12. A Court of Thorns and Roses: ''Fairy Smut'' or Fantasy Sensation?

Summary

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The Book Club – Episode 12: A Court of Thorns and Roses: "Fairy Smut" or Fantasy Sensation?

Hosts: Dominic Sandbrook & Tabitha ("Tabby") Syrett
Date: May 4, 2026
Book: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

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Episode Overview

This episode explores A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) by Sarah J. Maas, diving into its meteoric rise as the flagship novel of the "romantasy" genre—a blend of high fantasy, romance, and explicit sexuality. Dominic and Tabby examine the book’s literary roots, world-building, gender politics, cultural impact, and what romantasy’s explosive popularity reveals about contemporary readers, all while debunking both snobbery and stigma around the genre.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Introduction to A Court of Thorns and Roses and Romantasy (03:30–08:18)

• ACOTAR as a Phenomenon:
  Tabby outlines the book’s massive popularity—over 75 million copies of Maas’s books sold, with ACOTAR alone selling 13 million (04:36). The book leads the "romantasy" trend, blending magical adventure with explicit romance, sometimes derisively labelled "fairy porn" or "fairy smut".

• Romantasy’s Market Power:
  The genre’s global reach is fuelled by social media, particularly TikTok (“the romantasy tag on TikTok has almost a billion views…” [04:36]), with a predominantly female young adult audience.

• Host Perspectives:
  Dominic, initially skeptical and feeling outside the target demographic, openly admits:

  "The final quarter of the book, I read it all in one sitting... I was, I mean, I was pretty addicted to it." (06:03)
  Tabby notes her enjoyment, but not as a superfan, appreciating the blend of folklore and romance (06:52).

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2. Plot Summary & World-Building (09:12–20:00)

• Plot Overview:

  • Feyre, a 19-year-old huntress, kills a wolf, triggering a treaty violation with the mystical High Fae.
  • She’s forcibly taken by Tamlin, the High Lord of the Spring Court, to Prythian—a magical, fairy-ruled land.
  • Over time, Feyre’s attitude shifts from fear and hatred to love for Tamlin.
  • A wider curse and deception are revealed: Feyre’s romance was engineered to break a spell (17:00).
  • The antagonist, Amarantha, is introduced, leading to Feyre’s self-sacrificing quest Under the Mountain with trials and riddles.

• World-Building Critique:

  • Court structure, types of Fae, and the blend of medieval/folkloric elements with modern language.
  • Dominic is underwhelmed by the depth of the fantasy world:

    "I would have liked more about the deep history of the world. I felt the culture was a tiny bit generic." (28:39)

• Language & Modernity:

  • Mix of colloquial speech with high fantasy setting is highlighted as both accessible and jarring.

    "She would be like: ‘Back off, bitch.’ Which nobody says in Gondor, you asshole." (18:58)

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3. Literary and Folkloric Influences (27:34–43:55)

• Fairy Tales and Myths:

  • Beauty and the Beast, the myth of Cupid and Psyche, and the Scottish ballad "Tam Lin" all inform the structure and themes of ACOTAR (33:41–38:21).

    "You have Feyre... goes to live with the moody Tamlin, the Beast, and teaches him to love." (38:21)

  • The connection to 18th-century French salon culture and the evolution of fairy tales is charted (35:09).

• High Fantasy Lineage:

  • Acknowledgement of influences from Tolkien, Harry Potter, Garth Nix, Lloyd Alexander (Prydain)—the tradition of world-building tropes, quests, and magical objects (41:14).

• High School & Contemporary Parallels:

  • Dominic likens the love triangles and drama to American high school narratives—Tamlin as the quarterback, Amarantha as the queen bee, Rhysand as the brooding ‘bad boy’ (“It does feel very, very like a high school romance.” [42:14]).

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4. Character Relationships, Gender Politics & Sexuality (45:51–58:19)

• Emergence of Rhysand:

  • Tamlin fades; Rhysand’s charisma, wit, and complexity become increasingly prominent, especially in later books (46:43).
  • The Persephone and Hades myth, and the ‘bargain’ motif (spending a week with Rhysand per month) foreshadow further romantic complications (48:00).

• Sexual Themes & Purpose:

  • Despite the ‘smut’ reputation, the first book is relatively restrained—one explicit scene:

    “...with one long claw he shredded through silken lace and my undergarments fell away in pieces...” (49:37)

  • Tabby notes, “The male lovers are often subservient to their kind of kickass female lovers. So it’s very much about female pleasure and the female gaze.” (50:58)
  • Dominic raises the question of “coerced” romance given Feyre’s captivity and bargains, and whether the dynamics are as empowering as claimed (51:39).

• Feminism and Fantasy:

  • Debate over whether ACOTAR is feminist:

    “This book is massively... a celebration of the female gaze and female sexuality and female pleasure...” but Tabby cautions, “I don’t think this is a massively feminist book either. The girl boss element of it all... is, for me, a little bit surface level.” (53:58–56:16)

  • Noted lack of substantial female cast early on, which broadens in later books.

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5. Romantasy: Culture, Criticism, and Appeal (58:00–68:53)

• Origins & Roots:

  • The genre’s seeds in folklore, gothic literature, and romances like Tristan and Iseult, but its explosion is a product of social media, particularly BookTok (58:19).
  • Throne of Glass and ACOTAR’s viral success as a gateway for many (58:42).

• Why Now?

  • The emotional focus differentiates romantasy from classic fantasy: outdoor quests vs. inner journeys and feelings.

    “The focus and the driver in romantasy is emotion. The emotional stakes are generally the point of everything.” (60:22)

  • World-building and magic often serve the narrative of trauma, healing, and empowerment, rather than vice versa.

• The Social Media & “Influencer” Effect:

  • Romantasy’s aesthetics (beautiful clothing, décor) echo Instagram influencer culture.
  • Dominic notes some critics’ concerns about the genre’s dominance, but argues this is classic literary snobbery (65:53).

• Trauma and Emotional Depth:

  • Tabby is ambivalent about "box-ticking" for trauma and empowerment, yet acknowledges the genuine emotional engagement many get from the books.

• Snobbery vs. Fun:

  • Both hosts defend reading for pleasure, draw parallels to past female-led popular genres, and advocate for broader acceptance of commercial literature.

    “Anything that gets people reading is brilliant... I hate bookish snobbery.” (66:37–67:29)

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6. Critiques, Closing Thoughts & Ratings (68:53–74:43)

• Praise & Critique:

  • Enjoyable, addictive pacing in the final act.

    “I genuinely found the last hundred pages... very readable and dare I say it, exciting.” (71:25)

  • Prose described as “workmanlike,” some characters flat (Tamlin “has literally no sense of humor”, Amarantha is “a cartoon cutout” [72:42–73:21]), and the big riddle’s answer is “blindingly obvious” (71:25).
  • Modern language can feel “jarring” against the fantasy backdrop.

• Final Ratings:
  Both hosts give ACOTAR 6/10 ripped fairies with hearts of gold:

  • Dominic: Surprised by enjoyment; initially considered a 7.
  • Tabby: Loved the world and fun, but didn’t deeply care about Feyre or most characters.

• Notable Closing Quote:

  “There’s much more to it than, you know, inverted commas, goblin sex... I think because these are much more female books, people always... liked to sneer at what women, particularly young women, read.” (Dominic, 68:16)

• Next Books:
  The upcoming lineup: The Woman in White, Beloved, Mrs Dalloway, The Hunger Games, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Code of the Woosters, and Little Women.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "[Romantasy is] a brilliant window into the preoccupations of our own moment." – Dominic (08:18)
• "I found the first three quarters... very slow." – Dominic (20:15)
• "The emotional stakes are generally the point of everything." – Tabby (60:22)
• "It’s really enjoyable. There is much more to it than... goblin sex." – Tabby (68:16)
• "You know what? I want to rush to the next, but I can’t." – Dominic (73:30)

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Memorable Moments

• Dominic’s awkward but endearing appreciation of the book’s addictive nature, despite not being the target audience (06:03).
• Tabby’s dry wit regarding world-building and gendered assumptions about the genre.
• Extended riffing on fantasy vs. modern slang (“pants”, “back off, bitch” [19:14]), and on cheese as the wellspring of literary genius (25:06).
• Playful bickering about ‘girl-boss’ feminism, influencer culture, furries, and Otherkin (71:03).

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Conclusion

The hosts provide an honest, nuanced, and entertaining exploration of ACOTAR. They recognize its flaws but defend both its pleasures and its importance as a lens on popular literary culture in the 2020s. The episode concludes with encouragement for readers to embrace their tastes, whatever they may be—be it Tolkien, Austen, or fairy smut.

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Transcript

[Tabby]

I sold my car in Carvana last night.

[Dominic]

Well, that's cool.

[Tabby]

No, you don't understand.

[Dominic]

It went perfectly.

[Tabby]

Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem.

[Dominic]

Nothing in my life goes as smoothly.

[Tabby]

I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch.

[Dominic]

That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.

[Tabby]

Wow.

[Dominic]

You need to relax.

[Tabby]

I need to knock on wood.

[Dominic]

Do we have wood? Is this table wood?

[Tabby]

I think it's laminate.

[Dominic]

Okay.

[Tabby]

Yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up. Fees may apply. This episode is brought to you by.

[Dominic]

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[Tabby]

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[Tabby]

The first few moments were a blur of the snarling of a gigantic beast with golden fur, the shrieking of my sisters, the blistering cold cascading into the room, and my father's terror stricken face. Somehow I wound up in front of my sisters even as the creature reared onto its hind legs and bellowed through a maw full of fangs.

