I had a hard time getting into this book, the second book of A Court of Thorns and Roses trilogy. In my review of the first book I mentioned that this is not a love story, it is a story about a women finding herself and her strength. It was a story about being human. At the start of the second book she has lost all her strength. The relationship she is in is extremely unhealthy and I did not want to read a book about another young adult caught in a bad relationship that is suppose to be the ultimate fairy tale.

Thankfully I kept reading. That is exactly the point that Sarah J. Maas was making. Without going into spoilers the relationship is called out for what it is and Feyre continues to find out how strong of a heroine she can become - with the help of true friends. I do not know how I could have taken so long to pick up her books. Now that I have I feel the need to bing read everything she has written.

A Court of Wings and Ruin is the third, and longest book in the Court of Thorns and Roses series. While I enjoy Sarah J Maas, and her writing as a whole, I was disappointed in parts of this book.

This book is 700 pages, three hundred pages longer than the first book and a hundred pages longer then the second. While page length is not in and of itself a concern, the extra pages did not add value to the novel. If anything I felt that if they were trimmed the novel would have been better served. At times the story ran away from itself.

In addition, this novel was more sex than plot. While there have always been a romantic tangle through the plots, in A Court of Wings and Ruin the tangle turned into sex scenes. They did nothing to further along the plot or add value to the characters. The words allocated to these scenes would have been better spent on development.

I enjoyed the series as a whole. However, I feel this final book could have been better by being more developed. I was looking forward to reading it, but I had a hard time getting through the middle of the novel. As I started to get to the last two hundred, or so pages, I felt that the pacing was back and I enjoyed the conclusion.

Life Before Legend is a short story collection that is a prequel to the Legend's trilogy. It contains two short stories, one for Day and one for June. The stories are more of an introduction, with the idea that you already have read the trilogy before the short stories.

Of the two stories, my favorite was Days. They were both well written, it was just that June's was a bit more predictable. I already had most of her story pictured.

It really is a quick read, but it was great to have this to turn to after finished the trilogy. I was having a huge book hangover, and one last read of the characters was perfect.

Mark Lawrence is an amazing short story writer. He manages to combine so much emotion and characterization in a compacted word length that the reader is left feeling like they have lived an entire lifetime, rather than just 2000 words.

During the Dance is very different than Lawrence's longer works of fiction. It is story about family, siblings, and grief. It is about the joy that one special girl give to the world in her brief time on Earth.

You can read it for free from Amazon.