Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Mass Book Review

After serving out a year of hard labor in the salt mines of Endovier for her crimes, 18-year-old assassin Celaena Sardothien is dragged before the Crown Prince. Prince Dorian offers her her freedom on one condition: she must act as his champion in a competition to find a new royal assassin.

Her opponents are men-thieves and assassins and warriors from across the empire, each sponsored by a member of the king's council. If she beats her opponents in a series of eliminations, she'll serve the kingdom for three years and then be granted her freedom. Celaena finds her training sessions with the captain of the guard, Westfall, challenging and exhilirating. But she's bored stiff by court life. Things get a little more interesting when the prince starts to show interest in her... but it's the gruff Captain Westfall who seems to understand her best.

Then one of the other contestants turns up dead... quickly followed by another. Can Celaena figure out who the killer is before she becomes a victim? As the young assassin investigates, her search leads her to discover a greater destiny than she could possibly have imagined.

I was sure I would love this.

The first book I read by Sarah J. Mass was A Court of Thorns and Roses and it was one of my favourite 2015 books, next to The Wrath and the Dawn. I adored the writing style, the world building, and the characters too. I had always heard about Throne of Glass as a separate series, I’m a big Tumblr user so every now and then amazing fanart, posts and discussions about the series would pop up on my dashboard, sparking my curiosity more and more. I wanted to be a part of that fandom, I wanted to fangirl at the characters and relationships, to overthink every detail and write overly complicated meta about the littlest thing, as I always do.

The first few pages I liked, sure there were a few logical errors here and there (Like the guards not taking a prisoner blindfolded, or Celaena’s almost pristine physical condition after spending a year being beaten and starved to death) but I wasn’t going to be picky, I loved ACOTAR and I was sure I would love Throne of Glass, I mean, it’s about a female assassin and mysterious murderers, what’s not to love??

And yet, the more I read into the novel the more things started to bug me. The writing style was all “Tell and not show”, we were constantly told what we should think about a character, an action, anything. I started to feel like a small child, as if I were too dumb to pick on such obvious stuff on my own. The problem with this kind of writing is that it not only bores the readers with endless descriptions of things they can see for themselves, but it also doesn’t give a lot of credit to the writer itself. Those are stuff the reader should figure out, if you have the need to explain why a cat is a cat, then you are not doing a very good job in the first place.

The show and not tell also applied to the characters and, in my opinion the one who suffered it the most was Celaena, our main character. We are constantly told what an amazing assassin she is, what a clever, kind, strong and impressive person the assassin obviously is, but we never actually see that. As a matter of fact, Celaena doesn’t even kill anybody and is constantly helped out by men. It amazed me time and time again how, for telling us just how awesome Celaena was, the author wrote things that showed the exact opposite. But I’ll get on to that later.

The world building in ACOTAR was beautiful, unfortunately due to how sheltered Feyre had to be in a place where every fairy wanted to kill her, we couldn’t see much of it. But the little details that were constructed into the plot gave us an idea of a much larger picture. We could see that the author put a lot of thought into the world, and it would be effortless for her to expand our knowledge of said universe since the grounds for it were already there.

I can’t say the same thing about Throne of Glass. In this world, magic was as ancient as the world itself until a conqueror decided to wipe it out. Why? How? We do not know. I was expecting to see more of this; imagine this place where magic, fairies, trolls and every being you can imagine exists, they all have their own cultures, languages, traditions, history (at least I hope so because it wasn’t explained, but it would be really lame if they didn’t) and suddenly a human comes wanting to vanish all of that.

I was expecting to see the devastation of that war, imagine what it must have been like to succeed in destroying something so ancient! Imagine the people having to readjust their lives to this new world without magic! How much did humans interact with it beforehand? And how did its disappearance affected their lives today? But I was saved from all of that by the fact that all magical beings never put up a fight. Apparently the King wanted magic vanished… so they simply vanished.

How did this happen? And, for the love of God why did it happen? It would at least make some sense if we were to say that these beings lived peacefully through ancient treaties or so, or that it wasn’t in their nature to be violent and so they never put up a fight and were slaughtered with ease, but then we are shown that these people were warriors, and mighty ones at that. There are legends about their wars and battles, so what happened?

