It’s a tale as old as time, a beauty young woman is taken away from everything she loves and is forced to live with a hideous beast. The woman breaks the curse on the beast turning him into a handsome prince and they live happily ever after. Now, let’s add some drama to that story.

We begin with Feyre. One day while hunting in the woods, a wolf emerges that she know is actually a fae in disguise. She has grown up in a world where the fae are hated after a long war that occurred 500 years before she was even born and the lives of humans and fae are separated by a wall which you are never to cross.

It is this hatred that keeps Feyre from even hesitating before she kills the wolf to help feed her starving family. The day after making her kill, another fae beast invades her home demanding retribution for the life she has taken. Feyre agrees and leave with this beast. Upon their arrival, Feyre discovers that the beast is one of the seven High Lords that reside over the fae. Her new prison is within the Spring Court of Prythian and her captor is named Tamlin.

This book is a new adult romance meets high fantasy. Sarah J. Maas wrote the first draft ‘A Court of Thorns and Roses’ in five weeks, and I was just like her in the sense that I couldn’t put the book down. Maas took inspiration from ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and truly made it into her own story when she added in the fae aspects. Knowing that the story was an adaptation defiantly affected the way I read and interpreted the book.

You could see all the elements from the original story as the book progressed, and the way that the author choose to change the elements in her own style help her own them. Adding in the elements of faeries also forged a new place for itself amongst the other adaptations of Beauty and the Beast that are on the entertainment market today.

I think the thing I loved most about the first book was Feyre. Even though the “Beauty” in the original story gave off a sort of ‘damsel in distress’ air, Feyre was not what I was expecting. She is definitely a strong female character who you stands her ground and it’s this attitude that helps the story move with an air of originality as opposed to that feeling you get from reading an adaptation.

Maas’s character and scenery description are both vivid and thrilling, keeping you on the edge of your seat and ripping the carpet out from under you at the same time.

This book was so good that I couldn’t stop myself and ended up binging all three books in the series in less than two weeks. There are only so many praises I can sing about this book without going into full fangirl mode.