House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas
4.28 out of 5 Stars
*Makes a cup of tea.*
*Takes a deep breathe.*
*Cracks fingers.*
Here we go.
First things first, I love SJM's writing; I love SJM's world-building; I love SJM's characters. . . I'm still not going to give this book 5 stars. I did really really like this book.
House of Earth and Blood is one of those fantasy books that is just an absolute joy to read. But, there are some things about the story that I didn't quite enjoy or that I thought SJM could have done better. And maybe it's a little unfair of me to do this, but I am holding SJM to slightly higher standard of writing because I know how excellent her books can be.
Second, I have
SO many thoughts on this book that I'm going to have to break it into two posts. This one is going to be a more legitimate, holistic review of the novel. The second, which I will link here when I get to it, will essentially just be me spazzing and fangirling over the story. This second one will also contain more moment-by-moment analyses, so I'm not super worried about having spoilers in this review.
And now, the review. . . (which, is super long so bear with me.)
House of Earth and Blood was a fantastic fantastical procedural novel with characters whose depths were revealed to us at the perfect pace to match the slowly burning plot line. There were only a few dud moments and jerky developments, so the rest of the story was fairly evenly wrung out of the pages and made it so easy to get sucked into the Crescent City. Her writing is addictive and I don't think (and I hope) that is something that will never change. There weren't as many emotional punches or
oh-s*** moments that I'm used to getting from a SJM book, which was a little sad, but the ones that
were in the book were pretty damn good.
maybe minor spoilers below
Plot:
This is for sure a procedural story. I don't necessarily mind that, but at the same time, I wish there was more of a strategic political scheming element to the plot as well. SJM does such a good job with those things in ToG and ACOTAR. The power plays, getting around magic use, knowing what to say and how to say it, dynamics between groups or nations. . . pretty much any sort of strategy portrayal or use, she is a queen of it. And I just wish she had taken better advantage of that skill set, because while it was a good procedural story, and she is a great writer, there was room for more of those political games that would have elevated the story more. We get some politicking at the end, and I really hope that means we'll see more of it in the next books.
For example, Bryce has a really strong political connection (who her father is) that we as readers learn early on in the story. I would have loved for that dramatic irony to be played up more. Or, better yet, for that to raise the stakes somewhere for Bryce as a character with some blackmailing, veiled threat, pressure to expose herself, secret use of it, etc. Instead, her family connection is near buried until the end, and I wasn't completely satisfied by how it was revealed to the rest of the world in the book.
As a procedural, I really enjoyed that I couldn't guess the final answer to the case. However, I think that there may have been one too many moving parts and theories. I don't think there's too much more to say about that other than I felt like the characters jumped to conclusions sometimes that I couldn't follow, which was a little frustrating. It was like they knew things about the world that informed their insights, but we as readers didn't have that knowledge yet to understand the insight with them.
Boy, oh boy was the ending amazing though or what. I'm not even going to bother with a question mark on that sentence like it should be, because it really was just great. SJM does such a great job writing these long battle scenes. The timing of knowing where characters are at and having plot point revealed by specific perspectives is just perfect. It's simply epic, and I really loved that while I hadn't guessed who the big bad guy was at the end, it also made sense. Everything collided together wonderfully and resolved so satisfactorily. This, however, leads directly to the next paragraph.
I have no idea what the next plot will be. There's no loose connective tissue except for the epilogue featuring Aidas and Jesiba. I'm sure I'll try to spin some crackpot theory about it later, but the only thing I've got right now is how Hunt and Bryce are going to find new roles for themselves now and maybe there's some synth still on the streets. There's almost guaranteed to be some fae political tension as well with what Bryce does at the end, but none of this is a large plot that I can see right now. Clearly, Aidas is going to become really important, and I'll get to him more in the related-spazzy post about this book, but in terms of the next book, I have no clear sense of how he is part of the plot.
Characters:
As a whole, I thought that she did such a great job creating her characters. There were a couple that I found familiar to characters from her other series, but not so similar as to be completely recycled. And honestly, and I wouldn't say this about many writers, but she has
so many characters in these books that some personality traits are probably going to pop up multiple times. Like, that's just life. There's seriously a lot of players in this book and they all were so wonderfully individualistic. I'm really only going to focus on the main two though, Bryce and Hunt.