Lack of thought into the storyline is what happened.

And yes, I know that there are some novellas that are previous to Throne of Glass, and since I haven’t read them I can’t say that the world isn’t really explained because it might be in those prequels, but that’s not the point. A first novel should be there to set the grounds for the story to come, you can’t just start up out of nowhere and give no explanation on the world, the rules and mythology as if it were fanfiction.

The story:

I wasn’t impressed by the plot, as much as I had wanted to love it. The summary promises us an assassin fighting for her freedom in a competition against other criminals to become the King’s next champion. But as the competition progresses and the champions start appearing dead, Celaena realizes that something dark is lurking in the palace, and it will be up to her to figure out what is wrong before she is targeted next.

Instead of all of this, we find that the competition, the main plot of the entire book is not really such thing but rather something that it’s dealt with in a couple of sentences. I was looking forward to the action of these trials, but they were merely mentioned every now and then as the narration decided to focus on the love triangle between Celaena, the Captain of the Royal Guard Chaol Westfall, and the crown Prince, Dorian Havillard. Besides this, not much really happened in the first 300 pages of the book, which is to say nothing happened in 90% of Throne of Glass, how is this possible?

The mystery killings were what intrigued me the most here. I love a good mystery, and I was curious as to see why the champions were being murdered; was it a plot to get a certain champion to win? Or was it something far more mysterious? After all they were killed in strange ways… and we saw none of that. The mystery is barely registered up until the 80% since before that Celaena was too content letting the guard deal with a possible treat to her life. She doesn’t care about people being killed, or that she could be next and so the narration doesn’t care either. It was disappointing that none of the plots mentioned in the summary were not a part of the book.

It bored me, it was not fun to read about nothing going on and on, back in circles of more nothing ever happening. The logic fails also bored and annoyed me in equal amounts.

The resolution of said mystery was lame as hell. Of course that person would be the killer! There was no surprise or suspense in the plot, and that was incredibly dissapointing.

The King wants to find hiss next champion, a person who would be loyal to him and do his bidding without questioning him, whether that is killing, torturing, spying or whatever he needs… And yet he wants for the champion to be chosen from criminals? Why? Why if he’s looking for someone who would be loyal to him, he looks between the people who have disobeyed his laws? That’s like hiring a self-proclaimed child murderer as a nanny!

Plus, he is not the one who is choosing these people, his court men do it for him. The King is hiring a person to be his thug, and it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility that some of this thug’s mission would be to kill, spy or torture the same court member that brought him/her into the palace in the first place, who is to say that the thug won’t turn against the King? That he/she is actually a pawn of the person who took the champion into the palace?

Another logic fail is that, by hosting the competition in the castle and having everybody at court watch the trainings, they would all know who is chosen and how he/she works. There would be no secrecy! Everybody would know who the champion is, how that person works, his/her weaknesses and strengths. It’s dumb and pointless.

There is also the part of the contract. Apparently, the stipulations for this competitions is: you lose, you get send to wherever it is you came from or you do whatever the hell your sponsor wants you to do. If you win and become a champion, you sign a four-year long contract, after which you are freed and have your expensive salary to use as you please. Who the hell would do this?? You have killed for this King, you have done unspeakable things in his name and after only four years he would let go of you? That’s just plain dumb, you could sell his secrets to ANYBODY, who’d be better than his champion to know of all the dirty things he has done?

It doesn’t make sense, and I can usually overlook this things but the book itself demands you to use logical thinking only to suspend it in the things that should be logical, like the motherfreaking plot!

Now that that it’s settled I’ll move on to the characters:

Before I began reading I had seen contradictory opinions on Celaena, some hated her while others loved it. Conflict over the main character is nothing new, of course, but as I started to read reviews in more depth I saw a point that struck a cord with me; people hated Celaena because she was strong, and they would love her if she were a guy. This is something that I absolutely hate, and that unfortunately happens a lot in our society. Women are judged unfairly, and what’s acceptable for guys, it’s not for women. We have to be perfect, pure but sexy, innocent and smart, strong but not too strong.

