Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood
By Sarah J. Maas
Bloomsbury, 2020

Bloomsbury Publishing and the various enthusiast niches of social media have made one claim about Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas more pointedly than any others: that this book is the adult fiction debut from an author who’s had a string of bestsellers and made a million loyal readers by writing young adult novels, both in the “Throne of Glass” series and in the “Court of Thorns and Roses” series. 

The claim would be fascinating if true, since it would entail Maas briefly looking away from the YA genre that’s brought her wealth and success - for well over 10 years now, a very large number of fully-grown adults have proudly admitted to reading virtually nothing except books written for teenagers, and Maas has been one of their favorite authors.

But is it, in fact, true? That question raises another: what is YA fiction? If all the industry identifiers were stripped off a manuscript, how would you know you’re reading YA? The genre’s fiercest defenders, the ones who live on Twitter all day long, have argued that you wouldn’t know, that the label is a form of discrimination. But since these are the same people who argue that YA should be taught in college literature courses not alongside Shakespeare but instead of him, they can be safely dismissed. 

Even so, the question itself shouldn’t be dismissed, nor should it be reduced to some variation of Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” description of pornography. YA is a type of writing. It therefore has characteristics that distinguish it from all other forms of writing. So what are those characteristics?

Well, one is certainly a fixation with prepositional phrases, a trend largely started by Maas herself and one that’s led to the virtual lock-down certainty that a new YA book’s title or subtitle will be “The [X] of [Y] and [Z].” “The House of Earth and Blood” certainly ticks that box. 

Another YA characteristic - and I’ve enjoyed plenty of YA books, so I say it with love but it nevertheless needs saying - is terrible, slangy, lazy, overwrought prose, the kind that’s all easy word choices, one-sentence paragraphs, and slathered-on melodrama. Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood is largely the story of a young woman named Bryce Quinlan, recently graduated from university in Crescent City, a place where supernatural elements - angels, devils, and a light overlay of quasi-Norse mythology - routinely intermingle with quotidian elements from our own world like insurance, emails, and the Internet. Before two dozen pages have turned, Bryce is caught up in a rapidly-expanding plot that brings her at one point across the Istros River, through the Bone Gate, and to the city’s Bone Quarter, and that whole time, this second YA characteristic has been, let’s just say unmissable:

The black steps ringing the foggy shore of the Bone Quarter bit into Bryce’s knees as she knelt before the towering ivory steps.

The Istros spread like a gray mirror behind her, silent in the predawn light.

As quiet and still as she had gone, hollowed out and drifting.

Mist curled around her, veiling all but the obsidian steps she knelt on and the carved bone gates looming overhead. The rotting black boat at her back was her only companion, its moldy, ancient rope draped over the steps in lieu of a mooring. She’d paid the fee - the boat would linger here until she was done. Until she had said what she needed to say.

Another lock-step characteristic of YA fiction is its adolescent fixation with sexual politics, love triangles, and brooding ‘bad boys’ whose grudging but inevitable transformation into respectful, dutiful, loyal boyfriends is the genre’s staple element of high school wish fulfillment. These things have been ironclad hallmarks of Maas’s own YA fiction, and surely any test of whether or not Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood is, in fact, an adult fiction debut will involve this author’s willingness (or ability) to leave such cafeteria-gossip behind and finally write adult characters who act, talk, and think like adults. 

Early on in this book, we’re introduced to a Fallen angel named Hunt Athalar, who is handsome and brooding and who reflexively underestimates Bryce, dismissing her as a typical half-Fae party girl of no depth of significance. In a typical YA novel, this relationship would proceed through an off-kilter first meeting to some awkward rom-com banter to a love that literally changes their world - an escalation as inherently absurd as if Anna and Vronsky’s love in Anna Karenina had culminated in the overthrow of the Romanovs, but even so, a vital part of YA. 

Readers don’t need to stick with Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood very long to find this characteristic right where they’d expect it:

Bryce reached forward, her long braid slipping over a shoulder, and grabbed his phone from the coffee table. She snapped a photo of him and sent a copy to herself, mostly because she doubted anyone would believe her that Hunt fucking Athalar was sitting on her couch in casual clothes, sunball hat on backward, watching TV and drinking a beer.

The Shadow of Death, everyone.

“This is annoying,” he said through his teeth.

“So is your face,” she said sweetly, tossing the phone to him. Hunt picked it up, snapped a photo of her, and then set it down, eyes on the game again.

That’s three boxes ticked in fewer than 100 pages, and there are plenty, plenty more. Forced, excessive cursing? Check - the book is crammed with F-bombs, literally a minimum of four per page. Forced, excessive pandering to current-year notions of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’? Check - on virtually every page, whether it makes sense in the narrative or not. Forced, excessive mirroring of what the author perceives as the reader’s ordinary everyday life? Check - everybody talks in 2019 idioms that will be indecipherable in 2119, everybody absolutely needs their coffee, everybody knows the latest on what the equivalent of high school cool kids are doing at all times, etc. 

So: for whatever reasons, Bloomsbury and Maas are simply lying - Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood is most certainly not an adult-fiction debut. It’s 800 pages of easily-identifiable YA. Readers looking to steer clear of YA should be warned of the blatant false advertising, which will no doubt be furthered by this book being mis-shelved in retail bookstores. 

Which isn’t to say that readers should be looking to steer clear of YA - like all other genres, this one has strengths to recommend it. In place of subtlety, there’s action. In place of nuance, there’s that strange but compelling omnipresent urgency that fills adolescent life. And there’s when it comes to YA fantasy and science fiction, there’s usually elaborate and meticulous world-building. 

All of these things are true for Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood. Sarah Maas may be lying about the genre of her latest book (either involuntarily, because she’s incapable of writing adult fiction and doesn’t know it, or voluntarily, because she wants to break into a different section of the bookstore without turning her back on the legions of fans who made her a queen back in the Kids section), but she’s a smooth, engine-efficient pro at delivering what she’s actually writing: lovingly detailed and completely page-turning YA fantasy. Once I got over my initial irritation, I was enthusiastically reading to the genuinely exciting climax and the final page. I’d rather have skipped the irritation altogether, true - for the next volume, I’ll simply ignore the marketing.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.