I am going to start off yet again stating that this post is full of spoilers, much more so than my last post. I would suggest that unless you have finished HOFAS or you just don’t care about spoilers, do not read any further than this paragraph.
I was very pleasantly surprised. This book does a really good job of cleaning up a lot of loose ends. It doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but I was left with a few questions, nothing that will keep me up at night, but it gives me hope that there will be a fourth book in the future. And seeing that each of the books have been titled after three of the four houses, I think it would be safe to assume that the fourth book would potentially be titled House of Many Waters. I don’t want to get into the plot, because it is a lot, but every major cliffhanger we were left with at the end of HOSAB is resolved. We also got the crossover we were waiting for, and I really liked that we not only got to see some of the ACOTAR characters in the very beginning of the book but at the end too. A lot of the evil, cruel, and misogynistic characters are killed and there is a happy ending for almost all of the protagonists. In this book, there is a lot of back and forth with the first person point of view which goes constantly back and forth between Bryce, Hunt, Ruhn, Tharion, Ithan, and Lidia. I feel like there might even have been a few other first person point of views that I am missing, I think Hypaxia might be one of them. I was hearing that a lot of people didn’t like that the point of view changed so often but I did not mind it. All the main characters were split up for a lot of the book. The way the story flows makes it so that the reader is seeing things as they happen in the present time, so even though Bryce is in Prythian, Hunt is in the dungeons with Ruhn and Baxian, and Declan and Flynn are doing reconnaissance, sometimes with Ithan and Tharion, you get to see what everyone is doing at the same time on the same day. I feel like this worked well, even if you were dying to know what happened to someone but you had to read from the point of view of a few characters before you got back to the story line you were most interested in.
That is about as much as I will say about the plot overall. Now, I just want to get my questions out there.
Is Sathia in some kind of trouble? She went to the Meat Market to try and see if she could free her friend from the Viper Queen. And Tharion, on his way there to find her, is confronted by Ariadne, who was kind of working for the Viper Queen as a fighter, but left her service towards the end of the book. Speaking of which, is she even still a slave?
Who killed the seventh Asteri, Octartis? Sirius was killed, or removed from the world, a long time ago by one of the Princes of Hel. Bryce killed Polaris on the battlefield by using the blades and her power to open the portal to nowhere. Immediately after that she and Hunt teleported to the first light tubes where they were met with Rigelus, soon after joined by Eosphoros, Hesperus, and Austrus. Bryce sends them into a second portal. Both Ruhn and Bryce mention that they felt time slow down in between the death of Polaris and the other four Asteri, which is an indicator that an Asteri had been killed. Did I miss something? I swear no one talks about it in the aftermath. I also couldn’t find an answer online.
The tattoo on Bryce’s back is in the same language as the symbols used in the Book of Breathings, as stated by Amren in the beginning of the book. Are these the same symbols that Ithan sees on the metal bowl that the statue is holding when he and Hypaxia go to see the Under King in the Bone Quarter? He says the symbols look familiar but he can’t place them. If he has seen Bryce’s tattoo, maybe that is why they seem familiar. Or, it could be that Ithan was a history major and maybe he saw something similar in a book while he was in school. And following that, are the symbols Wyrd marks? As in the symbols that are prevalent in the Throne of Glass series?
Finally, why did that one language, the old Fae language, stop being spoken in Prythian over 15,000 years ago? Did it just fall out of style? I feel like it might have something to do with the Asteri. Maybe they didn’t want the Fae of Prythian and the Fae of Midgard to be able to communicate with each if they ever came into contact. Maybe it was like their kill switch, an insurance policy created on the very slim chance that the portal between worlds would open and the two groups could somehow figure out that the Dagdan and the Asteri were the same beings.
I know that I probably won’t get answers to these questions for a long time, but I can wait patiently. I believe that the next book SJM is writing is another installment in the ACOTAR series and that is probably a few years away from being published. And while I think that there will be mentions of what happened in HOFAS in the next installment of ACOTAR, I think it will primarily focus on the characters in that universe. I personally am hoping for an Azriel focused story, he is my favorite, and I am really hoping that he ends up with Gwyn, or, in a surprise twist, Eris.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 