Bryce Quinlan: Bryce, I feel like, a cousin of Aelin's (from SJM's
Throne of Glass). They would be best friends, or they would rip each other to teeny tiny pieces. Bryce is seriously so strong, and I love that she holds herself in a way that even as readers, we don't fully see how good her intentions are. At least early on, we have to take a leap of faith in her that her grief has changed her, and that she wants to do more to help with the investigation and she truly cares about the ramifications of her actions. And of course it's slowly revealed that she really, really does and that she has a few particular techniques in public to hide those good intentions. I thought her character was so well done, between the reveal of her family history, to how she presents herself to hide how affected she is by the deaths, there was a lot there that I think I'm still unpacking. I am so looking forward to finding out where her character goes now, especially considering how the book ended!
Hunt Athalar: Ah. . . the fallen angel. I don't think I've read a book with a main character as a fallen angel in half a decade. It was fun. :) But as to Hunt's personality, he is actually one of the few characters that was not developed as smoothly as the everyone else. There is one point in particular (around page 600) where I just straight up didn't understand how we got to that point. The ground work for what was happening in the moment had barely been laid out, and there was no ground work whatsoever for the other characters' motivations involved in that scene. This has never happened to me before in a SJM book. And it was just weird because all of a sudden, there's a jerky development and I had to jump to looking at Hunt in this different light. That's never good in my opinion. I don't care if you're Jane Austen or Jacqueline Woodson or Stephen King. It never works. It pulls the reader out of the story, and it creates a bump in an otherwise seamless character development.
World/Writing:
This may be completely random and unnecessary, but this is 100% a fantasy novel. For some reason I feel like this was marketing in places as an urban fantasy, and I just straight up don't agree with that. To me, an urban fantasy is something set in our modern world, but there is integration of fantastical elements or a community on top of it. For example, I think Cassandra Clare's
Shadowhunter books are all urban fantasies. Not urban fantasy would be like
Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas becaus even though there are cities and humans, it is not
our world. If
House of Earth and Blood was supposed to be urban fantasy by my definition, there was no mention of our planet or the history of how things came to be set up in terms of politics or history, so in my mind, this is pure fantasy.
Quick version:
Urban fantasy = our world + fantasy creatures/elements
Cities in a fantasy ≠ Urban fantasy
Looking at the world, I love love love the map that we get in the early pages. I'm not sure who made it, but seriously, well done. I love maps in general, and I sort of wish we had one for the whole planet as well, but it wasn't super critical for this book. Maybe in the next book we'll get a world map.
Something that, as a huge SJM fan, I was so excited about, were all the Easter eggs and crossover possibilities to her other series that I found while reading this. I'm not going to go into too much detail about it here because I don't want to accidentally get into spoilers, but each time one sprung up I got giddy. The other thing is, I don't think they were obnoxious. You don't need to be a huge SJM fan. Everything is so well-blended in that, if this is your first SJM book, you wouldn't have even noticed there was an Easter egg and it won't read like you're getting left out of an inside joke.
Almost done, but I need to talk about how beautiful the design of the book is. Huge props to David Mann and Carlos Quevedo who designed and illustrated the jacket, respectively. For real though, I adore the artwork that Quevedo did. There's the red version that everyone can clearly see, but it's also reprinted in what I'm assuming is the original version with full color on the end pages, and I think it's just gorgeous. So so beautiful, I don't think I could ever say that enough.
And finally, the last thing I want to point out is that I have random Tweets out from when I was reading this. I got to the point where I couldn't keep my reactions to myself. And while I have more thoughts and emotional outbursts than what I Tweeted about (I'll get to those in the second post), I needed to let off some of that steam. If you want, they might be kind of funny to scroll through, so they're still up there.
House of Earth and Blood was so good, and satisfied my missing SJM's writing in so many ways. I'm curious to see where the series will go in the future, but for now, I'm perfectly comfortable saying that this was a great book and the start of what I hope will be another great series!
Thanks for reading!
Random Question:
Why are there blurbs about
Heir of Fire on the back of the jacket? Like, I know that they'll put whatever looks best and it's all general praise, but. . . wouldn't there be other blurbs from later in her series?
Anna K by Jenny Lee
~ Thank you to Flatiron Books and NetGalley for providing me with an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. ~
What I really enjoyed though about the plot was that it took an extreme (kids with crazy amounts of money), and brought those characters closer to the average person by connecting them through common courtesy, friendships, pets, and awkward teenage interactions. Yeah, they had some pompous airs about them, but like, Bea is going to look out for Murph to make sure he's having a good time at her party. Those little details of these kids' awareness about their surroundings really brought a nice touch to the story. 
I'm so excited for the HBO adaptation of this! Where it might fall short as a book, I think a TV show can really bring out the crazy and the nuances even more, without seeming like the story is taking too long. Plus, it's HBO, so I am going to have high expectations and I think they'll do a really good job with it in general. 
