An Abrupt Emotional Trip Via the Night Court

It was a gloomy, rainy October evening when I first opened A Court of Wings and Ruin. Under a frayed comforter, I cuddled up and lost myself in the lush, dark world of Sarah J. Maas's Night Court, while the wind howled and tree branches scraped against the windowpanes.

Maybe the dismal atmosphere was what drew me in so much to the story's seductive pull. Or perhaps there's a unique sorcery unique to this most recent book in the Court of Thorns and Roses series. Regardless of the cause, I was completely captivated by those first few pages.

With such lush, evocative prose, Maas captures the faerie realm of Prythian and its enchanting inhabitants, that you can almost smell the earthy tang of moss-covered trees and night-blooming jasmine drifting through the chilly mountain air. From the eerie echoes of elk bugles echoing across the Illyrian heights to the silken whisper of Feyre's robe trailing across ancient marble, the sights and sounds are so perfectly represented that I frequently found myself holding my breath as if I too had slid into this wonderful place.

Naturally, since their intense first appearances in the first book of the series, I have been utterly enthralled by Feyre and Rhysand's turbulent, smoldering bond. However, my interest in their outcomes was elevated to completely thrilling new levels by A Court of Wings and Ruin. I was enthralled with them more and more, to the point where I could not tell where my real world ended and the vividly imagined one began.

The ability to create a world that is so vivid and engrossing that it completely changes your perspective of reality is one of the distinguishing characteristics of extremely excellent fantasy worldbuilding. Maas is a master of this genre, cleverly drawing attention to the glaring deviations from fae society for sensory pleasures as well as serious philosophical questions about trauma, identity, sexuality, and power dynamics.

Despite the fairy worlds' extravagant and sumptuous depictions, Maas gives them a surprisingly human feel through the flaws and frailties of its protagonists. Yes, they engage in goblets of intoxicating faerie wine, exchange lewd jokes and stories of debauchery, and punish foes with ritualistic tortures one moment. But when they're alone, we can also see their subtle frailties.

It's not simply that Feyre and Rhys are incredibly charismatic and skilled fighters. They are shown to be internally tormented by self-doubt and anxiety as the simmering cauldron of conflict increasingly heats up. In sensitive, devastating disclosures, their vulnerabilities, fears, and childhood scars were exposed. Theirs is not a shallow, idealized romantic vision; rather, it is a complex, all-too-relatable web of intense love, agonizing agony, and the never-ending quest to make sense of one's many inconsistencies.

Maybe that's the reason these personalities become so ingrained in your mind and won't go away. Their pounding hearts are vividly, distinctly human, even yet they are fabled avatars of heavenly grandeur and sin. In the kaleidoscope mirrors of their soul-baring plights, you see fragments of yourself, your own difficulties, hidden reflections of yourself.

I most definitely did. Feyre was fiercely independent yet painfully self-aware, and in her I saw the broken pieces of my former self. Through her internalized struggles, I was able to see my own seething doubts and awkward growing pains with identity and intimacy. And I was in awe of the fierce warrior's resilience in the face of constant gaslighting and narcissistic manipulation.

At quieter times, I swear I could almost smell the book's pages releasing the perfume of my teenage bedroom. A blend of sweet creams and tangy citrus scents, supported by the mustier undertones of stale corduroy and campfire smoke that stick to clothing and hair all the time. That smell took me back to my high school days curled up on rumpled bed linens, desperately crouched beneath a reading lamp long after it was time to go to sleep, reading fantasy novels until the cracking stitches at the spine gave way from misuse.

The experience of reading A Court of Wings and Ruin was rich and multisensory, like traveling through eerie psychological airlocks to return to my own pasts while simultaneously taking me to a plethora of fascinating new worlds. Heady, unsettling, and often terrifying, it was always a sublime experience that I didn't want to stop.

I was therefore left feeling completely broken in the most perfect way imaginable when those dramatic, concluding final paragraphs finally arrived. Emotionally detached and drenched. Similar to a yogi who has been destroyed by the awakening of Kundalini, trying to piece their broken golem back together so that it still functions as a body.

Amidst those tumultuous downpour waves, I couldn't stop playing back bits and pieces of the most intense scenes—the terrifying ordeals of torture, the intense clashes colored with long-simmering treachery, the exhilarating fights that left entire societies blackened and ember-like in their wake. It was all engraved in a hallucinatory Technicolor upon my memory.

Even now, remembering the horrifying nightmare revenants emerging from Maas's almost limitless imagination, makes me cringe. For example, the flawlessly staged assassin fights that bring to mind the exquisitely macabre martial arts ballets of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Scenes with such a pressing cinematic quality that you can almost feel the concussive hits and smell the metallic tang of blood leaking from serious injuries.

However, despite all of its imaginative bombast and spectacular gothic indulgences, the novel's quietest, most introspective moments were also its most devastating, eerie emotional punches. Whenever Feyre or Rhys or anybody else led the story into those hazy, unguarded thickets of recovered trauma and private pain, I often had to hold the book at arm's length, my eyes tearing. Their unsaid heartaches, their shared burden.

Maas has a remarkable talent for writing with such heartbreaking grace—writing of such raw, quivering honesty and sensitivity. She has a talent for knowing exactly where to drive the emotional dagger for the most impact and cathartic release. Those gut-punch revelations that shake your whole existential core until their hard-won psychological molts leave you feeling leveled and cleansed anew.

Wisps of Maas's engrossing story lingered in my mind like the obstinate remnants of some Promethean fever dream, even days after I had finished A Court of Wings and Ruin. At quiet times, I would find myself quietly caressing the book's wrinkled spine and discolored cover art while thinking about the poetic profundities of existence looping endlessly through the churning cosmic roulette wheel.

This went well beyond simple escape entertainment or commercial YA fantasy. A metaphysical rite, more than a literary work, the novel felt in its frantic combination of gothic terror, philosophical lecture, and bare emotional reckoning. An incredibly moving experience that had me confront love, grief, and suffering in simultaneously unbearably familiar and deliriously unfamiliar ways.

Not only did I look forward to the end of the series after finishing A Court of Wings and Ruin. It transformed me profoundly in its wake. Illuminated by a renewed fascination with the power of unrestrained creativity. The mind-excavating insights that tasted of my own deepest, darkest pains and pleasures left me humbled. And in the end, granted a soaring, spiritual catharsis I had rarely experienced outside of my most profoundly destabilizing psychotic excursions.

In other words, it brought back memories of the restless, lonely adolescent who initially sparked my love for fantasy literature. Not just for the amazing escape, but also for the glittering doorway it opens up into the dreamlike mazes of our most incomprehensible, inner selves.