Amazing Book
The series starts out by introducing the heroine, Celaena Sardothien, who has just spent a year in a slave camp where the average life expectancy is only a month. She was put there because she was Adarlan's assassin - the best in the land, never caught, and never seen. Until her trial, almost no one even knew that she was a 17 year old girl. She has always been the best, the prettiest, and she knows it. Even worse, she makes sure everyone else knows it too.
I love Celaena.
Throughout this book, she isn't just an assassin who has killed too many people to count. She isn't just the girl who became a woman in the depths of Hell. She is a woman who is scarred and a little broken, but loves pretty things, and sweets, and music. She is a woman who is scared sometimes, who loves and gets mad and is happy. She is a person, not just an assassin, and that is what I love about Sarah Maas's work.
Too many book these days are all about the situations the main character is in. I cannot count the number of times I have read a dystopian novel in which we get to watch the heroine come to age because of the circumstances that force her to grow up. In this world we get to see a woman who already knows that the world is bad, who has already grown up inside of it, and watched her love and her innocence die, but still has the will to truly live.