How many times have we seen people complain about female characters but then praise male ones that are exactly the same? There have been far too many Korras, Kataras, Katherine Pierces and endless more female characters who have been treated this way. It’s an unfair double-standard that most people don’t even realize they are applying because we are too used to it. The fact that people were apparently judging Celaena this way pissed me off, and I was more than sure that she would be an amazing character wrongly accused for being too awesome.

And yet…

Celaena was my biggest problem and disappointment in this novel (don’t kill me just yet) and it’s such a shame because it started out so well! Just look at this:

“She loved clothes—loved the feeling of silk, of velvet, of satin, of suede and chiffon—and was fascinated by the grace of seams, the intricate perfection of an embossed surface.”

Lately, we’ve seen a tendency when it comes to female characters. People are getting tired (luckily) of the typical damsel in distress with no agenda or personality, and we are demanding more real characters, strong and capable as we are in real life (not to say the people like that don’t exist, but they are only a part of the population, not the entire world!). But there seems to be a misunderstanding on how said characters should be. There is the idea that, in order for a woman to be strong she has to think and behave like what is accepted as “typically male”, which often leads to female character proclaiming to be better than other girls because they dislike dresses and other stuff considered “feminine”.

It’s moronic. First of all, if you have to put other people down to make yourself look good, you are not that great. Secondly, what’s wrong with being feminine? Seriously! I have read about female characters proclaiming that wearing a dress made them “dumber”, though they were clearly not too bright to begin with if they were so easily affected by a piece of fabric. You can be awesome and like dresses and make-up, you can be strong and kick ass, you can be strong and have your ass kicked. I don’t know what it is with people and this kind of dangerous ideas about feminism that they believe women can only be respected, scratch that, should only be respected if they behave in a way that pleases men, but it’s freaking insulting and dumb, annnd annoying.

Which was why I had been so happy to see that Celaena was not like that. She was confident (She was the greatest freaking assassin in the entire world!) and she loved dresses, embroideries, she enjoyed colors, pastries, and I loved it! I honestly believed Celaena would become one of my favourite characters.

What happened you may ask? Or you don’t and I’m just writing this review to the empty void that it’s the internet, hello void! (Yes, I totally stole that but I’m talking to the void, he won’t mind.)

The writing style had a large influence on her, especially the “tell and not show”. On the book we are constantly told how amazing Celaena is, how she is the best Assassin in the entire world and she could kill anybody with a snap of her fingers, but we never see this. In fact, and something that confused me to no end was that the author kept on bringing characteristics, actions and situations that proved Celaena was the exact opposite of a “Great Assassin”. I simply did not get it, because this was constant, and how can you convince us of something by telling us the exact opposite?

As an assassin, EVERYBODY could sneak up on her. Hardly a chapter went by without someone startling her, or watching her for minutes without her noticing. How could this be? How hadn’t she been killed just yet? And it was aggravating because the same narration acknowledged it!

“Dorian peeled himself from the wall. For all her assassinating experience, she didn’t notice him until he sat down on the bench beside her.”

“He remained in the doorway, fearful that she’d wake up if he took another step. Some assassin. She hadn’t even bothered to stir.”

As a matter of fact, many people not only watch her sleep without her noticing, they also enter her chambers on several occasions and leave bags of candy, breakfast, prepare clothes and the bathroom, and even take out her dog without her even noticing. And here we are talking about a woman who not only spent six years as an assassin, but she also spent a year as a slave where she had to constantly watch her back, aaand then she was moved to a castle were the competitors (like herself) were being targeted and killed. But Celaena doesn’t even think it’s important to stay alert, she doesn’t care that there could be someone out to get her.

Her abilities were also confusing. Celaena tells us that she could make a perfect circle with arrows at a great distance, and yet she can’t hit a still target at only a few feet from her.

“She aimed for the edge of the innermost ring, which she hit with deadly precision. She could have made an entire circle of arrows, if she’d wanted. And if she’d had enough ammunition.”

Despite being an expert at this, Celaena seems incapable of identifying the qualities of a good arc and the force she should use on it. While firing she described how much strength she had to use and how the arc moved, without realizing that those were all things it shouldn’t do. I don’t get it, if the author researched how firing an arrow worked then why did she write the things it should not do? Like, if you describe a doctor you wouldn’t write her/him purposefully poisoning people.