[Dominic]

Murderers.

[Tabby]

But it was another word that echoed through me. Fairy.

[Dominic]

Who killed him?

[Tabby]

The creature stalked towards us. I stared into those jade eyes. I did. It was that flash of understanding that had me angling my remaining knife at the beast. What is the payment the treaty requires? His eyes didn't leave my face as

[Dominic]

he said, a life for a life. Any unprovoked attacks on fairy kind by humans are to be paid only by a human life. In exchange.

[Tabby]

My knees quaked. I couldn't escape this, couldn't outrun this. Couldn't even try to run. Since you blocked the way to the door. Do it outside. Not here. Not where my family would have to wash away my blood and gore if you even let them live. The fairy huffed a Vicious laugh

[Dominic]

for having the nerve to request where I slaughter you. I'll let you in on a secret. Human Prythian must claim your life in some way for the life you took from it. So as a representative of the immortal realm, I can either gut you like swine, or you can cross the wall and live out the remainder of your days in Prythian.

[Tabby]

So that was, of course, from Sarah J. Maas, long awaited A Court of Thorns and Roses, the first in her five book series, and that was published in 2005-15. And this is surely the most hotly anticipated episode that we've ever done on the book club.

[Dominic]

Surely.

[Tabby]

So the book known as Akuta to its army of adoring fans was at the forefront of the rising tide of romantasy. And this is one of the fastest growing and most commercially successful literary subgenres in the world. I mean, it's a phenomenon. It's famed for these fantastical narratives featuring mythical creatures and magical worlds. Everything that you'd kind of expect from classical fantasy, but then combined with a massive dollop of romance. And it's the romance and actually the explicit sex scenes that drive the plots. So this is why, you know, in some, you know, corners of the Internet, it is known as fairy porn. And we will definitely be digging into the phenomenon itself after the break.

[Dominic]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

But I mean, just to give a sense of how massive it is, the romantasy tag on TikTok has almost a billion views with billions for masses books alone. She is now one of the best selling authors in the world. She sold more than 75 million copies of her books worldwide. And this series alone has sold an estimated 13 million copies since its publication. And we'll be exploring why it is that this is such a massive hit. But before then, Dominic, I know that you're a longtime lover of romantasy and have a particular penchant for sexy goblins and tights. Wow. So without further ado, what did you make of this? What did you make of A Court of Thorns and Roses?

[Dominic]

So, do you know what? We've done a lot of books so far in the book club that are canonical, that are extremely well known. We've done Frankenstein in 1984 and the great Gatsby and so on. But we always wanted, when we did the show, to have a kind of mixed diet, to have books that lots of people actually genuinely read, that you'll see people reading on the tube or whatever. And this is a really good example because, as you say, it's a phenomenon. And I'LL be honest, until I did this show, there was no way I would have read these books because they're really not aimed at me. I mean, I'm not the target.

[Tabby]

No.

[Dominic]

I'm not the target age. And to be honest, I'm probably not the target gender because I think they're very. They appeal overwhelmingly to women, don't they?

[Tabby]

Yeah, I'd say so.

[Dominic]

So I thought it would be boring for me to sneer at it.

[Tabby]

That would be boring.

[Dominic]

There's no point in doing the show if you're going to sneer at books. So I approached it in a spirit of open mindedness and I have to say this will surprise some listeners. But please. The army of Sarah J. Maas fans. The Suddenly, the final quarter of the book, I read it all in one sitting and I was, I was, I mean, I was pretty addicted to it. I was very keen. Not just because I was keen to finish it, but I was actually keen to find out what. And so I enjoyed, I enjoyed reading it a lot more than I thought I would. And I will say no more. I shall leave my penetrating analysis. Not sure whether penetrating is the word you want to choose when it's this kind of book.

[Tabby]

Oh yeah, poor choice of words.

[Dominic]

But anyway, I will, I will leave my incisive analysis till later in the episode. You love this stuff, don't you? Or am I being. Am I caricaturing you?

[Tabby]

I think you're caricaturing me. I think you're making the mistake that so many people make about Romantasy. You know, assuming because I am a young woman, I love it. I actually read it first during lockdown because it was really, you know, rising to the fore around that time. This series in particular, a lot of my friends were big fans. I was obviously curious and I thought it was a lot of fun. Like anything that kind of features fantastical worlds, mythical beasts, I'm kind of there for it. Didn't change my life, I would say.

[Dominic]

You didn't fall in love with it, the world?

[Tabby]

I wouldn't say that I fell in love with it. I think maybe there was a situation in which I might have done, but I found the inclusion of like very real world themes. I mean, all fantasy generally has something to say about the real world, whether or not the authors deny it or acknowledge it or not. But this was so on the nose, you know, the inclusion of kind of fluffy slippers and, you know, real world social media driven terminology that suddenly got in the way of the escapism that I look for when I. When I go. When I read fantasy, nevertheless, it was, on the whole, very enjoyable. But you're right in that this is not an episode in which we're going to spend our time tearing these books apart or sneering at them, because there is some really, really interesting kind of backstory to them, the way that they meld kind of high fantasy with folklore, with fairy tales. So we're going to be digging into all that during this episode. Right.

[Dominic]

Because I think there's lots of different elements to this. One is the extent to which the books draw on long literary traditions. So we'll be talking about the story of Cupid and Psyche, we'll be talking about Beauty and the Beast and so on. So these books are kind of rooted in. In a genuinely, really interesting kind of cultural tradition, but also the phenomenon of romantasy. And what it says about readers in the 2010s and 2020s is that it's genuinely very interesting. It's so interesting, future historians will find it a brilliant window into the preoccupations of our own moment. So we'll talk about all this. So I'm guessing there's quite a lot of people who are listening to this show who have never read these books, you know, because, I mean, I know some of them, and I know they would never read a romantic book in a million years.

[Tabby]

Our producers.

[Dominic]

Right, Exactly. So shall we explain exactly what the book is about? First of all, give us sort of sense of the. Of the plot of the book.

[Tabby]

Yeah, let's. And flesh out the world a bit. You. You set us off. Dominic, you take us. Let the adventure begin.

[Dominic]

The adventure begins. Okay, now, there will be some spoilers, inevitably, but we're not. We're gonna try to do it so that we don't. If you want to read the book, we're not gonna ruin it for you. So our heroine is called Feyre, which I think is a slightly weird name, but there you go.

[Tabby]

I love that name.

[Dominic]

Okay, very good. So I stand corrected. She's 19 years old. She is a huntress, and she lives in a kind of medieval world on one side of a magical wall that separates the world of humans, the mortal lands, from the world of the fairies, and that the world of the fairies is called Prythian. Now, just on fairies. If you're thinking about the kind of characters that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought existed in the Cottingley photographs, so little tiny things with wings, that is a mistake. They're not like that. They're basically elves. Tolkien's elves is that fair tabby.

[Tabby]

Yeah. Well, there's two sort of subsections of fairies. You get the High Fae. They are essentially told they're immortal, they're beautiful, they have powers. And then you get kind of the more common fairy folk. And they are more like something from Goblin Market or whatever by Christina Rossetti.

[Dominic]

Yeah, because they more goblin, like in their wings sometimes, or whatever.

[Tabby]

Yeah, exactly. There are lots of different types and kinds and some wicked, some malevolent, some good. You know, it's quite Narnia in that way. It's a strange mishmash of kind of folklores, but they always have a side.

[Dominic]

So Feyre lives with the humans on one side of this barrier.

[Tabby]

She is mortal. It's important to say.

[Dominic]

Yeah, of course. And we meet her, we're plunged right into the action from the very beginning. She's off hunting. She's a brilliant kind of huntress. She's very athletic, she's very brave, all of these kinds of things. And she has gone hunting to feed her formerly wealthy but now impoverished family. So this is your classic, I mean, people, to. To give away what we're going to be talking about. This is a story obviously ripped from the pages of fairy tales. She has a useless father and two spoiled, selfish sisters. And they live in this rundown cottage and she's out hunting and she ends up in the first section of the book, she shoots this great white wolf. And at the time she thinks, oh, gosh, is this basically one of the. One of the fae, one of the fairies? Because these fairies can kind of disguise themselves as animals or whatever or take animal form. And if she has accidentally shot a fairy, then she will be in breach of this treaty that divides the human and the fairy realms. So that's a bit of a worry for her. And actually, in the scene that we performed, I think performed rather than read. Yes, performed, the scene that we performed, this bloke basically bursts into her cottage and it turns out she has shot one of his friends.

[Tabby]

He's in the form of a terrible beast though, isn't he? He's terrified.

[Dominic]

He is exactly a sort of feral beast that's like bear, wolf, you know, it's hard to pin down exactly what it is.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And he's come to get revenge. And basically her punishment is she will be brought back to the fairy realm, which is Prythian, to live out the rest of her days with this beast.

[Tabby]

Yeah. So he takes her over the wall, the. The dividing line between these two realms. And it turns out that he is a member of the High Fae, which we spoke about just now. You know, beautiful, immortal, he's called Tamlin and he is in fact the High Lord of the Spring Court. Because Prythian is divided into different kind of courts, which are different kingdoms. So you have the Night Court at the top, you have the Autumn Court, the Dawn Court, the Winter Court, the Spring Court and the Summer Court.

[Dominic]

Just a word of warning for our listeners. Like if Tabby is allowed to talk for too long and challenged, she will just get deeper and deeper into the lore of this world.

