House of Earth and Blood
Author: Sarah J. Maas
Trope: Slow Burn,
Point of view: Multi, Third person
Relationship: MF
Type of series: Series
In a nutshell: 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.
What I thought: Two things -
1. I loved this book, it got me good.
2. It took me three attempts to get into this book and past the first half!
This book moved very slowly, as in slower than you’ve come to expect from SJM with her dedicating a large part of the story to world building and info dumping. Which this book does in a major way for a fair haul of the book. With that said, go into this story prepared for that and you will be rewarded come the last quarter of the book! House of Earth and Blood follows a murder mystery and as you’d expect is full of plot twists and turns. The slow burn is verrry slow burn, with minimal spiciness but strong relationship and character development the focus - especially from the main character Bryce. The last quarter of the book goes from 0-100 and is epic in the way you’ve come to expect from SJM. I’ve got high hopes of House of Sky and Breath as now the scene is set, I expect we’ll launch straight back in the action and romance!
