House of Earth and Blood
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4.6 • 639 Ratings
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Think Game of Thrones meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a drizzle of E.L. James - Telegraph
Perfect for fans of Jessica Jones and True Blood, this is a blockbuster modern fantasy set in a divided world where one woman must uncover the truth to seek her revenge.
Half-Fae, half-human Bryce Quinlan loves her life. Every night is a party and Bryce is going to savour all the pleasures Lunathion – also known as Crescent City – has to offer. But then a brutal murder shakes the very foundations of the city, and brings Bryce's world crashing down.
Two years later, Bryce still haunts the city's most notorious nightclubs – but seeking only oblivion now. Then the murderer attacks again. And when an infamous Fallen angel, Hunt Athalar, is assigned to watch her every footstep, Bryce knows she can't forget any longer.
As Bryce and Hunt fight to unravel the mystery, and their own dark pasts, the threads they tug ripple through the underbelly of the city, across warring continents, and down to the deepest levels of Hel, where things that have been sleeping for millennia are beginning to stir ...
With unforgettable characters and page-turning suspense, this richly inventive new fantasy series by #1 New York Times bestselling author Sarah J. Maas delves into the heartache of loss, the price of freedom – and the power of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
YA author Maas (the Throne of Glass series) makes her adult debut with this electrifying series launch set on a planet plagued by conflict between oppressed humans and upper-class supernaturals. When a demon slaughters wolf-shifter Danika Fendir and her packmates, Danika's best friend, the half-human, half-Fae Bryce Quinlan, turns from carefree party girl to traumatized loner. Bryce's only comfort is knowing that Archangel Micah Domitus and the 33rd Imperial Legion have incarcerated the man who orchestrated the attack: a human with a vendetta against the wolves. But two years later a vampire with connections to Bryce dies the same way Danika did, suggesting the pack's true murderer remains at large. Desperate to discover the truth, Micah conscripts Bryce to dig into Danika's final days, and tasks Hunt Athalar, an indentured Malakim assassin doing penance for his part in a failed rebellion, with protecting her. Despite some murky worldbuilding that occasionally undercuts the intricate plot, Maas delivers a richly imagined tale spiced with snarky humor and smoldering romance between Bryce and Hunt. The villains tend to twirl their mustaches, but Bryce is a realistically flawed heroine with moxie and heart to spare. Maas's adult readers and fans of Charlaine Harris will devour this ambitious, emotionally charged contemporary fantasy.
Customer Reviews
Awesome
A bit a slow and convoluted start but post chapter 7 all makes up for it. Another stunning female protagonist in Bryce Quinlan and stupidly hot male in Hunt Athalar! Couldnt put it down and cried so much! Awesome stuff!
Adult fantasy?
I did enjoy this book, that is something I don’t dispute. After the very slow start, it picked up and it is a very enjoyable story. I don’t feel like the characters are too likeable or unlikeable, they’re very grey. The supposed enemies or bad guys, didn’t seem too horrific to me, it just wasn’t shown enough. I liked Bryce and hunt and their dynamic, but it all just fell a bit flat to me.
I love Sarah’s books that are marketed as YA so I thought I would love this even more as I have grown up with her books and her books have also grown up in a way too. However, I see no difference between Crescent City and say ACOTAR series in terms of maturity level and content except maybe there’s a lot of swearing in CC.
Sarah is a brilliant writer and I will continue to read everything she puts out, but there were a few things that fell flat for me unfortunately in this book.
Her books are always unputdownable... but this one took a bit of effort to not actually put down.
A Formulaic Smut Novel
To begin: I’m a big fan of her other work, having read all of it... but this book unfortunately left wanting. It’s composed entirely of predictable characters who trade the beautiful romances of her earlier books for repetitive smut styled dialogue. Almost all of the characters have some form of “self-hate/self-harm” behaviour, and in the case of the two protagonists it’s presented as factors of their attraction to one another. The semi-protagonists (Bryce and Hunt) are two dimensional characters; they’re both beautiful and suffering ... and that’s pretty much it.