Review: House of Earth and Blood

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, it's been a minute since Sarah J. Maas gave us a good book to read - which is for the best considering how much she kinda burned herself out around 2015-18 or so with as many as 1500 pages of content each year. Now, she's back with her first book in a year and a half, and her first explicitly aimed at an adult audience - this, of course, despite how ACOTAR was an NA series that ended up on the YA shelves because NA fantasy pretty much doesn't exist. It's also her first urban fantasy as opposed to her previous high fantasy settings, set in a totally fictional city that reads like Gotham by way of The Dresden Files, with our protagonist being half-Fae and surrounded by pretty people of all sorts of supernatural persuasions. So, really not a lot different from a lot of Maas's previous books, but the high-stakes mystery elements - and the pretty well-done slow-burn romance, one of her best yet (I say this as someone whose ships were, in all her previous series, torpedoed with extreme prejudice) - help the 800-plus pages fly by pretty fast. And at least those 800 pages, I read in ebook format this time since my library was closed - which also means no none of those stupid Bible-thin pages. Hopefully Maas won't burn herself out trying to write the inevitable sequel to this one by 2021...

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