[Tabby]

Yes, exactly, exactly. And there's something clearly very, very wrong with Tamlin's lands, with the Spring Court. For one thing, they all have to wear masks. So this automatically for Feyre stepping into unknown territory, she. She doesn't entirely know who everyone is. There's like an element of disguise to everything. And Tamlin is the manifestation of Spring kind of in human form. You know, he's tall, he's blonde, he has green eyes. His powers are kind of tied up with nature.

[Dominic]

He's a hunk, isn't he?

[Tabby]

He is. He's a massive hunk. He's not my type in truth, but he's definitely a bit of a hunk. And his right hand man is another hyphae called Lucien. And he is the manifestation of autumn because he's originally from the Autumn Court and they live in this vast mansion. This is the kind of the hot spot of the Spring Court. This is like their castle, if you will. And over time, Feyre goes from loathing Tamlin and living in fear of the fairies to quite liking it and to finding that she's attracted to Tamlin and

[Dominic]

he's ripped and she can't resist him.

[Tabby]

He's ripped. Yeah, exactly. And they end up falling in love. So it's your classic kind of enemies to lovers and they sleep together. But then what happens is that this strange, mysterious stranger arrives in their midst. It's a guy called Rhysand. He turns out to be the High Lord of the Night Court. He too is kind of the physical manifestation of darkness of night. And he warns Tamlin that some mysterious. She has sent him to tell Tamlin that his time is running out. We don't know why, Feyre doesn't know why. But it seems that the blight that is afflicting this land is building growing darker and time is running out. So Tamlin sends Feyre back home to her family, who are now wealthy again.

[Dominic]

So she goes home. She's had a lovely time with this bloke who occasionally is Like a kind of wolf, like, bear.

[Tabby]

He lets her paint, which is very kind.

[Dominic]

Yeah. They've been painting, they've been going for lovely country walks. They've been sleeping together. It's wonderful. Anyway, she goes back home. She's a bit miserable. She finds that her family, while she's been gone, have been elevated to wealth and status, which is his doing. Isn't that nice of him? But then she comes back. She can't resist. She comes back across the wall, back to the castle.

[Tabby]

She's worried about him.

[Dominic]

She's worried about him. That's nice. And she discovers. Now this is a big. You know, if you're really going to read this book, you could stop listening now because this is a slight spoiler.

[Tabby]

Come back for the analysis, though.

[Dominic]

Yeah, dude, don't. Don't stop listening. He has been taken prisoner by this evil queen called Amarantha. And basically everything that Feyre thought about the plot so far was a mistake. This is. Do you know, reading this, it genuinely was a surprise to me. I thought this was a great twist. She's told this by a maid servant. Basically, there's no blight and plague like she thought, which is why they wear masks.

[Tabby]

Actually.

[Dominic]

What happens is Tamlin and Kyra have been cursed by this evil queen who's basically come from Ireland. She's come from a place called Hybern, this island off the coast of Prythian.

[Tabby]

Unbelievable.

[Dominic]

I mean, I'm not being. I'm not being hibernophobic, Tabby. This is. This is the truth.

[Tabby]

This is actually in this book, you're kind of encouraged to be hibernaphobic.

[Dominic]

So you are. You are. Yeah. So for complicated reasons, this evil queen called Amarantha tricked all the other fairies into giving up their powers almost, or

[Tabby]

sort of that are the high lords and high fae.

[Dominic]

Yeah, sorry. Tabby's gonna keep correcting me whenever I make mistakes with the precise details of this world. The masks that they wear are symbols of their loss of power. They're emasculation, I suppose, for the male fairies, I guess, their loss of autonomy. The amazing thing that we discover is that all that stuff with, like, the hunting and the beast and, like, offending the treaty and being taken back, that was all a bit of a. Bit of a con.

[Tabby]

It was engineered.

[Dominic]

Yeah, it was engineered because basically under this curse, Tamlin was given 49 years to find a human girl who hated fairies and make her fall in love with him. And he had basically taken Feyre and this was his attempt to break the curse. And Feyre is really shocked by this. Gosh, you know, a poor guy. What a terrible thing. And she decides, I'm going to go on a quest to rescue my love, who's been now taken prisoner by this evil queen under the mountain. Under the mountain. She's going to go under the mountain. When she gets there, she has to do a series of deadly trials and to solve a riddle to try to rescue him. And she's the one human there, and she's surrounded by these terrifying creatures, the fairies. Can she do it? Will love triumph? Will she get to embrace this incredibly ripped, hunky guy yet again? And what's the story with the other bloke who you mentioned, Tabby Rhysand, the dark character called Rhysand. He's lurking in the background somewhere, sort of smoldering and brooding and looking dark and interesting. And, you know, is there part of her that perhaps might fancy him instead? We will find out.

[Tabby]

You will find out after the break. And the very dramatic cliffhanger that you left us on there, Dominic, that couldn't be more appropriate, because in terms of the way that this book is written, it is unrelentingly hyperbolic, unrelentingly dramatic. You know, so it's told from the first person. Feyre is narrating it and her language as narrator and both, you know, as a character, when she speaks, it's full of very modern kind of colloquialisms. There's a lot of repetition. As the journalist Joanna Thomas Corr says, they all sound like modern teenagers who talk about bathing and suffering from separation anxiety despite battling evil and wielding magical powers.

[Dominic]

Yeah, so she will shout at the fairies, they'll come at her. And this is not the Lord of the Rings. She would be like, back off, bitch. And all of this kind of thing. Which nobody says in Gondor, you asshole. Yeah, right. No one says that in Tolkien's world.

[Tabby]

You know what I actually found most unsettling of all, and that literally just kept pulling me out of the narrative was every time they kept referring to pants, you know, as trousers. You know, it's not like jerkins or leggings. It's like his tight white pants. You know, I think a way you

[Dominic]

could get around that is by using the word britches, because that would solve the problem for both British and American readers. But I guess it's a very American book. You know, it's written for Americans and maybe American. Well, I mean, we. I know we have American listeners. Maybe they don't find the word pants off putting in a fantasy Book.

[Tabby]

I mean, it is funny, you know, as you say, you have this language and that you're set in kind of the legendary mythological folkloric world of kind of, I don't know, old England or mythological England or whatever. It's very interesting. And the plot itself unspools very slowly. Not much happens with the first three quarters. And as you said, the last quarter is incredibly dramatic, but I quite like that. I like to spend time getting to know the magical world that I'm kind of reading myself into. And it builds. She's very good at building suspense. Sarah J. Maas.

[Dominic]

I think I found the first three quarters. I shall give myself away here. I found them very slow.

[Tabby]

See? But I think that reveals something about romantasy, about the popularity of romanticity for women that we will touch on later. The aesthetics of it.

[Dominic]

Yeah, because. Right, because I think a lot of the female listeners are, like, brilliant. They're going off and painting again and going for a country walk and looking at the flowers and.

[Tabby]

And that's not actually, like, patronizing or reductive. Like, I genuinely liked all that. I liked hearing about Feyre's gowns and about the way that the mansion looked and stuff like that.

[Dominic]

Yeah. Whereas I just wanted fighting or, you know, more bedroom action.

[Tabby]

But you also mentioned the fact that Feyre is totally shocked by what happens to her because she is an unreliable narrator, isn't she?

[Dominic]

Yeah, I like that, because I like. I like to be surprised, and I genuinely was surprised. Feyre is wrong about almost everything in the first three quarters of the book. She misreads all the characters. She misreads her own family. She misreads all the characters that are. You know, there's only a small group of characters in this book. It's not the Lord of the Rings. We're talking about five or six people. And she gets all of them wrong. Tamlin, his mate Lucien, this boat, Rhysand, all of this. They're all different from the initial impression. And actually a theme of the book. I mean, maybe people who are skeptic will be like, oh, does the book really have themes? It absolutely does.

[Tabby]

It does. It definitely does.

[Dominic]

A theme of the book is that people are this thing about masks and people are hiding their true nature behind a mask, whether it's a physical mask or a sort of a metaphorical one. And I thought that element was very well done, actually.

[Tabby]

Yeah, agreed.

[Dominic]

But just say a little bit about the author herself, maybe tabby, to give people a sense of it, because we often talk about authors and it's easier to do when you're doing, you know, John Steinbeck or Emily Bronte. Yeah, exactly. But Sarah J. Maas herself. So she's born in New York in 1986. She's, you know, a fantasy and mythology enthusiast. She's married to another writer who's called Josh Wasserman.

[Tabby]

And if you look him up, he actually looks a lot like. Like a very kind of sort of slightly more mundane, much more mortal Resand. And a lot of fans of this series believe that he was the inspiration for Rhysand because they share the same birthday. And that's quite a big clue as to Rhysand's destiny in due course, I think.

[Dominic]

Oh, you're giving us a little clue then. That's nice. So her first book, which was called Throne of Glass, she wrote supposedly when she was 16 years old. And that was published in 2012. And this is basically the Cinderella story. So she loves a fairy tale genesis, it's the Cinderella story, but Cinderella, if she were an assassin. So she goes to the ball not to kind of dance with the prince and whatnot, but to kill him. And I actually haven't read this book, I'll be quite frank with you. But you have read it, I think. Tabby.

[Tabby]

Yeah, I gave it a quick read and it's, it's really interesting because it's, it's much more kind of rooted in high fantasy. There's a lot less sex. And I think that's telling because Maas wrote it earlier when Romantasy wasn't a massive genre yet. It wasn't even like a phenomenon yet. And so she's kind of. I think she was kind of feeling it out. But you can see in that book, I mean, not, not even just the seeds. You can see the whole trunk of the world that will become Prythian, the High Fae, all of that. You know, that world has High Fae, beautiful, a beautiful kind of kick ass heroine.

