Bless This Mess: A Court of Frost and Starlight
THE SET UP
This is such a weird little entry.
So, Feyre, human-turned-Fae extraordinaire, won her war and has functionally lived happily ever after with her mate (bleh) Rhysand. Why not publish a little Christmas sorry, Solstice special?
I don’t know if I’ve ever read a published book like this. There is very little plot or story here, things happen without even the barest glimpse of a character arc, and it’s all basically a setup for the next big novel. Still, it’s here, and it’s wild, so we’re going to talk about it.
THE MESS
A lot of this book is Feyre et al sorting out post-war complications, which is actually a plot point I usually enjoy. Like, I do want to see how people rebuild after something cataclysmic, I like when it’s not just “oh big battle over, everything’s fine now.” Unfortunately, SJM is not the writer to give this to me.
And example of post-war issues: the brutish Illyrians (remember, the winged brown people who mutilate their women ugh, sorry, females) are unhappy with the changes Rhysand is trying to enact (ie, more rights for women). Also, Feyre goes Christmas/Solstice shopping and the people stop her to tell her how she saved them.
Speaking of Illyrians: we finally meet a female, a shopkeeper named Emerie. She’s had her wings clipped, and nobody likes that she owns her shop, but hey, it only took three books to actually include a member of this marginalized group in addition to the hot males fighting for women’s rights.
Rhysand goes to speak to Tamlin, who has apparently been completely abandoned by his people, and hasn’t been defending his borders properly. This goes about as well as you’d expect: Tamlin’s still not doing well, and Rhysand does not offer him any help or sympathy, just saying he’s gotten what he deserves.
We learn in this book that female Faeries have incredibly bad menstrual cycles. We actually spend a lot of time on this — they get two really bad periods a year, every six months. This isn’t relevant to anything storywise, but I guess we had to have some downside to the transformation at some point, huh? I do actually appreciate the inclusion of menstruation in a book in theory, I guess, but this really doesn’t add anything.
Other things I guess I appreciate in theory: Amren mentions off-hand that she could have taken a male form, because before she had a physical form she was “neither. [She] simply was.” This is the closest we’ll get to any kind of trans or non-binary representation. It’s in the context of her needing to figure out how to pee once she became mortal.
So eventually we get to, I guess, the main conflict of this book: Feyre’s oldest sister, Nesta, is Having A Bad Time. By which I mean she’s been drinking a lot and sleeping around (the horror). Feyre is pretty judgy about this, and the narrative seems to be too. Anyway, she’s also not accepting help and she doesn’t want to be around Feyre and friends.
There’s this mildly interesting piece where Feyre speaks to a weaver who’s been using her grief over the loss of her husband to create beautiful art. It’s almost hilariously ham-handed in its lack of subtlety, and Feyre CANNOT stop comparing herself to other people. “Wow, she lost her husband, just like I almost lost Rhys. That would have been so sad :(”
Lucien comes to Solstice and for really no apparent reason, Feyre chooses to bully him. Like, he is clearly not welcome in the Night Court because they all inexplicably hate him, and he had to leave Tamlin in the last book to help Feyre, so he’s started hanging out with a new crowd of folks who actually seem to like him. Feyre makes fun of him and his new friends! I can’t imagine why he would prefer not to be thre!
Oh, SJM also mentions that Lucien’s gift for Elain — enchanted gardening gloves, a thoughtful present because she LOVES gardening — are set aside immediately, because, as Feyre makes sense of it, Elain must PREFER to have torn hands. I hate it here.
Rhysand, Cassian, and Azriel have a tradition of having a big snowball fight every year. I mention this mostly because it serves as an inroad for SJM to tease us about Feyre having group sex with all the boys. This will never happen because it would introduce way too much potential for queerness, but it’s hot that Feyre could if she wanted to, I guess.
Oh my god, though, also, Feyre gifts Rhysand a painting of herself. Her true self, as seen in a mirror in the last book (which is like a badass dragon or something). “Here is your Christmas gift, honey, it’s a picture of me” is hilarious to me, even if it is meant to symbolize him accepting her as she is or whatever.
So Nesta does end up coming to Solstice (because Feyre kind of forces her to — literally only agrees to pay her rent if she comes), and she’s kind of sullen and unpleasant because she’s traumatized from a) becoming a Faerie against her will and b) watching her father die in front of her. So rude of her, right?
