A Court of Silver Flames Review (ACOTAR #4)

Nesta is not okay. She wasn’t able to save her father’s life, even though she was able to kill the King with Elain’s help. She is haunted by flashbacks of that battle over and over again, and nothing she does will free her from this painful cycle. The others want her to join them in their celebrations after the war ends, but she can barely bring herself to join them for holiday celebrations. Instead, she would rather spend her time going to the local tavern and bringing men back to her apartment. Eventually, Feyre and the others give her an ultimatum. Either she returns to the human world, or she goes up to the House of Wind to train with Cassian and work with the priestesses in the library. The House of Wind has 10,000 stairs, so it won’t be easy for Nesta to be able to escape from the home and go back to the town tavern. Nesta has the choice of whether to give in and go along with the trials that are meant to save her or keep fighting back and destroying herself in the process. 

This review/rant is going to have quite a few spoilers, so I would suggest not reading it if you want to read this book spoiler-free. 

I started this book hating Nesta honestly. She reminded me of the type of people who would just purposefully hurt everyone around them, and then go back and blame it on mental illness/trauma. Very Gabbie Hanna-esque character. You feel bad for whatever they’re going through at the time, but you can’t forget all the awful things they did in the past. Nesta constantly treated everyone around her pretty terribly. The only time she even attempted to be nice was during the war, but she just went back to being awful afterward. I also don’t forget all the years that Feyre was trapped in that house, and Nesta did nothing to try to help her baby sister hunt or feed the family. Even Elain had a small garden. Nesta simply stewed in her hate for her father but was no better than him as she also refused to rise out of the situation to try to do better for her sisters. So when I heard that an entire book was going to be told from her perspective, I was less than excited. Oh boy, I had no idea that she would end up being one of my favorite characters by the end of the book. 

I hated Nesta for not at least attempting to work with Cassian. She understood how important it was for him to try to get the Illyrians to accept female warriors, and yet she didn’t at least attempt to do exercises with him. I’m not sure exactly how much time she sat on that rock every morning, but I can definitely say that that it IRRITATED me to no end. At that point it wasn’t about her, it was about all the abused women that Cassian was trying to raise up in spite of the misogynistic warriors. Nevertheless, I plugged forward. If Nesta had antagonized the priestesses I would have hated her forever, but she actually managed to do well with them. That’s when I truly started to see things turn around for her character. Her relationship with the priestesses, and her relationship with the House itself. 

By the middle of the book, I was scraping for a smidge of plot. Don’t get me wrong, I am a SUCKER for smutty fanfiction. I really don’t care if a book has detailed sex scenes, and nothing can be worse than what I’ve read on Wattpad. NOTHING. I came into this series knowing that it would be smutty and sensual. But DAMN. I honestly felt like this book used the smut almost to pad out the story. ACOTAR had a few slightly steamy scenes and one kinda detailed scene. It got to be a little bit more as the books went forward. Now, I’m petty. So I counted. 53 pages of pure sex scenes. Not counting flirting, daydreaming about one another, or lusting after one another. And trust me, a LOT of that happened. By comparison, A Court of Wings and Fury only had 13 pages of direct scenes, and people thought that was a lot of sex scenes at that point. I don’t mind the scenes, but when you put that on top of the weak plot, then I really started getting irritated. It felt like the sex scenes were padding out a story that didn’t have enough content. 

Around halfway through, things started to change. I saw how Nesta’s relationship with her fellow sparring buddies grew, and I wanted to see them succeed. And, surprisingly, I started disliking some of my favorite characters. Surprise of all surprises, Feyre is pregnant. But because she became impregnated while in Illyrian form, the baby has wings. Illyrian women have special wing-openings during birth so they literally aren’t torn apart, but now that Feyre is back in human form, she doesn’t have that. The doctor doesn’t want her to shift back into Illyrian form to have birth, but she could die from having birth in human form. And for some reason, there’s no special anti-bleeding magic or special surgery magic or anything. And for some reason although she’s been shifting all this time, shifting while pregnant is 10x more dangerous. And for SOME reason, Rhysand and Feyre have a death bond so if one dies the other dies. As you can guess, this could cause some issues!

I expected Rhysand to be more Rhysand-like when Feyre is pregnant. Instead, he goes full Tamlin. He doesn’t want Feyre doing dangerous things and becomes super over-protective of her. On top of that, he won’t even tell her that she could DIE while giving birth? He just thinks this would stress her out too much so he is happy with letting her possibly die while not even having any prior warning. He orders everyone not to tell Feyre about this, and they don’t because he’s the High Lord. Nevertheless, when Nesta gets into an argument, she tells Feyre the truth. And this was actually when my attitude towards her character shifted. I was SO happy she told her. Like wtf Rhysand? It’s literally her body, if she would possibly die during childbirth she should at least have the chance to know. This feels like Twilight Breaking Dawn all over again. It’s her body, so it should be her choice what she does. Only difference here is that Rhysand isn’t trying to get Bella, I mean Feyre, to abort the child. I was like YES Nesta, even though you told her in a moment of anger, FINALLY someone who is willing to tell the truth even when it hurts. 

Then Rhysand goes into a rage and warns Cassian that if he doesn’t grab Nesta and flee the city that he will kill her. Yes. Loving mate Rhysand threatens to KILL the sister of his wife simply for telling his wife the truth. For telling his wife what she deserved to know. Feyre wasn’t even mad at Nesta, Feyre was mad at everyone else for lying to her. The book made Nesta out to be the villain for literally being the only one in the situation with the guts to do the right thing. This scene, this ONE scene, has turned me off from Rhysand. Between his antics with constantly antagonizing Tamlin in previous books even after he “won” the girl, and this? He literally acts like Tamlin would have acted throughout this whole book, but because it’s Rhysand we are supposed to believe that he’s the good guy. Ooh, I’m so mad. Literally no one was acting the way their characters were supposed to act based on their actions in the previous books! It was truly like I was in an alternate universe. 

After this is when the book finally started to become more enjoyable to me. You see Nesta’s relationship with Gwyn and Emerie come to a head with them acting more as her sisters than Feyre or Elain ever were. Which is sad when you think about it, but I think Nesta’s relationship with them has been strained ever since her selfish actions when they were still in the cabin. Feyre is also able to finally prepare for her pregnancy as she knows the true dangers that were kept from her beforehand. I have to say that if the entire book was more like the last…200 pages? I could have added an extra star onto this review. Nevertheless, those heartfelt moments and action-packed scenes on the mountain could not make me forgive all the other issues the book had for the other 500 pages. This book clearly had a decent premise, but it just didn’t shine through until we were very far into the book. 

Then I hated the ending. Why would Nesta have to give up her powers? Her powers were never even truly realized/described in the story. I feel like Maas didn’t know what she wanted Nesta’s powers to be, so she gave her vague abilities until she could finally just strip the powers away. If the baby was already going to die, why wouldn’t Feyre shift into the Illyrian form to give birth and then have the High Lords bestow her child with the same gift she was given when she was dead as a human Under the Mountain? It honestly made no sense why Feyre was just forced to try to give birth in regular Fae form even though the baby was already dying, and why Nesta had to give up her powers just to save her sister and nephew. 

Overall, I would not recommend this book. That’s the first time I’m saying that for this series! I’ve read every single book, read fanfiction, reread the books. This series should have stayed a trilogy or should have had a sequel series spinoff based in one of the other courts. I think these characters would work fine as side characters for a story based in another court, but there’s not enough left to keep building on them as main characters. 

Overall Rating: 2 out of 5 books.