[Dominic]

Right.

[Tabby]

And then her later series, Crescent City also features this same kind of universe. So it's more of a multiverse, I think. And the same tropes are popping up in every single one. Kind of a dark, brooding love interest, people not being who they appear. But Throne of Glass, just getting back to the romanticity of it all. Throne of Glass massively contributed to the success of A Court of Thorns and Roses because it built mass a fan base that then follow her throughout her career. And not all writers can say that these days. I think it's an unusual thing.

[Dominic]

So Throne of Glass, when she started it was what's Called a young adult book. So YA and Acotar. I was about. I'm using the technical term, Acotar. Acotar is aimed at a slightly older audience, I would guess. Like people in their early 20s, probably,

[Tabby]

as the series progresses. Older and older, I would say.

[Dominic]

Right. So she wrote this, she claims, in five weeks. And I quote, I wrote book one back in 2009. It was one of those can't write fast enough books, A magic book. I got the idea and then, bam, I couldn't stop. Stop writing it for the next few weeks. It's still the fastest I've ever written a novel.

[Tabby]

I'm a little bit skeptical of that, I think, because the thing is that Romantasy books are famous for their rapid turnarounds. People write them very, very quickly. I think maybe the writing suffers for that. But because they are pushed to. Because they have these clamoring fan bases that are hungry for more, more, more. And I think the publishers, you know, are part of that.

[Dominic]

So I was interested to. I was.

[Tabby]

You found a fascinating fact about Sarah J. Maas, didn't you? Go on.

[Dominic]

I was trying to find a fascinating fact. I was trying to find a good fact that would give us a clue to Sarah J. Maas writing.

[Tabby]

I think this is very indicative of who she is and to the appeal

[Dominic]

of the appeal of her books, the tremendous sales. I mean, there are so many writers who would get anything to have her success.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And the single most interesting fact I could find about her was, and I quote, sarah has an entire shelf in her fridge dedicated to cheese.

[Tabby]

Yeah. Well, that's just good sense.

[Dominic]

And maybe that's where a lot of writers are going wrong.

[Tabby]

Yeah. But maybe that's giving her. Maybe that's triggering like mad nightmares from which, you know, these books are born. Artistic inspiration. Anyway. Let's get into the world itself a little bit.

[Dominic]

Yeah, let's forget the cheese. Get into the world.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

So the first thing I said to you when I started reading this, when I kind of texted you about it, I said, I've literally opened the book and it's got the map of Game of Thrones.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And you rightly pointed out to me, don't be such an idiot. Basically, the map of Game of Thrones and the map of this book is the same. Because they're both the maps of the British Isles.

[Tabby]

Exactly. Because people like to root, I think, fantasy in, like, this mythological old England. I don't know whether that goes back to the Arthurian legends or something. It kind of gives it a credibility

[Dominic]

I think it's Tolkien. Right, they're getting the influence from Tolkien.

[Tabby]

Yeah, definitely. And we'll touch on Tolkien's influence actually in a bit. But so we've said it's. Prythian is made up of these courts. And you can see Mass manages to kind of tell us all about the world in one small paragraph when Phara is looking up at this map and it's. The six other courts of Prythian occupied a patchwork of territories. Autumn, summer and winter were easy enough to pick out. Then above them, two glowing courts. The southernmost one, a softer, redder palette. The Dawn Court. Above in bright golden yellow and blue, the Day Court. And above that, perched in a frozen mountainous spread of darkness and stars. And the sprawling, massive territory of the Night Court. So that's the geography of Prythian neatly laid out for us at one go.

[Dominic]

Right.

[Tabby]

And I know that you're quite sceptical of the world building element of these books, which is so crucial to fantasy, but I actually really quite like it. I like the way that she plays with the way that whatever the court is, be it summer, autumn, whatever, the way that that is manifested in the environment of the court, the food of the court, the trade of the court, whatever it might be, the dress styles, the way that its denizens look and the way that their powers manifest. I loved all this. I was very keen on it.

[Dominic]

Well, you. Hold on. You have a massive advantage over me because you've read other books in the series. So I'm just basing this purely on this first book.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And the other books flesh out the world of Prythian much, much more. And actually it's old history, because if

[Dominic]

I was being critical, and I don't want to be critical because I don't want to invite the wrath of Sarah J. Maas fans, basically, I live in terror, I of 22 year old American women, don't we all attacking me. So. So I. I shall restrain myself a little bit. But I would say that I found the world building in book one quite thin. I felt that I liked the fact that there's a slow reveal of information. She doesn't do it all in one big dump right at the beginning, which a lot of writers might be tempted to do. But I would have liked more about the deep history of the world. I would definitely have liked more about the culture. I didn't feel like. I felt the culture was a tiny bit generic. It's sort of medieval and there's some fairies, but there's not much more to it than that. And so obviously, I love. We both love. I mean, it's one of the things that we first, as it were, bonded over.

[Tabby]

Bonded over.

[Dominic]

Isn't that nice? That's nice for us to know. Yeah. I mean, you could have said that slightly less cynically, but you chose not to.

[Tabby]

I actually couldn't.

[Dominic]

But it's the Lord of the Rings. And obviously in the Lord of the Rings, the world building is so sophisticated because Tolkien basically never went out and that was what he did.

[Tabby]

The point for him was the world building, like that's what came first.

[Dominic]

Yeah. More than the narrative. Exactly. Right. In this, I felt that it didn't have. It clearly doesn't have the depth and consistency of the Lord of the Rings. Maybe it's unfair to expect it. And the way that. That was so glaring for me. We've already mentioned it. I felt all the time characters who live in a world like this do not speak like this. They do not say, back off, you know, you know, you suck or whatever. I mean, I'm not saying anyone does actually say you suck, but they say stuff like that again and again. And I found that jarring.

[Tabby]

Well, I think this brings us nicely onto the influences behind it, because first of all, this book, I think maybe it didn't need as much of a backstory because it's basically a retelling of a fairy tale. And we'll get onto that. But also, Mass said of her earlier series, Throne of Glass, that the main character, Selina Sardothian, was inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kill Bill, Han Solo from Star wars and Disney Princesses. And you can see that all the mishmash of those influences in the language and the world building of A Court of Thorns and Roses.

[Dominic]

There's a really good example, actually, which I know you could hardly be more familiar with, of a super popular genre, basically a mishmash of sources, and that's Harry Potter. So she's basically doing the same kind of thing, which is taking loads of stuff and putting it into a blender. I mean, you could argue that lots of writers do that. I don't mean that harshly, but I think.

[Tabby]

I think that's. That's so much of what, like, fantasy writing is. It's, It's. It can't be original, really. But let's get into, for instance, what some of the things that inspired A Court of Thorns and Roses, because I think this is really interesting. So folklore was a massive driver for Mass, and she's acknowledged this. She says that she does a bunch

[Dominic]

of research A bunch of research.

[Tabby]

I love that this is the way they write, that they speak in the book as well. She says if a story is inspired by classical literature or folklore, I'll do a bunch of research on it first, decide what parts I want to keep or discard. And you can see this. But there's one glaring example for a court of thorns and roses, and that's Tam Lin. So obviously the main player is love interest. And this is called Tam Lin. And this is a Scottish ballad which dates back to. To at least the 16th century. And I actually remember it. I had an illustrated version of this when I was a child. And it's the story of this guy called Tamlin, and he lives in the forest of Carterhau, and he's rescued by his love, who's called either Janet or Margaret, and they rescue him from servitude to the Queen of the fairies, just as Feyre rescues her Tamlin from Amarantha. And then there's also a big bucket of Greek mythology in this. In some ways, it's a retelling of Hades and Persephone, but that element actually unfolds much more in the later books. And I also noticed, I looked up Mas's most recent series, the Crescent City books, and they are just jam packed with mythical creatures. Satyrs, fauns, manticores. So this is clearly something that Mads has in her mind, in her kind of worldview, anyway.

[Dominic]

I mean, the thing that jumped out to me from this story is the story of Cupid and Psyche. So Cupid and Psyche, for people who are not familiar with it, the original version is in a book called. It's either Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass, depending on the translation you have by Apuleius. And Apuleius was a Roman writer, 2nd century AD, who lived in Numidia, so in North Africa. And. And this book that he wrote is basically the only novel in Latin that survives intact. And it's a sort of bawdy pickeresque novel. And there's a story within the story. And the story is of this girl called Psyche. She's one of three sisters. So ready we can see the parallels. She's very beautiful. And Venus sends Cupid to shoot her. So she falls in love with something horrible to sort of punish her because Venus is jealous. And Cupid scratches himself with his arrow accidentally, and he falls in love with her himself. I mean, you'll see how the similarities. She ends up being transported to this beautiful house, this kind of castle, where a beast who is Actually, Cupid in disguise sleeps with her. She finds out eventually how beautiful he is behind the mask and he runs away. She goes back to her sisters, but they reject her. And eventually Venus sets her a series of trials and tasks which she passes, the last one being to descend, as it were, under the mountain to the underworld. At the end of the story of Cupid's Psyche, Psyche is rewarded by Zeus, she is elevated to the ranks of the immortals, and she and Cupid are happily married. So, Tabby, I mean, you can obviously see.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

The parallels with the. Yeah, exactly.

[Tabby]

Yeah. But you can also see a very, very strong fairy tale element in. In A Court of Thorns and Roses.

