I joked with my friends that Sarah J Maas’ books are like our mothers’ intense romance novel, but the truth is that they are and they’re not. Her books always have tension, that incredibly sexual tension along with romance, but they also have incredible world-building and plot twists. House of Earth and Blood didn’t disappoint. This book was everything I was promised.
It was everything I always want to see in an Urban Magical Fantasy and more. There was the intense world building she gives all of her books and the small details we need to pay attention to because they become important later.
Every single one of the characters in the book made me feel something, whether it was absolute hate (Sabine) from the first moment we even heard about them to want to put them in a blanket and swindle them (Ithan). All of them are dimensional and have their own voices.
I know this is Sarah J Maas, so I should not get attached to Hunt and Bryce, and even if I do, she’ll have me loving their next partners anyhow because that’s just how good she is with her readers’ emotions. The kind of control she has over what her readers feel is something I have seen very few times and it takes me over every single time.
I also known that everything is about to get much more complicated because this is SJM, she doesn’t do simple plots, and I cannot wait.
A lot of House of Earth and Blood is about going past grief and trauma, about learning to live with everything and not just survive. It’s about Bryce accepting that her friends are gone and that she’s not, that she needs to stop feeling guilty over it and learn to live her life. Hunt has to come to terms with who he is when he isn’t being somebody’s weapon, which is what he has been for centuries, coming to terms with Shahar’s death and his actions that day, who he was as her commander.
Humans are also much more present in a different way, here they are not equals to the other beings in the book or even separated, they are part of a society that sees them as inferior, as slaves. The criticism of the Asteri and the Imperial Republic as well as telling us that the government changes history to fit its narrative, but people will never fully stand for it. SJM also goes into what extremism does to someone when it presents us with Philip Briggs and Hunt’s past, how good intention can lead to bloodshed, we are left asking ourselves the question though: Were they wrong? Are they wrong?
House of Earth and Blood is an emotional roller coaster from chapter 5 (sorry spoiler) to the end of the book. I laughed and cried (a lot), I grieved with Bryce and felt Hunt’s fiery anger.
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