It was this constant telling and not showing that started to get on my nerves until it just down right pissed me off. Why did I have to be told constantly of how perfect Celaena was at everything when I could see that she wasn’t? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you have to constantly keep telling the reader something that should be obvious, then that’s because you are not making a good job in the first place.

Sarah J. Mass tries to give us the perfect character, Celaena is the best at everything, but without her actually earning it. This is something particularly troublesome for me because it presents the idea that women have to be perfect to be praised, and perfection is impossible. It’s what I’ve said before, and Celaena is the best at everything. She’s the best assassin in the world at the tender age of sixteen (that was when she was imprisoned and was already known as such), she’s breathtakingly beautiful, she is the best at anything she proposes without effort. Every guy has a crush on her, every girl envies her. Animals, even the most anti-social, love her. She loves books, because every reader loves a bookworm. It’s a very dangerous idealization especially because it’s very poorly executed. Celaena is everything, and at the same thing nothing. She jumps from one thing to the other, her characterization as flimsy as her personality.

I wouldn’t mind it if Celaena was the best assassin, gorgeous, flirt, bookworm, dog whisperer and all of that if it made sense, but she’s magically all of those things without making any effort.

The assassin thing, for instance, I was looking forward to getting into the mind of this girl. Why is it that she became an assassin? Was it for money? Pleasure? Revenge? How does she feel about killing? Does she enjoy it, or simply does it because it’s necessary? Those are all aspects that we should have seen, parts of her personality that should be obvious to us since we are reading from her point of view and yet, none of this is ever presented. Celaena and everybody around her throw the title of assassin to us as if referring to her hair color, it doesn’t influence who she is or what she thinks and that’s a MAJOR fault in the book. Characterization is extremely important, and as the premise of the entire series being the adventures of a freaking assassin, one would think we would get to know said assassin.

Those were things that annoyed me, but there were things I hated about Celaena. I literally hated her. Trust me, I did not see it coming but I reached a point in the book where I didn’t want to root for her and, unless she had a 180 degress change in her personality, I would have been more than happy with her dying in the arena.

Celaena is incredibly misogynistic and petty. If you have read my previous reviews, you’ll know that I hate slut-shaming and girl-on-girl hate. I hate it with a burning passion; every time a girl judges another girl for her appearance, sexuality, or proximity to her love interest, it makes me want to take said book, violently throw it to the ground and jump on it as I scream DIE! DIE! DIE!

It’s that bad, and it’s why I hated Celaena. She instantly judged and denigrated any women who went near her love interest:

“She spotted the Crown Prince, dancing and laughing with some blond idiot.”

 

That’s awful! She doesn’t even know the girl, but because she’s dancing with Dorian she’s clearly an idiot.

“Dorian was dancing with a small brunette with outrageously large breasts that he took no pains to avoid glancing at every so often.”

The horror! That girl should be ashamed of her body!!

And as someone with large breasts, I find that outrageously offensive.

“Celaena studied Kaltain’s narrow, narrow waist. Was it really that small? Or could she barely breathe in her corset?”

So much body shaming! What is wrong with Kaltain’s body? What’s the need to have to shame her by suggesting that her corset must be killing her, since she couldn’t possibly have that tiny waist? What the hell does Celaena CARE??

Then, there was this gem:

She glared. “I hate women like that. They’re so desperate for the attention of men that they’d willingly betray and harm members of their own sex. And we claim men cannot think with their brains! At least men are direct about it.”

What a wonderful passive-aggressive insult! It’s like saying, “I’m not racist, but black people are more violent.” (This other gem is from Fox News, in case you are wondering.). Celaena says she hates women who betray their own sex for men… while betraying her own sex for men.

And what cemented my hate for her:

“After that, she’d sworn never to trust girls again, especially girls with agendas and power of their own. “

So, in Order to be good in Celaena’s eyes you should not have power that comes from confidence in yourself, or pursuits, or passions or goals. I CANNOT respect a person who wants for others to be miserable so she can like them. Celaena has power and agenda, but she is the only one who should have that. That’s horrible! And especially in the age the book is settled in, women are treated as properties. We have seen how everybody mocked her for being a girl, and yet Celaena wants women to remain this way, powerless and weak. How can someone be so horrible? That’s like living a comfortable life and wishing “Man, I hope there are still people in the world starving to death.” WHAT THE FUCK??!!