[Dominic]

So fairy tales, there's a. There's a brilliant definition of them by an American critic called Stith Thompson, who was the late 20th century expert on folklore. He said a fairy tale is a tale of some length with a succession of motifs or episodes, and it's in an unreal world without definite locality or definite creatures. And it's filled with the marvelous. And then it's a never never land. Humble heroes killing adversaries, they succeed to kingdoms and they marry princesses.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

So there's something sort of a fairy tale floats free of definition. It's in this sort of magical world where anything could happen. And it has the quality of a kind of fable. And according to thorns and roses, I mean, obviously it feels very fairy tale right from the beginning, doesn't it? The cottage and the sisters and all of that stuff.

[Tabby]

Yeah, the two wicked sisters, Feyre being kind of brave and sacrificial, kind of your classic Disney princess. But it's actually really interesting. I was thinking about this. There was this massive trend of fairy tale retellings in the 2010s, and I was kind of wondering why that may be, I guess, part the reason that, you know, Romantasy is such a hit. And that's because it's kind of a familiar emotional entry point. And it's a useful way to blend romance and recognizable character arcs. For instance, the latest season of Bridgerton is a retelling of Cinderella. So it's obviously something that continues to appeal to culture and society. But we mentioned that Beauty and the Beast is basically the inspiration for this book. And that is a very familiar entry point to a lot of people, of course.

[Dominic]

So just on Beauty and the Beast. So Beauty and the Beast originates from the 18th century. The first version written down was by. It's French, by A French writer, 1740, called Gabrielle Suzanne Barbo de Villeneuve. And she was writing in what was called the salon tradition, the kind of pressure tradition. And what that meant was basically it's posh people in salons telling each other lovely little stories, often with a kind of moral point to them. And they'd inherited this tradition from the. The real, The. The. The. The godfather of fairy tale schools, called Charles Perron, who was an official at the court of Louis XIV and Perrault, basically invented fairy tales as stories told within the court. So Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty and so on. We think of these as children's stories, and the original French tellers of them, I think, talked about them as though they were stories for children, but told them to each other. So it's like, here's a lovely children's story, but you're actually telling it to adults to while away the evenings, you know, when you've got your gigantic wig.

[Tabby]

I love that.

[Dominic]

I think that would be. I mean, I'm going to give myself away. I think that would be an unbelievably boring way to spend an evening listening to a French Aristotle telling me a fairy tale. But you would love that.

[Tabby]

I would.

[Dominic]

So. So Villeneuve writes the story of Beauty and the Beast, but the version we are most familiar with was an abridged version produced 16 years later, and this was produced for children. And it's by another interesting year, another female writer, Jean Marie le Prince de Beaumont, and she writes the version of Beauty and the Beast that we are all familiar with. So just a very quick, simple, sort of simplistic recap. A wealthy merchant who has lost his money, as in a court of thorns and roses. He and his family have been forced to relocate to a cottage in or near the woods. One of the sisters is beautiful, brave and intelligent. The other two sisters are spoiled. They're entitled, they're greedy, they're horrible. There's this beast who is offended in some way by the father. The daughter must sacrifice herself and go with the Beast to repay her father's debt, as it were. She goes to the Beast's house. There, the Beast, surprisingly, treats her like a princess. Over time, she and the Beast fall in love with each other. But eventually, the Beast, because he's mellowed, he lets her go home to her family. And she says, I'll be back in two months. She forgets because she's gone home. She's gone home to her family. And the Beast starts to die. His heart is breaking. She finally returns. She confesses her love for the Beast. She says, I will marry you. And at that Point, you know, with the kiss or whatever. Aaliyah, in the chat, our producer is writing Stockholm Syndrome, which I think is little, famously.

[Tabby]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dominic]

I think Aaliyah is even more cynical than you. Clearly. Debbie, she kisses the Beast or whatever the Beast. Wouldn't you know it? The Beast transforms into a handsome, hunky prince. It turns out that all along he was the prince and he was afflicted by this curse, by this enchantment. And they live happily ever after. And Tabby, obviously, you know, this is the plot of A Court of Thorns and Roses to some degree.

[Tabby]

It literally is. I mean, you have Feyre, you know, she's kind of beautiful, slender, she has unusual eyes. Very Disney princess in that she's kind of got some special skills within her that makes her different from other girls. She's got two kind of horrible, spoiled sisters. She comes from an impoverished family. She goes to live with kind of the moody Tamlin, the Beast, and she teaches him to love. And then you have Tamlin, who initially seems kind of arrogant and bad tempered, but then over time spent with his princess, with Feyre, he turns out he's actually quite a good guy. He's shy, he's misunderstood, he's kind. Dominic, do you not think I connoted

[Dominic]

that in my reading, in my performance?

[Tabby]

No, no, no, no. That was, that was all X Men. That was all Wolverine. And his mask in this is is it equates to the Beast's, you know, horrible disguise. But obviously it's Romantasy, so the hero can't be ugly. It also serves to kind of hide in this Tamlin's emotional vulnerability because Romantasy is kind of led by emotion rather than in a way that that classic fairy tales absolutely do not. And then Feyre's sister Nestor, the mask device is used in the same way later on as well. So you have beauty. Feyre the Beast, Tamlin. Feyre, like Belle, falls in love with her imprisoner. But there's a final kind of major influence on this story and I think for Romantasy in general, and that's just, you know, classic high fantasy. And Sarah J. Maas has acknowledged the debt that she owes to, you know, fantasy authors like Garth Nix, Lloyd Alexander, and of course, the godfather of all high Fantasy, and that's J.R.R. tolkien. And there are tropes in this that you can map onto classical fantasy. You know, a reluctant hero steps into this destiny and grows in their power, clearly delineated good and evil, some sort of quest. And then, of course, fantastical world Building featuring strange creatures and magic and all that. And I think the first instance of this that you can spot in a court of thorns and roses is Lloyd Alexander's Prydian, isn't it? Which we both, it turns out, read when we were little.

[Dominic]

Yeah. So it's kind of the Black Cauldron, isn't it? And there's a guy called Taron who used to be a pig keeper and rises to become High King. They're clearly. They're American. They're rooted in Welsh mythology in the Mabinogion. And they are written obviously for children. I think they won a lot of awards in the 60s and 70s. I loved them, actually. And Sarah J. Maas was completely upfront about it. I found a thing that she'd written on Twitter when she said, basically, you know, I love those books. I got the name to Prythian comes from Prydane, which is in his books, which is basically an old Welsh word for Britain, I think. So there's that, obviously, the Lord of the Rings, the idea of West. The idea of the. The elves, the High Fae, the Anahai Fae. Exactly.

[Tabby]

Both of them have these objects of great power that kind of set everything in motion and needs to be destroyed. The ring in this, it's the Cauldron. You have this thing of immortal mortal love which is replicated in kind of cycles throughout the generations. So you have Arwen and Aragorn, and they are kind of the descendants of Beren and Luthien. In this. Feyre and Tamlin, it turns out, are not the first mortal and immortal to fall in love, because before them there was Clifia and Durian. So this is very Lord of the Rings.

[Dominic]

Yeah, it is the difference, I suppose. So here's the difference. There's the high fantasy element. There's the fairy tale, there's Greek mythology, there's all of this kind of stuff. But the other element, I would say, is, I mean, there's high fantasy and high school. So when I got to the end of the book, I thought to myself, you know, this does feel very, very like a high school romance. So Feyre is the outsider girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The evil queen Amarantha is basically the queen bee of the school. There's the school quarterback, who is kind of Tamlin, who's hunky and blonde.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

There's his sardonic mate, Lucien. There is the. The bloke who's a crony of the queen bee, but who actually turns out is quite interesting. And he's got these Kind of smoldering dark looks. And that's Rhysand and the end of it. Not I, I don't want to spoil it, but basically end of it. The climax does involve the Queen shouting at Feyre. Say that you don't truly love him. Admit to your inconstant heart. And this is kind of very much like the showdown in the changing room or something.

[Tabby]

I'm not gonna lie. No one ever said that in Glee when I was watching. But I know what you mean. The general, you know what I mean.

[Dominic]

It's like basically they're fighting over this guy. Do you love him? Don't you love him? You don't really love him. All this kind of thing. And I think that's obviously, that is obviously a part of this. You know, it would never have occurred to Gerard Tolkien in a million if he'd lived to the age of 100,000. He would never have. He would never have incorporated a kind of teenage romantic love triangle.

[Tabby]

But then alongside this kind of high school element, you know, there is a big dollop of sort of classical romance. You know, the romantic element is central. You know, like there's even something of, you know, la belle dans enmerci in this, you know, the Keats poem. Traditional romance. People sitting in fields, staring at each other, kind of moon eyed. A lot of nature. So we can see from all this that the book is clearly a massive mishmash of all these themes. Fantastical worlds, high school parlance and drama, folklore and fairy tales, classic romance. But what Romantasy does is it sprinkles in sex into all of this. And that is kind of what makes it a bit different. And I think we should get to a break now, Dominic. But after the break we'll be compose

[Dominic]

ourselves before we get.

[Tabby]

We'll compose ourselves of that. We'll be exploring kind of the purpose of sexual in romantasy. Is there one? Is it just kind of shameless titillation? And we'll also be digging into Romantasy itself and the massive plot twist at the heart of a court of thorns and roses.

[Dominic]

So exciting.

[Tabby]

Come back after the break.

[Dominic]

See you after the break. Focus features in Blumhouse present Obsession When

[Tabby]

I have a crush on a guy no one knows.

[Dominic]

Be careful.

[Tabby]

I wish Nikki loving more than anyone

[Dominic]

on the table world who you wish

[Tabby]

for obsession is 96% fresh on rotten tomatoes.

