REVIEW: Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas

Meet Celaena Sardothien. Beautiful. Deadly. Destined for greatness. In the dark, filthy salt mines of Endovier, an eighteen-year-old girl is serving a life sentence. She is a trained assassin, the best of her kind, but she made a fatal mistake: she got caught. Young Captain Westfall offers her a deal: her freedom in return for one huge sacrifice. Celaena must represent the prince in a to-the-death tournament—fighting the most gifted thieves and assassins in the land. Live or die, Celaena will be free. Win or lose, she is about to discover her true destiny. But will her assassin’s heart be melted?

*Thank you Bloomsbury for providing me a review copy of this novel. This hasn't affected my opinion of the novel or my review.*

Thrown of Glass has quite a hype surrounding it that if I can admit was quite intimidating. But it ended up being one I honestly enjoyed. It had action, a kick ass heroine that actually delivered what she preached, swoony love interests and a surprising amount of fantasy.

One thing that before reading Thrown of Glass had picked up my attention was that everyone had loved the strong protagonist also known as Adarlan's Assasin. Celaena was fiesty, flirty, brave and very admirable. She had the right balance of compassion and strength which I think was very important for her to have. Celaena's mind was both fascinating and different. It was intriguing how she cleverly plotted ways of self defense and was always keeping watch. I hadn't really experienced that whole assassin thing before so I found Celanea's character to be really interesting. But I really want to explore more of her backstory and basically, how she came to be. A relationship I really enjoyed watching grow was Celaena's and Nehemia.

I quite liked the concept of a place were magic once was but had disappeared. I was actually really surprised by the direction it began to take fantasy wise. But without spoiling to much, there is a great evil in the castle. Fortunately rather then being overly complicated, it was hooking and interesting. Perhaps one of my favourite story lines of the plot.

As I've mentioned, in Throne of Glass we have the fantasy aspect and of course the King's Champion tournament but we also have a subtle love triangle forming. In my opinion Captain Chaol Westfall and Prince Dorian Havilliard are both worthy of Celaena's heart. I don't really have anything against Dorian, but I somehow preferred Chaol. I could see that one character in particular was being favoured so I'm interested to see how Maas explores the other relationship in Crown of Midnight.

I found the beginning to be a bit slow paced and I initially struggled to get into it. Which was essentially the only reason a full star was decreased. But other then that I didn't have many issues with it and I found that it definitely picked up around a 100 pages.

I was pleased with the ending and overall thoroughly enjoyed the book. I in some ways felt something was missing but it's still a novel I'd recommend with good words, I wasn't disappointed. It's a great fantasy and great action and I am so excited to read Crown of Midnight which I fortunately didn't have to wait for, due the lovely people at Bloomsbury who sent me a copy.