Celaena constantly feels the need to put people down so she can look better in comparison; she tore apart other girl’s appearance, personalities or ideas so that she could feel better about herself. If you need to tore other people down to look better, YOU ARE NOT VERY FUCKING GOOD.

Unfortunately, that’s not the only thing that annoyed me. Celaena is dumb. There, I said it, she is. There is a killer targeting champions, like herself, and she doesn’t care one bit. She doesn’t even set a guard or even locks the freaking door. Even after she saw the marks under her bed and how they keep appearing every day after she washes them, she never locks her door or, hell! tells the guards that are there to protect her that someone keeps sneaking into her room.

She has a test on poisons, and the very next day she finds a bag of candy that magically appeared while she was sleeping. It has no card, and she has no idea who left them there (May I remind you that she had found marks under her bed that suggested she would be the next to be murdered) and, without thinking it, she eats the entire bag of motherfreaking candy!

“Candy!” A large paper bag sat on a pillow, and she found that it was filled with all sorts of confectionary goodies. There was no note, not even a name scribbled on the bag. With a shrug and glowing eyes, Celaena pulled out a handful of sweets. Oh, how she adored candy.”

It never even crosses her mind that they could have been poisoned, and she eats half a bag!

“Sick? Who can get sick from candy?”

A grown person said that, one that has plenty of experience eating candy. And then, guess what?????? She gets freaking sick!

Another proof of her lack of judgement is related, again, to the poison test. They all had had to identify and rank poisons from the deadliest to the most harmless. Celaena has difficulties identifying one poison, Wolfbane. Then, at the very end of the book, she is poisoned with Wolfbane because she never cared to learn how the one poison she had failed to identify in a public test where everybody saw her ignorance on said poison, tasted like. Look, if you have a test and answer everything right but one question, wouldn’t you want to learn it so that it doesn’t happen again? You know, kind of like learning from your mistakes?

Celaena doesn’t. She was aware that everybody at court, including the participants who wouldn’t be above killing her to get the job, knew she was unable to recognize Wolfbane, meaning that was a poison they could use to kill her, and she never studies it! AND THEY FUCKING USE IT AGAINST HER!

The freaking King says it himself!:

“If she’d been really good, she would have noticed the poison before she drank.”

 

Yes! Thank you, generic villain! She should have noticed the poison.

She’s a hypocrite.

I have already mentioned how Celaena treats women, but that’s not when the hypocrisy stops:

A flicker of shame sparked within her. What was “Champion” but a dressed-up name for murderer? Could she actually stomach working for him?

YOU ARE FUCKING ASSASSIN FOR FUCKS SAKE!

What the hell?? I would understand if Celaena were an assassin against her will, or who targeted people who did wrong but she has claimed to kill innocent people because she was paid to do it, because others wanted to advance in their careers and wanted an “obstacle” removed. Not to mention that she fantasizes about brutally murdering people when they even look at her in a bad way, or they are better at something than she is, or they say a freaking joke. She’s a petty, petty person but we are supposed to believe that she’s “Oh so great and good at heart!”

“But you did not let the mines harden you; you did not let it shame your soul into cruelty.”

SHE’S ALREADY CRUEL, AND PETTY, AND A JUDGEMENTAL ASSHOLE!

All of this is part of a bigger problem, I don’t buy Celaena as an assassin. But it’s not that I don’t buy a girl being the best assassin at the age of sixteen, it’s just Celaena.

Look, I really dislike the term Mary Sue. For those of you who don’t know, a Mary Sue is a female character idealized to the point of perfection; she’ll be the best at whatever she intends, however impossible it may seem, she’ll be the most beautiful girl in the world that every boy craves and she might also have super amazing and impossible powers (depending on the genre). It’s basically wish fulfillment, a way for an author to insert him/her into the story but with improved characteristics. The male version is called “Gary Stu” and one of the most popular ones is Batman. My problem is that there is always a double standard for boys and girls. As I had said, before I started reading I came across many reviewers who claimed that people would love Celaena if she were a guy and, although that’s not true for me I know for a fact that it’s true to other people. I mean, Batman is the biggest wish fulfillment character out there and nobody says it’s ridiculous, but many would if he were a she.