When she leaves, Cassian insists on walking her home, despite her own insistence against it. Hey ladies, it’s hot when he pushes your boundaries, right? He keeps trying to talk to her, she shuts him down, meanwhile his internal dialogue is all about how he “tries not to care about who took her maidenhead” and excuse me, I need to go vomit, catch you all later.
Anyway, after this whole debacle, which I have more thoughts on below, we’re back to Feyre and Rhysand, and we get the wild reveal that all of Feyre’s favourite dresses were made by Rhys’ mother. You know, the one who’s been dead for hundreds of years. I’m…honestly not really sure what the implication here is, though I think it’s that he’s held onto them for her.
So naturally, they bang it out (that’s what people come to these books for, I guess) and, because they’re also mentally connected, Feyre asks him to simultaneously bang her mentally. No, I don’t know how this works either. I guess “what if I was in you while I was in you” does it for some folks??
And then one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read in a book happens: Feyre projects the image of their future son into Rhysand’s head so hard that he comes.
She projects the image. Of their future son. Into his head. And that makes him come.
Yeah, no, just take a second for that. Let it sink in.
Rhysand’s later chapter begins “The sex had destroyed me” which I do find funny out of context. “UTTERLY RUINED ME.” Okay sir.
So her other gift to him (besides the self-portrait) is that she wants to have a baby with him. He buys her land to build a perfect house on. It’s all just the most heteronormative bullshit and really all I have to say about that is “blegh” and also “ick ick ick.”
Anyway Rhys goes back to Tamlin and bullies him into taking care of himself, I guess. Don’t worry, this sounds like it’ll be interesting, so we’ll never come back to it, nor will we get any kind of reckoning between these two men and their complicated history.
THE ACTUAL BAD STUFF
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: the depiction of the Illyrians continues to be deeply racist!
Fairly early on, when thinking about how Amren gave up her immortality and cool powers in order to help them in the war, Feyre explicitly says that she did it because of her new boyfriend. Not, y’know, because of her bond with her friends/found family they’ve been trying to sell us. I hate this so much. Feyre could be wrong here, I guess, but the books don’t set her up as an untrustworthy narrator.
I am legitimately so angry about how Lucien is treated in this book. There is no reason for everyone to be so hostile to him, his biggest sin is that he helped Tamlin after being lied to about Feyre, which he corrected as soon as he could. Justice for Lucien, genuinely, he deserves so much better than this series. This made me angry enough that I sought out ACOTAR fanfic that actually dealt with this, and I cannot believe I was driven in this way.
Cassian also sucks so much, and he takes up so much space here because he’s Nesta’s romantic interest and she’s going to be the protagonist of the next book. After she rebuffs him (honestly, fairly, in my opinion), he THROWS HER SOLSTICE GIFT INTO THE RIVER. You know, the actions of a normal, well-adjusted, emotionally mature 500 year old man.
Straight up the narrative admits that Nesta has nowhere else to go, and yet, I think we’re supposed to be on Cassian’s side when his response to her “I hate it here” is “Then leave.” Oh, and also, “Your sisters love you. I can’t imagine why, but they do,” as well as “You need to try harder” (to get over her trauma). Cassian. Sucks. So. Much.
You know what else sucks? The whole “young adult female matches with ancient male” thing. Yes I know it’s a trope in these kinds of books but it’s still bad, and it somehow feels even more grating because the books are trying to (or think they’re trying to) be more feminist. We’re all about empowerment for Feyre until she’s 21, married to her 500 year old husband for less than a year, and she decides, counter to a discussion they had last book, that she wants a baby. Really? REALLY??
God, the Nesta stuff. We’ll come back to the Nesta stuff because it’s about to get SO much worse but to recap: Nesta has been set up by the narrative to be kind of a shitty person. When we first meet her all the way back in ACOTAR, she is explicitly ignoring the needs of her family and letting Feyre run herself ragged to keep them all alive. However, aside from this first introduction, she’s pretty smart, and she actually is not overly selfish; she can be arrogant, but she generally steps up when they need her to. But these books are allergic to actually interesting development or interactions, and so even though she’s obviously traumatized and struggling, we focus on how poor Feyre and poor Cassian feel about it.
IN CONCLUSION
Man, this book blows.
I was riding pretty high at the end of ACOWAR, I’m not gonna lie. I was having fun. This book completely took the wind out of my sails. It’s boring, it’s stupid, and it’s aggravating. Honestly, nothing in this book is enjoyable. Hard pass, thumbs down, miss this one.
Can I give this a negative one? Or zero? ZERO FUTURE BABIES OUT OF FIVE FOR YOU, CHRISTMAS SPECIAL.