*This review contains spoilers*
As somebody who has read every other Sarah J. Maas book, I think Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood is the craziest one yet.Set in Maas' sprawling new world, a city quite like our own world with some fantastical tuneups, Bryce Quinnlan navigates the tricky waters of love, loss, corruption, and deceit. As a young twenty-three year old, working all day and partying all night, Bryce comes to us with a sharp mouth, a quick mind, and one goal: to spend as much time as she can with her best friend, Danika Fendyr.
All of that changes when, late one night, stumbling home from a club with multiple drugs in her system, Bryce pushes open her apartment door to find Danika and her pack of wolves savagely murdered.
It's clear that, since this is Maas' first official adult novel, she was given the go-ahead to talk about some topics that she previously couldn't, such as drinking, drugs, more sex (but we'll talk about that later), and cursing. The first twenty or thirty pages were an adjustment for me in a similar way that The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling seemed to affect people. It's as if, because the floodgates were open, all those years of pent-up curse words and bar scenes tumbled out.
And at first, I was a little bit frustrated, worried that Maas would suffer a similar affliction to Rowling, but after about a hundred pages, once the plot properly began to pick up, she seemed to even back out into her old rhythm of things, incorporating those things where they were believable rather than wherever she could.
Now, let's talk about world building. I'll admit, this book wasn't my favorite for a long while. I actually debated DNF-ing it because the beginning of this book was slow. The world Maas created is fascinating, a breeding ground for all kinds of creatures. Mer-people and humans, Fae and shape-shifters, wolves and archangels all co-existing.
But the first fifty pages felt like a deluge of information. Like every other paragraph was explaining something new about the world, how different things functioned within it without showing that to us. It almost became too much at once, like reading a world handbook rather than the actual story. And to be frank, I found most of those explanations went over my head, and I really understood things once we saw the city functioning in action.
Perhaps that's why the first fifth of the story just didn't pull me in, but I found myself really unsure if this was going anywhere that I was interested. Bryce, though fun, felt like another iteration of Maas' other two main characters, and when we met the brooding Umbra Mortis who would be watching her as they strove to discover two years later who had killed Danika and her pack, I knew he was Rhys or Rowan incarnate.
But once the story picked up, Maas drew me in. What she does, even if the characters aren't entirely new, is fantastic character work. Between dialogue and habits, she creates characters that feel undoubtedly real, for whom you have to sympathize with.
Bryce being a half-Fae with near-negligible power, so little that her father refuses to recognize her in a world where being a half-breed gets you called just that, you have to feel sorry for her. She's lost her best friend and is clearly struggling with that. And you have Hunt, who's a slave that is forced to kill, tormented all these years later by a lost love, slaughtered at her sisters hands.
The characters are so sympathetic that watching them heal one another slowly is something you want to stick around for.
But once the plot really got going, that was nothing to shy away from either. My favorite genre is crime, and so finding out that this book was practically fantasy-crime made me feel electric.
The clues were laid perfectly. I'll admit, some of them I saw coming, or had an inkling. With the incessant reference to Bryce being nothing more than a half-Fae, not blessed with any power, a deep part of me promised that that was not true. However, I never expected her to hold Fae light within her, to make the drop solo and plummet so deep into power. I didn't once predict that the horn was inscribed on her back in that tattoo, and I definitely didn't see that Micha was behind all of the killings.
The last two or three hundred pages were breakneck, hurtling to an end that felt inevitable, but was set back so many times by complications, you had to wonder if it would truly come to fruition.
An unexpectedly tender and emotional moment happened toward the end, when all of the Summit is watching Bryce face off with Micah on the big screen and Lehabah—who, though I didn't love towards the beginning, really grew on me—sacrifices herself for Bryce after being freed. It was brief, not entirely new, but so emotional and so essential that I couldn't help but love it.
The reveals of this plot were done expertly, and they really made the end of the book feel worthwhile.
Many of the things that went down here tied into the different species hierarchies in this world, and I found that to be done very tastefully. The way Fae looked down on half-Fae, and all of the Vanir looked down on humans, with archangels and angels brooding above the rest. It added a nice flavor of reality to this book, where so much of it is fantastical. Our society is layered with hierarchies and gates for those who do not qualify, and I liked seeing Maas tackle something so head on.
All of that being said, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about a few of the things I didn't love.
The characters all felt like new iterations of the same people Maas has always written. The men are possessive, brooding, and though everyone in the world thinks they're killing machines, they're all soft and cuddly at their heart. The women are all biting, irreverent, and take any chance they get to call the "alpha" men on their "alpha" bullshit.
And every single one of them are, per usual, stunning, gifted with unnatural beauty and perfect bodies.
I'm never really a huge fan of sex in fantasy books unless there is purpose to it. A sexual scene can elevate the plot if it's with someone unexpected, if it has either huge negative or positive implications, if it shows cheating or reveals a character's sleight of hand. There are a lot of ways to spin this. But Maas has always written uncomfortably detailed, way-too-long sex scenes that are smut for the point of smut.
That works for some people, for me I just don't need it. All of the masculine words and the mixing of scents and things just aren't interesting to me. Her strength is world and character building and big reveals we didn't see coming, so I wish sometimes she could just cut some of the sex scenes out. If anything, though, I still felt like this book was less smutty than A Court of Mist and Fury, which is a win in my book.
Overall, the beginning started out slow and a little bit rocky for me, but as the plot picked up and the characters deepened, I found myself engrossed, reading the last three hundred pages in practically one sitting. Maas created a series with massive potential as it goes on, this book clocking in as one of her best plot- and setting-wise.
Characters: 95%
Plot: 98%
Depth: 90%
Intrigue: 90%
Style: 80%
Overall: A-