But still, does that mean that Mary Sues and Gary Stus are not real? No.

And Celaena, unfortunately is a Mary Sue. My problem with these characters, either male or female is that they don’t earn anything. I hate people who are magically handed everything, it’s not logical or realistic.

Celaena was the best assassin before she was betrayed and imprisoned when she was only sixteen, which means she had trained for less than eight years before she became known as the greatest assassin. How could she have gotten so good when she doesn’t even has discipline? I don’t know if it’s possible for a child to overcome her own master and people who have trained and worked for decades, but it certainly is impossible for someone who has no self-discipline, will to learn or care about improving their knowledge.

Despite having being starved and beaten for over a year, and having to compete in fights with much older and rougher guys, Celaena doesn’t care that she is out of shape and doesn’t care for training either. She’s convinced that, because she was the “greatest assassin ever” she can still beat them without effort. That’s a major flaw, especially for an assassin because she’s overestimating herself.

This girl’s period stopped coming, her freaking period! You know how much weight she probably lost for that to happen? Her muscles would be atrophied because the body started consuming them long ago in order to stay alive. Her bone density probably diminished as well. As far as strength goes, Celaena should barely be able to take a few walks.

If she lost, she would be sent back to Endovier, don’t you think anybody would do anything in her power to stop that? But Celaena doesn’t care, she claims that she can do anything… though she is always offended when she is not helped in cheating the tests.

Not to mention how she spent the night before a test, awake reading a book. That’s how little she cares, but yet again why should she? She’s a Mary Sue, of course everything will work out for her.

Something that confused me was the title she had and how nobody really knew who Celaena was. As an assassin, anonymity is everything, I mean if everybody knows who you are then it’s much harder for you to get your job done, people will try to kill you all the time. Nobody knew who Celaena Sardothien was, just her name and her reputation... which basically means everybody knew who she was. She has met people on the book who recognized her easily enough and no wonder there, since she was always bragging. It was weird, because Celaena insisted on how nobody knew who she was or how she had to keep her identity a secret, while always trying to prove she was, in fact, Celaena.

“I hate you telling me to hold back when Brullo sings Cain’s praises and I’m just there, boring and unnoticed in the middle.”

That’s how it should be! For the love of God, she’s still weak and if the guys knew she was a treat they could team up and kill her easily enough. Wouldn’t it be better if she didn’t draw attention to herself? Smarter? It would be, but Celaena is not smart.

The truth is, for all her perfection, I can’t say anything positive about her. I liked her potential in the beginning, but she soon proved me wrong. And the thing is, flawed as she was I could have loved her! Minus the slut-shaming, I love characters who are freaking wrong and messed up, but what killed it was that everybody insisted on how perfect she was, on what a truly good and pure heart she had and how she could do anything.

Celaena is sold as a strong character, a woman who fends for herself in a male-dominated world and yet, she has no real power. Everything she achieves is done for her by men, the tests and fights, even her survival at the castle could not have been accomplished if she hadn’t been helped by several guys through the journey. She does nothing for herself, and we are meant to praise her as a feminist icon? I’m sorry, but Celaena is one of the most un-feminist characters I have read about, and that’s not an opinion, that’s a fact.

Dorian.

Damn, as if disliking Celaena wasn’t bad enough, I disliked everyone’s favourite love interest. Go big or go home, I guess.

Ok no, seriously, what’s up with this guy? Dorian Havillard is the crown Prince, and the one who takes Celaena out of the mines and into the castle to become his father’s next champion. Perhaps it was because he, like Celaena not killing anybody, did nothing a prince would do. You would think the future ruler of an empire would study and be engaged on what happens with his kingdom, the wars it’s fighting, its people. But no, Dorian is the typical playboy prince with daddy issues. If he lived today he would be the spoiled child of a corporate magnate, too busy chasing girls and thinking himself so charming, but stumping his feet and crying every time his dad doesn’t think he’s capable of running the company. Seriously, Dorian would complain and complain on how his father didn’t take him seriously when he did literally nothing to be respected. I guess he just hoped everybody would love him and respect him without him lifting a finger, poor guy.

