movement.”
• The king breaks Feyre and Rhys’s bond. “Tamlin gripped my arms as I [Feyre] screamed and screamed at the pain that tore through my chest, my left arm. A crack sounded in my ears. And the world cleaved in two as the bond was broken.”

 Drugs and Alcohol   

• Feyre mentions drinking wine with most meals.
• Mor tells Feyre, “come sit with me while the boys drink.”
• Feyre talks about how Mor “had been out drinking and dancing until the mother knew when.” Feyre eludes that Cassian and Azriel have hangovers, describing them as “grumbling and wincing over breakfast, had looked like they had been run over by wagons.”
• Feyre goes out to a nightclub with Rhys, Mor, Cassian, and Azriel. She describes “nursing her glass of wine” as Mor and Cassian “danced around the bar.”

 Language

• Profanity is used occasionally. Profanity includes: shit, damn, ass, and hell.
• Rhys and Feyre are having an argument and Rhys says, “I don’t give a damn what I have to do.”

Supernatural

• Feyre asks Rhysand about his winnowing powers and he says, “Winnowing? Think of it as . . . two different points on a piece of cloth. One point is your current place in the world. The other one across the cloth is where you want to go. Winnowing… it’s like folding that cloth so that two spots align. The magic does the folding and all we do is take a step to get from one place to another.”
• Feyre meets a water-wraith and describes her as wearing “no clothes. Her long, dark hair hung limp and her massive eyes were wholly black.”
• Feyre uses her powers unknowingly and goes into the mind of Lucien. She describes it as, “still there, still seeing through my eyes, but only half looking through another angle in the room, another person’s vantage point – his head. I had been inside his head, had slid through his mental walls.”
• Tamlin and Feyre get into a fight, and he gets so enraged that his power “blasted through the room.” The room is destroyed around Feyre, but she isn’t hurt. When Tamlin tries to come to her, he hits an invisible wall around her. “And I realized that the line, that bubble of protection. . . It was from me. A shield. Not just a mental one but a physical one, too.”
• Feyre starts to feel talons growing on her hands. She describes it as “where my nails were growing, curving. Not into talons of shadow, but claws.” She can also will them away “like blowing out a candle.”
• Rhysand tells Feyre about her power to look into other people’s minds, which is a power he also shares. “We’re called daemati- those of us who can walk into another person’s mind as if we were going from one room to another. If you were to ever encounter a daemati without those shields up, Feyre, they’d take whatever they wanted.”
• Feyre describes Amren, one of Rhysand’s inner circle members in the night court, as being an other-worldly being inside a human body. “Her silver eyes were like nothing I had ever seen; a glimpse into the creature that I knew in my bones wasn’t high fae. Or hadn’t been born that way. The silver in Amren’s eyes seemed to swirl like smoke under glass.”
• Rhys describes the Illyrians, a race of winged faerie warriors, since he is half Illyrian and his closest friends and court members, Cassian and Azriel, are also Illyrian. “The Illyrians are unparalleled warriors, and are rich with stories and traditions. But they are also brutal and backwards.”
• Rhys and Feyre go to a magical prison inside a rock with “the foulest, most dangerous creatures and criminals you can imagine” to visit a prisoner called the bone carver. The bone carver is a magical creature that may “appear to you as one thing, and I might be standing right beside you and see another.”
• Feyre sees the weaver, a scary, mythical being. She describes her with “gray skin, wrinkled and sagging and dry. Her lips had withered to nothing but deep, dark lines around a hole full of jagged stumps of teeth.”
• Amren doesn’t eat human food, and while they are all out to dinner together, the restaurant’s owner brings her “a goblet filled with dark liquid.” After Amren takes a sip, her teeth were “gleaming with blood.”
• Feyre practices with her water powers by “making water rise from the tub, then shaping little animals and creatures out of it.”
• The night court celebrates a holiday called Starfall, where stars “cascaded over them filling the world with white and blue light.” Rhys tells her they’re not stars at all, but “spirits on a yearly migration to somewhere. Why they pick this day to appear here, no one knows.”

 Spiritual Content

• Feyre meets Ianthe, one of the high priestesses of Prythian. “Among the high fae, the priestesses oversaw their ceremonies and rituals, recorded their histories and legends, and advised their lords and ladies in matters great and trivial.”
• The bone carver tells Feyre about the Cauldron where “all magic was contained inside it and the world was born in it. It could not be destroyed, for it had made all things, and if it were broken, then life would cease to exist.”

by Adeline Garren