[Dominic]

I love you so so so, so much. It's blood soaked nightmare fuel.

[Tabby]

Brooke's blood you put on her.

[Dominic]

You have been warned.

[Tabby]

Obsession Rated R under 17. Anime without parent only theaters May 15 with special engagements in Dolby.

[Dominic]

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[Tabby]

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[Tabby]

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[Dominic]

Use as directed.

[Tabby]

Hello.

[Dominic]

Welcome back to the book club. All kinds of delights await, physical and intellectual.

[Tabby]

He went there.

[Dominic]

So tell me. Well, let's start with the. The plot twist. Let's start with the intellectual, intellectual side of things. So here's the big surprise, right? Basically for three quarters of the book, Feyre has been pining for one bloke above all who is the beast and in love.

[Tabby]

Falling in love with. Yeah.

[Dominic]

And she's fallen in love with him. And then she goes off to basically rescue him and at that point he slightly fades from the narrative and he's just off stage all the rest of the time. He's just a sort of generic presence.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And he's surprisingly uncompelling actually, altogether, Tamlin. He has literally no sense of humor and he's not as kind of dramatic and stylish as Sarah J. Maas's other romantic love interests.

[Dominic]

Right. So this I mentioned before the break that he's a bit of the kind of the quarterback of the high school, but with all of that implies, right, which is that he's ultimately a little bit boring and one dimensional. But in the final quarter of the book, this bloke who's been hanging around, who's sort of, you know, a bit sinister and dark and, yeah, basically been sold to us as a baddie who is called Rhysand, he turns out to be more complicated and she starts to, against her will and against her better judgment, she starts to fall for him, doesn't she?

[Tabby]

Well, okay, so the thing that we need to be a little bit clear about here, particularly for those people that don't want spoilers, is this is never massively alluded to in this book. It is something that is hugely developed throughout the rest of the series. But the thing that does come through in this book is that Rhysand has incredible charisma. He's quite witty, he's quite sardonic, he's quite teasing. So the dynamic between he and Feyre is much more playful, much more enjoyable to read than that of Feyre's with Tamlin. And I mentioned earlier the influence of kind of the. The Greek myth of Persephone and Hades. And I think that that will unfold, that does unfold between Feyre and Rhysand. So it overtakes the beauty and the beast element of it all.

[Dominic]

Well, you see that because basically he does a deal with her to help her recover during her trials. He does a deal with her.

[Tabby]

Exactly.

[Dominic]

She will have to spend one week a month with him. This is very Persephone in Hades, isn't it? She will have to spend one week every month with him. But not only is he doing that, you know, don't forget this is a book written in the 2010s, so, you know, very much has the sort of the gender politics and the sort of me too awareness that you would expect. He's also basically drugging her and making her lap dance for him. Yeah, during the final quarter tabby. I mean, that seems a bit weird to me, frankly.

[Tabby]

There is an explanation for that though, and we will come on to that. But another obviously massive element of this dynamic is that the sex scenes, or rather the only real sex scene, because contrary to most people's expectations of romantasy books, this book, a court of thorns and roses, there isn't actually much sex that will really disappoint some of our creepier listeners. But there's basically one big sex scene between Feyre and Tamlin. As with many sex scenes in romanticity, it's, it's, it's surprisingly full of kind of animalistic sort of fairly bestial tropes. It's all about kind of claws and fangs, but being kind of wielded gently by the soft hearted, massively ripped male at the heart of it all. So in this, and I quote, I bit his lip in a silent command that had him growling into my mouth, says Feyre. And then with one long claw he shredded through silken lace and my undergarments fell away in pieces. Etc Etc, etc, and then completely yielding completely to the writhing wildness that had roared alive inside me. So this is very. This is very like, common for the sex scenes in Masses books. And there's far more in them later.

[Dominic]

Yeah, there's basically. There's an enormous amount of roaring, growling claw action.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

But sort of surprisingly, as you said, surprisingly tender claw action. And the prevailing sort of metaphors for. For the. For Feyre, there's a lot of heat, there's a lot of warm glows, there's all this sort of thing.

[Tabby]

So this is. This is actually an interesting element to all this, because the question is, is the. The massive amounts of sex in most Romantasy books less so in this one? Does it actually serve a purpose or is it kind of just titillation to get readers through the door? Yeah, and I think it's kind of twofold. Yeah, I think it's kind of twofold because I think on the one hand, in a sense, it does serve to further the plot in terms of furthering these romantic relationships between characters and their dynamics. Because in the sex scenes themselves, you learn a lot about the dynamics between the male and the female in question, if that is the case. And that is because often the males themselves are very subservient to their kind of kickass female lovers. So it's very much about female pleasure and the female gaze. And also the sex is often used to demonstrate whether or not two characters in Mass's universe anyway are mates. Mates is like soulmates in this world.

[Dominic]

She really believes the idea of soulmates.

[Tabby]

She totally does. And if the sex scenes are particularly kind of imbued with magic, if there are kind of explosions of magic. So there's a scene in the Throne of Glass series where when these two characters have sex for the first time, their magical powers literally explode out of them. And that demonstrates to us that they are mates. They're soulmates. So Tamlin and Feyre never really have this? No, I mean, on the other hand, other Romantasy books that I've tried, I think Mass is the best of them, Like Rebecca Yaris's Fourth Wing. I actually. It was actually annoying after a while, just the constant injection of needless, pointless sex scenes. And that felt like a bit kind of exploitative almost.

[Dominic]

What about this issue of the sexual relationships or the sexual feelings that Feyre has in A Court of Thorns and Roses? They are. You could argue, they're coerced. So, A, she's been taken prisoner by Tamlin, and B, Rhysand, the other guy who she Kind of ends up fancying he has forced her to come. He's going to force her to come to his court one week every, you know, month. I mean, Hades. When people tell the story of Hades and Persephone nowadays, people say, well, this is a story of rape. It's a. He's a rapist.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

Do you think. I mean, do you think that's true of the. The scenes in the. Because you were saying, oh, the men are submissive and all of this. I. I didn't read it that way, to be completely honest. I read it that he's a beast, Tamlin. He bites her at one point. This is before they sleep together. There's a scene where he bites her on the neck. I mean, he's got his claws. He's a giant feral presence. I mean, you could argue this. I mean, clearly Sarah J. Maas wants us to believe that this is very desirable and pleasurable for her. But you could argue, couldn't you, that actually he is the dominant partner, as it were, not her. Or am I misreading that? Tabby?

[Tabby]

It's important to remember what stage of the narrative we're at and that this is a story full of, you know, development and emotional development. Development and stuff like that. So at this stage, Feyre isn't at the height of her powers. You know, as the book progresses, she will grow to an incredible degree of kind of independence. It's all about tracing her emotional arc as much as anything. She's quite low status at this stage. And actually, we will discover later on in the series that she feels huge resentment towards Tamlin and kind of. Yeah, and he kind of. At this point, you know, she sort of almost falls in love with him because he looks after her and he gives her things after she's had to look up after others for so long in terms of the, you know, Rhysand getting her to dance, we learn that it's because he's saving her from something much, much worse.

[Dominic]

Oh, okay.

[Tabby]

He's basically preventing her from being molested by other fairies. And in the end of the book, she is the one that saves Tamlin, not the other way around.

[Dominic]

To play devil's advocate again, I mean, our story is narrated by. It's obviously written by a woman. Narrated by a woman. Most of the readers are women. I mean, is this basically. I hate to use the sort of slight jargon, but basically the female gaze. So we're seeing everything through a woman's ey. I mean, you were saying it's. Does it celebrate female sexuality? Do you think? Or does it? Is it objectifying it? Kind of, yet again, yeah.

[Tabby]

So it's an interesting point because throughout the book, men are constantly kind of looking Feyre up and down with these kind of long lingering glances. But I actually think that this book is massively kind of a celebration of the female gaze and female sexuality and female pleasure. It's always directed the sex scenes, everything, what is attractive in the male heroes or characters. It's very female. And also it's. Feyre is narrating the story. So she is the one that's telling us that these men are giving her these long lingering looks. And so she is basically acknowledging that she's seeing it. She's observing this failing in men, she's highlighting it, she's noticing that it's kind of. It's not. Okay. That doesn't mean that I think it's a massively feminist book either.

[Dominic]

Could you not argue she's defined entirely by her relationships with men? This may be her sisters, but apart from that. And there's one maidservant in the magic house called Alys that she kind of ends up being quite pally with. But by and large this is just about her and the hunky blokes, I guess. Why shouldn't a woman write that kind of book for other women?

[Tabby]

That's just at this stage in her arc, I think, like this is when Feyre's still, you know, discovering her strength, if you will. Later on, she is generally in status much higher than any of the male characters that she encounters. And her female friendship becomes central and crucial. And the cast is massively broadened in terms of female characters. There's all sorts of kind of strong, kick ass women.

[Dominic]

But I'm going to ask one last question, Tabby, before we move, because I know we got to move on to romancy more generally at some point. Now I know that there's one character that you hate more than any other in all modern popular culture. And you know who this is going to be? It's Rey from the Force Awakens. So Daisy Ridley's character in the Star wars reboots, you hate Ray and you're always slagging her off and dissing Daisy Ridley to me, which is poor, not Daisy Ridley.

[Tabby]

I think Daisy Ridley's great as far as.