His relationship with Celaena was pretty annoying, since it was basically half the plot of the book and one I couldn’t care less about. Dorian is bored of his life at court, and when Celaena arrives, a pretty and “sassy” girl who turns him down, he’s excited. Let’s face it, he chases Celaena because it’s a game for him and possibly because he had already chased the rest of the women in the castle.

He claims over and over that his attraction toward her is more than just that, but again it’s too much talking and little showing. Sometime in the plot he gets all of this profound feelings that he tries to shove down our throat, it fails to convince me for one simple reason; there is no reason. Why does Dorian like Celaena besides for a little fun? Well he likes her because she is… umm… ok, he appreciates her… ehhhh…. Mmmm… beauty?

I don’t know, there is no reason. And, yes I know that love is unpredictable and illogical and all, but he suddenly is in love and that’s it. What does he like about her besides the fact that she is someone fun to forget about court life?

He was a womanizer, or the term would be fuckboy? What does fuckboy mean anyways? Every online dictionary has a different answer... Sorry, I’m ranting. He uses women and then has the audacity of mocking them! And, of course Celeana beamed and laughed whenever Dorian said unflattering things about his previous lovers.

 “I can't stomach the idea of marrying a woman inferior to me in mind and spirit. It would mean the death of my soul “

It would mean the death of my soul. It would mean the death of my soul.

What a fucking idiot. He’s met countless of women and none of them are similar or superior to him in mind and soul? Kaltain is smart as fuck, and she’s just one! But pretty Celaena, the one who chocked down an entire bag of possibly poisoned candy is, oh so superior??

Another reason why I disliked him, HE SAYS WOMEN EXAGGERATE WHEN WE ARE ON OUR PERIOD. Look, if that’s not a major danger sign I don’t know what it is. Just look at this:

“Celaena opened an eye and frowned as Dorian sat on her bed. “I’m in a state of absolute agony and I can’t be bothered.” “It can’t be that bad,”

Bite me Dorian, honestly. There was nothing I found that I could like about him.

Chaol.

Well, what can I say? I really like the guy for most of the book. Sure, it wasn’t an spectacular love or anything, but considering how everything pissed me off, finding something that didn’t was nice. Chaol Westfall is the captain of the royal guard, Dorian’s Best friend and Celaena’s personal guard who also forms part of the love triangle.

I actually preferred his relationship with Celaena to her and Dorian. With the prince it was pretty much insta-love/lust but I couldn’t get it from the assassin’s side, why did she like Dorian? All she said was that he was handsome and that he was not as bad as she thought he would be, but that’s it. Not to mention how we have the mention of her previous lover, Sam who was killed before she was imprisoned. Celaena mentions now and then how his absence still hurts her and yet there is no conflict with her new romances. God, so little thought was put into this, it’s mind-numbing.

At least with Chaol the two got to know each other, though my rooting for him and their relationship soon died when he started worshipping Celaena. Seriously, why did they have to ignore her faults in order for her to be loved? Why couldn’t she be an assassin with a bad temper like she was, instead of presenting us this wonderful person of pure heart and intentions that didn’t exist?

I also found ridiculous how he had never killed anybody. I’m sorry, but he was captain of the royal guard, CAPTAIN! How the heck did he get that title, by being Dorian’s friend? I’m sorry, but it was just impossible.

Nehemia was another character that was a bit of a disappointment. I loved that she was fighting for her people, even though her immaturity and selfishness worked against them rather than help them. Still, she had a plan, she had character I could root for her, but she was merely an accessory to Celaena. Their friendship, just like the romance has no grounds. Why did the two of them liked each other? Fuck me if I know, they seemed to like to laugh at other women and their silly ways so, I guess to add more to the girl-on-girl shame? As if we didn’t have enough of that already.

If I’m being honest, her entire development and inclusion in the plot made me afraid she would turn out as a stereotype which, in one way she did... But luckily, she wasn’t killed which was my biggest fear surrounding her character.

Overall, to say Throne of Glass was a disappointment is an understatement. The only reason I didn’t give it one star was because many people say that the second is amazing, and this was Sarah J. Mass’ first book, so I want to give the series another try instead of judging it right away. Still, so disappointing in every way. So far, I wouldn’t recommend this at all.