A review by rinku
Court of Sun by Lexi Ryan

adventurous mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I’m not trying to be mean, but These Hollow Vows is your classical YA/NA fantasy written by an author who normally just writes romance. The world and magic system are not thought through enough, and the biggest focus of the story is the romance. 

After Brie’s sister gets taken into the faerie world, she decides to smuggle herself into a competition to marry Prince Ronan and hopes to solve the mystery around the place her sister is and her two love interest which are coincidentally both princes from opposing kingdoms. Yeah, sorry for the bad summary but there’s not much else going on in this story.  I wasn’t the biggest fan around the whole marriage competition that isn’t mentioned in the German synopsis – if it was, I probably wouldn’t have read the book because I don’t like this trope. Here, we never even see the other contestants which was so silly. Even more silly was Brie’s behaviour when she learned that
Sebastian was Prince Ronan. I didn’t really understand why it’s now a problem for Brie that she loves him. Her behaviour towards him just didn’t make sense
. 

Other plot points were really predictable, like
Ronan having a relationship(?) already with someone else, Brie being the true queen, or Brie turning into an Unseelie in the end. I also really hate the concept of bonds because I don’t like this deterministic idea that people are “fated” to love each other, and the idea is often quite heteronormative
. Furthermore, conflicts could’ve been resolved way more easily if the characters decided to talk to each other for once. It also isn’t explained why, towards the end,
Brie doesn’t just ask Bakken to bring her to her sister
. At least the finale is nicely dramatic. 

Probably the worst moment though was when Brie gets really drunk – and of course then also horny – in like the middle of the novel. This whole section just made uncomfortable and was so cringe, just like Finn’s reaction. We also have Kane who says that he would’ve taken advantage of the situation, yikes. The sex scenes were kidna cringe as well, especially how Brie asks if it’s a bad thing that she’s a virgin, I thought we were done with this stuff.  

Looking at the magic system, there are some interesting ideas introduced but not really developed. The star worms and what they were called at the beginning seemed interesting, but they’re not mentioned anywhere later. Most of the magical things have some loopholes that the author didn’t think about, and for a fantasy book, there was not really a lot of magic generally. 

The characters of the stories are so cliché as well. Brie is a quite unremarkable character, and I don’t know what to think about her. She annoyed me with her “not like other girls” stuff, like don’t liking dresses. Of course, she also lives with her mean aunt and mean female cousins. Like I’ve mentioned, the story lays a big focus on the romance. We have two love interests, both are of course tall and muscular, centuries-old, and both of course fall in love with our main character – and I liked neither of them. It’s so obvious that she will end up with Finn. I haven’t read ACOTAR and don’t plan to do so, but even I know that Bash will be the Tamlin of the series. 

My review reads quite negative, but I still gave These Hollow Vows three stars. I had fun with it, even though not everything made sense or was developed in satisfying way. 
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