[Dominic]

No, you confused the character. You know that's a lie. You absolutely confused the actress and the character. It's shocking. But anyway, you always say you don't like Rey in Star wars because she's a stereotypical, what you call Her a girl boss. She's really, you know, she's implausibly heroic, implausibly brave, bloody, bloody, bloody, blah, blah. She's too perfect, and you don't like her. How is that different from the character in this book? Because you could say all of those things about Feyre. I mean, they've almost got the same name, frankly.

[Tabby]

So my issue with Brae, these kind of girl bosses is I want my female heroines to be human. I don't want them to be perfect, and I don't want them to be infallible. I don't want them to be the ones that solve every single problem with this kind of messianic power. I want to be able to, like, relate to them and see them, you know, struggle and strive and develop. Feyre does do that in this book. You know, she grows in, you know, strength and courage, and she is riven with vulnerabilities and guilt. But that being said, I don't think this is a massively feminist book either. The girl boss element of it all is, for me, a little bit surface level. Actually. A lot of Romantasy books do this, but to sell the series as kind of feminist or about women claiming their power, I think that's just a bit jarring. And it only goes so deep. I think. Think it's a lot of fun. I don't think it's, like, gonna give me massive insights into the female condition or what it's like to be a woman or to overcome things. And, like, for instance, there's this girl called Christina Clark Brown who recommends books on Instagram, and she writes that Romantasy allows women to have it all. There is no damsel who needs saving. But rather, women are allowed to be powerful, go on epic quests, and find love with a partner who is an equal to them in every way. That's definitely true. They are powerful. They are always, you know, equal to their romantic counterparts. Love all that. But the reason they have it all is because they are exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally clever, exceptionally talented, and imbued with exceptional magical powers. So I think for women in the real world, they're kind of about as aspirational for women as, like, James Bond. Yeah, James Bond or Gigi and Bella Hadid or something, you know, so that's sometimes what annoys me about Romantasy is like, stop trying to make it deep. It's a lot of fun.

[Dominic]

Okay, well, let's talk about romanticism more broadly, because this is. This is the literary phenomenon, really, of the last ten years or so. It's a genre that did not exist till the beginning of the 21st century. You know, we talked about fairy tales. Would it be a stretch to say that the seeds of romantasy were always there in kind of folktales and fairy tales and things, do you think?

[Tabby]

Yeah, I kind of see fairy tales as the very, very first origins of romantasy because it blended romance with kind of magic and folkloric worlds. And, you know, maybe there's a soup. So of the medieval romance about it all, like Tristan and Iseult, the idea of forbidden love, that kind of thing. You know, there's a bit of romantic and gothic literature of kind of the

[Dominic]

19th, 20th centuries or 18th century Gothic stuff. Castles, maidens.

[Tabby]

Exactly, all of that, but. And, you know, these dark, brooding, Byronic heroes. That too. But the thing that really, I mean, to be truthful, launched romantasy was social media and more particularly booktok. And it was actually Mass's books have a huge part to play in making it the phenomenon that it is, because they captured people's attention on booktok. And these videos would go viral of people, you know, making their predictions, talking about their favorite characters, dressing up as high Fae, and then the term itself properly first appeared in 2008.

[Dominic]

So why now? That's the question. Like, women have always read books. Women drove the rise of the novel in the 18th century. So it's not surprising that there are genres dominated by women today. But what is it about this genre in particular that appeals to so many millions of incredibly enthusiastic younger women? I mean, Rebecca Yarros, there's a quote from her. You can find it online. She says it's because the real world sucks. There's probably a more professional way to say that, but people want to escape, sure. But, I mean, the real world has often been very dark and terrifying, and people have always wanted to escape. And it might have been in the 1930s. They would have been escaping by reading Agatha Christie whodunits, which tell us a lot about the intellectual climate, the cultural climate of the 1930s. We live in an age when there's lots of talk in the newspapers or whatever about mental health, about trauma, about sexual abuse, about sexual empowerment. What are these kinds of things about harassment, about living your truth? Do you think? Is it too simplistic to say that basically romantasy is the fictional embodiment of all those things?

[Tabby]

Do you think the escapism it provides is very different from that provided by, say, Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Game of Thrones because the focus and the driver In Romantasy is emotion. The emotional stakes are generally the point of everything. They're the heart of it all. Whereas traditional fantasy is more about like the outside. It's about world building, it's. It's about elaborate laws, quest structures, external stakes. So it's like the make believe that you loved as a child, but then as you get older and you know, arguably more emotionally complex and you're kind of buffeted by the social concerns of the day. As you say, mental health is a big concern these days. It's part of our cultural conversations, it's all over social media. What it does is it binds that into these escapist worlds, but makes it feel at least superficially relevant. And maybe that makes it kind of more permissible. Like if you're a 30 year old woman, you're sitting on the tube, maybe you feel a bit silly reading Harry Potter. You wouldn't feel silly reading about like a woman overcoming PTSD even though she was wielding a sword.

[Dominic]

Right.

[Tabby]

It's almost as though the plots and the world building in Romantasy, it's like there's almost something that feels a bit half hearted about it sometimes. It's almost like a means to an end. The end being to kind of maybe tick without being too cynical. Trauma and mental health boxes, for instance, Feyre's journey under the mountain. It's kind of more about will she choose Tamlin, what will it do to her mental health and her feelings about herself rather than, you know, will evil prevail in Prythian?

[Dominic]

So that's why, for example, when Sarah J. Maas uses the device of masks, ultimately why they're wearing masks is not that, that interesting. You know, the reveal that it's about a curse rather than a plague. I mean, who cares? The point of the masks for her is the emotional truth, which is that we're all wearing masks and, you know, we're ashamed to be who we are and we're putting up barriers and all of that kind of thing. And Feyre's sister Nesta wore a mask, metaphorically pretended to be horrible. And actually she was troubled and. But that was because she was troubled and suffering. Nobody loves Tolkien more than I do, but it would not have occurred to Tolkien to talk about those kinds of elements.

[Tabby]

Elrond's rarely anxious, I would say, you know.

[Dominic]

Right, exactly. His characters, some of his characters undoubtedly are troubled by, you know, Frodo most obviously at the end of the Lord of the Rings, you know, he's damaged and that's why he basically has to leave the story. But most of his characters do not have mental scars. They don't suffer trauma in the same way. Some of them do, but most of them don't. Whereas in this you get the impression that they're all battling with their demons, aren't they?

[Tabby]

To some degree, definitely. So it treats that as central rather than secondary. And it also treats the romance as central, not secondary. So in other fantasy series, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, the romance happens on the side and maybe it has some kind of purpose, but it's not really the point. Whereas in this it's all about the romance. And the sheer fact that it blends romance and fantasy is just massively significant because those are two of the highest selling genres worldwide anyway, so. So you get the kind of addictive, kind of dopamine triggering format of romance. You know, enemies to lovers, will they, won't they? And then you blend that with this sense of like world shaking, destiny and soulmates and the escapism that affords and the sheer spectacle of it all and then throw in a kick ass heroine that massively appeals to kind of a generation brought up on the aesthetics of social media. And that's the other thing is these worlds are very aesthetically pleasing. You get lovely details about how the bed hangings look, you know, about Feyre's dress, about how her hair is arranged, about what they eat. So the aesthetics of it, the linen is always good. That's definitely an appeal. And that's very kind of the shiny, polished world of social media.

[Dominic]

Yeah. What about. So I see you wrote down some notes and in the notes you have the word influencers.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

You see the characters as the fantasy equivalent of influencers, basically.

[Tabby]

This is probably very, very cynical of me, but I think maybe there is a slight element. I actually wouldn't say so much in mass books, but maybe in some of the other romantasy books that I've dipped my toe into, wherein, you know, influences, they're kind of perfect looking people doing perfect things, but they also, you know, they're telling you their truth and they're telling you their story. And sometimes maybe that's all about how they've overcome some sort of mental health challenge or whatever it is. Sometimes I feel like in some of these books it's like perfect looking people doing perfect things, but falling in love with perfect people and then like they kind of maybe crowbar in a massive dollop of trauma into that.

[Dominic]

I was about to ask you about the trauma. Do you think the trauma is unearned?

[Tabby]

I don't think it is the emotional

[Dominic]

investment that a lot of readers have in these books. They believe in the trauma. Right. They believe in the psychological suffering of the characters. And they see that as inspirational.

[Tabby]

Yeah, definitely. And that's another thing that I just. I think is great about Romancy, and I think people are too harsh on Romantasy about is the fact that it does afford. It means so much to so many people and it affords so many people so much joy, means it must be a good thing. And I think within these narratives, the characters, say Aelin in Throne of Glass, Feyre in this, they go through terrible things. Their trauma is earned. But, like, sometimes I think, do you need to be that violent? Do you need to go that far?

[Dominic]

Yeah. There's a fair bit of violence towards women in this.

[Tabby]

Yeah. I feel like sometimes it's a little bit exploitative. It's like a series of social media vignettes or tropes or clips. That's got to be more violent than anything you've ever read. That's got to be more romantic than anything you've ever read.

[Dominic]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

Social media is not a subtle place. Neither is romantic.

[Dominic]

So it's a series of set pieces, basically. A series of very.

[Tabby]

It feels like that.

[Dominic]

Lurid set pieces. Yeah. And there's a lot of. I mean, there are people in publishing, aren't there, who are anxious about Romantasy. Bit like the argument that people made a few years ago about the Marvel films and cinema, that it drives out all other stuff that is commercially dominant, that publishers don't have the courage to take other stuff on. I have to be honest, I don't find that a very plausible argument because I think people have always made that argument about other genres. So you could have made. I mentioned detective fiction. Detective fiction and romantic stories probably appeal to a quite a similar demographic. So we're talking about women in their 20s and 30s, and people at the time might have said, God, you know, Penguin are only interested in publishing whodunits these days. They're driving out all else. I think it's unfair. I mean, if people want to read Romantasy, that's what publishers should produce. Right, because publishers are serving the market.

