House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood is largely the story of a young woman named Bryce Quinlan, recently graduated from university in Crescent City, a place where supernatural elements - angels, devils, and a light overlay of quasi-Norse mythology - routinely intermingle with quotidian elements from our own world like insurance, emails, and the Internet. ” “The House of Earth and Blood” certainly ticks that box.Īnother YA characteristic - and I’ve enjoyed plenty of YA books, so I say it with love but it nevertheless needs saying - is terrible, slangy, lazy, overwrought prose, the kind that’s all easy word choices, one-sentence paragraphs, and slathered-on melodrama. Well, one is certainly a fixation with prepositional phrases, a trend largely started by Maas herself and one that’s led to the virtual lock-down certainty that a new YA book’s title or subtitle will be “The of and. It therefore has characteristics that distinguish it from all other forms of writing.

But since these are the same people who argue that YA should be taught in college literature courses not alongside Shakespeare but instead of him, they can be safely dismissed.Įven so, the question itself shouldn’t be dismissed, nor should it be reduced to some variation of Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” description of pornography. The claim would be fascinating if true, since it would entail Maas briefly looking away from the YA genre that’s brought her wealth and success - for well over 10 years now, a very large number of fully-grown adults have proudly admitted to reading virtually nothing except books written for teenagers, and Maas has been one of their favorite authors.īut is it, in fact, true? That question raises another: what is YA fiction? If all the industry identifiers were stripped off a manuscript, how would you know you’re reading YA? The genre’s fiercest defenders, the ones who live on Twitter all day long, have argued that you wouldn’t know, that the label is a form of discrimination. Maas more pointedly than any others: that this book is the adult fiction debut from an author who’s had a string of bestsellers and made a million loyal readers by writing young adult novels, both in the “Throne of Glass” series and in the “Court of Thorns and Roses” series. Bloomsbury Publishing and the various enthusiast niches of social media have made one claim about Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J.

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas