House of Earth and Blood, Sarah J Maas | Book Review

Every once in awhile a book stumbles into your lap, it’s filled with exactly what you think makes a blooming amazing read. For me, House of Earth and Blood has been just that. A truly exceptional introduction to the Crescent City series and a new favourite book.

House of Earth and Blood, Sarah J Maas

Themes: Fantasy, Adult, New Adult, Fae, Wolves and many more magical beings

Reading Format: Hardback

5 STARS // 9.7 CAWPILE

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Firstly, thank you to Bloomsbury for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Secondly. AHHHHH. This book completely, utterly, wholeheartedly broke me.

I have tabbed a lot of this book with favourite moments, lines and actions, but to tell you them would be spoilers and this is a spoiler-free review. So here we go, I’ll try and contain some of my excitement.

House of Earth and Blood is Sarah J Maas’ grand entrance into the world of adult fiction, which means you can expect a whole lot more talk of sex in this book… kind of? This book is gritty, it’s not afraid to say what needs to be said, it discussed alcohol issues, drugs, abuse. It is over 800 pages long so you can bet those pages are crammed full of both hard-hitting moments, but also funny ones. The urban fantasy setting worked really well with the different types of characters we see, faes wolves, witches, merfolk, the world was very expansive and interesting to be a part of.

Bryce is such a babe of a main character. She’s strong, sassy and superb, but also what I love about her is she isn’t a cliche female lead that doesn’t need a man. She isn’t afraid to ask for help, sure she wants to be strong and independent, but she reflects real-life humans by also knowing she has moments of being vulnerable. She wasn’t cheesy, she wasn’t helpless, she wasn’t anything special at the start of the book, she was just Bryce. She’s a character I learnt to love deeply, she was certainly searching for herself and to repair the damage in herself throughout this book and I definitely feel as a reader I went on that journey with her.

Hunt the saucy male lead. Rhysand is a beaut for sure, but Hunt. Man Sarah J Maas can write a good male protagonist. Hunt was sexy, heroic, protective, funny, moody, and just everything you want from an irritable angel really. I loved seeing Hunt and Bryce develop together and, now this is big for me because I’m rubbish at using words like this, but I definitely ship them together. I think it’s important that they’ve both gone through some shit together, they’ve seen hard times and they’re healing together. They help each other and I felt they had such a strong bond together throughout the whole book. I really enjoyed reading about them and seeing this bond continue to grow, I think Maas did an excellent job of writing them.

Other characters were also absolutely amazing. I don’t think I can list everyone I loved and why in their own paragraph otherwise we’d be here all day.  But some favourites definitely included Lehabah, Ruhn, Fury, Flynn, Syrinx. There was such a feeling of unity by the end of this book and I loved it. Everyone that could kind of became their own little hero and it made my heart happy. I loved how we saw Sarah J Maas’ criticisms of her past characters written into this book, making a joke out of alphaholes, who feature in her other series. Bryce begins to explain the term in the quote below.

“You know – you males, who rip your shirt off at the slightest provocation, who know how to kill people in twenty different ways, who have females falling over themselves to be with you.”

The humour fitted into this book is hilarious, witty and on point. There’s a certain scene with some purple glitter that if you’ve read the book you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, and if not you’ll have that to look forward to. But it shows how making this book aimed at adults opens the doors to a whole new set of witty comments for the characters to make.

When my heart wasn’t happy though, I was crying my eyes out. The last 100 pages or so of this book destroyed me. I can’t deal with heroic moments and boy were there a lot of them! I won’t say more, but just be warned. This book made me feel so much, I think it’s a rare breed when a book makes you feel like that. House of Earth and Blood definitely makes my favourites list.

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