[Tabby]

Yeah, of course, absolutely. And also, I don't think people should ever be shamed for reading anything. I think anything that gets people reading is brilliant. Who knows? These books could serve as a wonderful gateway to more sophisticated, maybe fantasy worlds, which could then mean that they leapfrog over into reading, I don't know, the classics, whatever it may be. And you're right. Like people said about. You know, some authors I have seen online said this of Harry Potter, that it was destroying literacy, that it was kind of.

[Dominic]

Yeah, bonkers.

[Tabby]

Melting people's minds. I hate that tone of, like, totally bonkers.

[Dominic]

I never kind of get that. Do you know what I did when I was a teenager, when I was 14, 15?

[Tabby]

Video games?

[Dominic]

I did. But also, I tell you what I was addicted to, absolutely addicted. The novels of Jeffrey Archer. Now, some people listen to this, will never listen to this podcast again. They'll be like, why would you. I loved them. I like Tom Clancy. I loved all of that stuff. I read every Agatha Christie.

[Tabby]

Yeah, I hate bookish snobbery. It always, always annoys me. And also, you know, the other thing is, people say that it's taking attention away from other books and stuff. Great things are still being published. And I suspect that anything that is, you know, brilliant, whatever that means, reading is so subjective. They will endure. You know, for instance, last year, Dostoevsky's novella White Night suddenly had this massive upsurge on social media. That is a very tricky, gritty book to get your teeth into. You know, it's not an easy read, but, you know, that's still coming up. Coming back.

[Dominic]

Completely agree with you. Savvy. I think I'm bewildered, actually, when people look down on stuff. I mean, it must. Doesn't necessarily mean I think it's great. I wouldn't go to the other extreme of the inverted snobbery and basically saying, oh, it's brilliant because people like it. I don't take that view, but I think it's fine. It's like, it's fine to have fish and chips. You don't always have to have Michelin Star food.

[Tabby]

No, exactly. It's really enjoyable. There is much more to it than, you know, inverted commas, goblin sex. They're founded in kind of folkloric traditions. There's shades of kind of Victorian romance. There's Byronic heroes, there's fairy tales. Sexual in their temptation. You know, they're quite amusing. I like the world building. And, you know, no one ever said this about Game of Thrones. No one ever said that, you know, Game of Thrones was rotting people's minds and anything like that. And I think because they're much more masculine books and these are much more female books, people always.

[Dominic]

And they always have done, going back to the 18th century. They have always liked to sneer at what women, particularly young women, read.

[Tabby]

There's nothing wrong with being, you know, a commercial writer. Jane Austen was a commercial writer. George Eliot was, too. But sometimes I feel like they have, like, a list of boxes that they need to tick that will, like, feed the ravening audiences of Romantasy Lovers. They're like, sex scene, every chapter. Tick. A good dollar for trauma tick. And I find sometimes that trauma element, you know, with characters saying things like, he was respecting my boundaries, I was speaking my truth, that's fine. But do you have to say it so on the nose? It takes some of the power away from me. You know, Lord of the Rings is so full of emotional depth and power about overcoming suffering, about soldiering on, about being brave, but they never have to say it out loud.

[Dominic]

It's sometimes too overt, but it's a lot of fun. Well, do you know what? We are going to give this a mark out of 10. Before I read this book and before we started to do it, Tabby said to me, you can't give this one out of 10 because everybody will hate you and no one will listen to our show and all of this kind of thing. And you know what? Having read the book, there's no way I'm going to give it one out of 10 because I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought.

[Tabby]

So what's our rating system this week?

[Dominic]

This is about female gaze, so you can decide.

[Tabby]

All right, well, Dominic chose this, obviously, as a massive fan of Goblins and Tights, we're gonna rate it out of ripped fairies with hearts of gold out of ten.

[Dominic]

So I tick three of those boxes. Personally. Sorry, two of those boxes. I don't tick three of those boxes. I ticked two of those boxes.

[Tabby]

Dream on.

[Dominic]

Gothmog coming from Legolas, of all people. Unbelievable. So I'm gonna give it six.

[Tabby]

Wow. Oh, my God. Isn't that what you gave normal people?

[Dominic]

That's insane. That's. I can't believe that we don't make a claim to consistency.

[Tabby]

I've never felt happier. I just. I feel like.

[Dominic]

Do you know what? I've actually. I've come down from where I thought I was gonna come in. I thought I was gonna come in with seven. Wow. Because he loves it. Because I didn't mind reading it. I can't remember where we are in the. In the series, but we did east of Eden, and I bitterly resented reading east of Eden more than I did this.

[Tabby]

You know what? I think you're rating that so highly because you're secretly an Otherkin, right?

[Dominic]

What is anotherkin? You put that in the notes. Tabby littered the notes with these weird

[Tabby]

sexual Terms, they're not sexual.

[Dominic]

Furries.

[Tabby]

Etherians and other kins aren't sexual.

[Dominic]

Yeah. What are they? I don't want to Google them. In case.

[Tabby]

Is it having a deep spiritual, psychological or metaphorical connection to an entity that is non human? You know, if you identify as a dragon, more power to you, brother.

[Dominic]

Okay, well, listen, I'm gonna give it 6 out of 10 because there are some things about it that I liked. I did not see the big twist coming. So when it turns out it's not really Beauty and the Beast, I genuinely didn't see that coming. I genuinely found the last hundred pages, and I'm not just saying this for the purpose of the podcast, I genuinely found the last hundred pages very readable and dare I say it, exciting. I wanted to find out what was happening in the trials. I kept reading. There are a few other twists with the characters, like Tamlin and his heart, which I won't give away because it's a big spoiler, but I thought that was quite clever. I didn't see that coming. I'm marking it down from seven to six because the answer to the riddle at the end of the book is so obvious, you would have to be absolutely deranged not to guess it. I would say it's blindingly obvious. Yes. So six out of ten for me. Tabby, please tell me you're going to come in lower.

[Tabby]

I'm actually also giving it a Six Great Minds Think Alike. I think it's so much fun. I love the world. I genuinely love the world. I like all the folkloric stuff, the mythical creatures. I like all the stuff with the different courts. I like the pacing. You know, I'm happy to just live in a world with not much happening, you know, allows me to get a feel for it. The writing isn't amazing by any stretch of the imagination.

[Dominic]

No, it's the prose, by the way. We haven't really talked that much about the prose because there's not that much to say. It's workman like.

[Tabby]

Yeah, it's workmanite. And I get. And I got sort of tired of the repetition, you know, mix it up a bit. Sarah J. Maas. But, you know, she does manage to inject a hell of a lot of passion into it. But I am going to deduct a couple of points because while there is a lot to admire in Feyre, you know, genuinely admire, and she's not two dimensional, I didn't really. I didn't like her that much and I didn't found that I cared as much about her fate, I found Rhysand and Lucien entertaining, but Tamlin, oh, my God. Despite his bulging tights, there's just absolutely nothing interesting about him. And also, Amarantha is a bit underwhelming. She's kind of like a cartoon cut out.

[Dominic]

Yes, she is. She's an evil queen.

[Tabby]

Yeah, that's it. And I found the scattering of kind of modern phrases and references a bit jarring, but I massively enjoyed it. I'm not going to rush to the next again, but I massively enjoyed it.

[Dominic]

Do you know what? I want to rush to the next, but I can't. I want to crack on with the series and find out what happens to Feyre.

[Tabby]

Is that because you need to read the Woman in White?

[Dominic]

That's because I need to read the Woman in White by Wilhee Collins, which is our book for next week.

[Tabby]

Out of interest, which court do you think you'd be in if you had pointy ears and long hair?

[Dominic]

So I'm looking at the courts. There's the Night Court, the Day Court, the Dawn Court, the Winter Court, the Summer Court, the Autumn Court, and the Spring Court, and the Court of Nightmares. I'm probably from the Court of Nightmares.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

So we've got the Woman in White. And then after that, we have a total change of tone because we are doing Toni Morrison's book Beloved. After that we are doing Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, great classic of the early 20th century. Then we're coming back into this sort of territory again. We are doing the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. And after the Hunger Games, it is the Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Then the Code of The Worcesters by P.G. woodhouse, which is one of my absolute favorite books. That's the World of Jeeves and Worcester.

[Tabby]

Yeah, it's wonderful.

[Dominic]

And then a book that actually I've taught, would you believe, when I was an academic, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. And on that bombshell, we should probably draw a veil. Draw a gossamer veil with our claws. We're getting bogged down now in fantasy metaphors. Goodbye.

[Tabby]

Bye.

[Dominic]

Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe [e-mail]

[Tabby]

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities.

[Dominic]

So do like I did and have

[Tabby]

one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to [e-mail]

[Dominic]

Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only

[Tabby]

then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full [e-mail] hey mama.

[Dominic]

Thanks for making all my favorite recipes.

[Tabby]

Hi Ma. Thanks for your unfiltered advice. Hi Mom. Thanks for always being by the phone. Hey Mom. Happy Mother's Day. When you ship UPS Air at the UPS Store, your items arrive on time or your money back guaranteed at no extra cost exclusively at the UPS store US retail locations. Visit the upsstore.com airshipping for full details. Terms and conditions apply. Send your Mother's Day gifts at the UPS Store and we'll get your gratitude there on time.