Review: House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)

• Title: House of Earth and Blood

• Author: Sarah J Maas

• Series: Crescent City #1

• Genre: Fantasy Romance

• Rating: ☆☆☆☆

"That's the point of it, Bryce. Of life. To live, to love, knowing that it might all vanish tomorrow. It makes everything that much more precious."

I want to dislike this more than I do. And believe me, I have a healthy level of criticism for this book that I could rant about for some time. But I just keep coming back to the fact that I complained over the slow pacing and the endless setup and walked away from this novel with a very distinctive world that has been built so well in my head that I can’t help but give 4 stars to it. That being said, this is SLOW. If you’re a fast-paced book enthusiast, you might feel like pulling out your hair for the first 170 ish pages. It often picks up and then drops back down again too. There were times when I honestly was done with how slow this book was, and the first 20 pages were so off-kilter for me I almost DNF’d it. I don’t think House of Earth and Blood needs to be nearly as long as it is. This leads to my next issue, I hate the glorified drug use that happens within this book. I struggled morally to get past it. This is a me issue, as I don’t enjoy books about drugs. I felt the author glamourised the substance use in this a little too much, and it left a sour taste in my mouth. Bryce wasn’t a hit for me. I often hated her and didn’t get the hype around her at all, especially in the earlier stages. However, she does have some moments where I feel for her and enjoy her. I didn’t like the revelations for her character towards the end. It felt far too convenient, and there was a lot of her progression that was hard to separate from previous characters by this author. Hunt, in contrast, was a much better main character. Even if he felt like a carbon copy of Maas’ previous leading men, I really liked him and his storyline too. I often would perk up reading his parts, and seeing him grow into someone who wanted more than what he was without the slice of pure vengeance fuelling it left me satisfied. I didn’t care that their romance was a slow burn. In fact, the one intimate scene for me felt so badly placed that I was happier to move on in the storyline than linger over it. The side characters, however, are what make this book. I LOVED several of them, and their placement in this novel was perfection. They honestly are some of the reasons I continued and one of the bigger reasons I will be reading the second book in this world. I also appreciated that this book was told from several POVs, though sometimes a little choppy, it provided much-needed variation so you could get the full picture of this world. As much as the world-building was executed well, the actual storyline just felt repetitive of books I’ve already read by this author before. I was hoping for a little more, and the plot, whilst intriguing at times, just fell flat in several areas where it again felt like an ACOTAR moment. This especially was the case in the final parts of this book, where several instances just felt like they were versions of what Feyre experienced in the first novel of that series. The same formula of leaving everything for the final quarter of the book cheapened the journey. It was quite the disappointment because I had invested so much of my time reading this, only to experience deja vu when moments felt plucked out of one book and cast into this world with a slightly different spin on it. I come away from this novel annoyed because I wanted to like it more. Equally, for all the issues I had with it, I want to dislike it further. And I wish to not feel the need to read the second in this series, but well played Sarah J Maas, I’m interested enough to see how it goes.