Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass #1)

Content Overview

Overall Content
Severity
3.3

Language

3.1/10

Alcohol, Drugs, Smoking

1.0/10

Intimacy, Sex, Immodesty

1.4/10

Violence, Weapons, Crime, Blood

10.0/10

Potentially Intense Themes

0.8/10

**As an Amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases. 

Throne of Glass

Sarah J. Maas

After serving out a year of hard labor in the salt mines of Endovier for her crimes, 18-year-old assassin Celaena Sardothien is dragged before the Crown Prince. Prince Dorian offers her her freedom on one condition: she must act as his champion in a competition to find a new royal assassin.

Her opponents are men-thieves and assassins and warriors from across the empire, each sponsored by a member of the king’s council. If she beats her opponents in a series of eliminations, she’ll serve the kingdom for four years and then be granted her freedom. Celaena finds her training sessions with the captain of the guard, Westfall, challenging and exhilarating. But she’s bored stiff by court life. Things get a little more interesting when the prince starts to show interest in her … but it’s the gruff Captain Westfall who seems to understand her best.

Then one of the other contestants turns up dead … quickly followed by another. Can Celaena figure out who the killer is before she becomes a victim? As the young assassin investigates, her search leads her to discover a greater destiny than she could possibly have imagined.

-Excerpt taken from Goodreads.

Check Goodreads to see the book’s ratings.

My Opinion

4.5 out of 5 stars (4.5 / 5) When I read this in 2015, I was reading it just for the hype. I was not into fantasy at the time but this one worked it’s way in slowly so it wasn’t as hard for me to picture. Back then, I rated it 3 stars. I liked it but didn’t see what the fuss was all about. This time around, I’m a full-blown fantasy lover and I’m rating it 4.5 stars. It’s good, but Maas was a bit less polished then.

Celaena is released from prison to win her freedom. If she wins a competition, she will work for the king as his assassin. While she is staying in the castle, people go missing and many bodies are found mauled and mutilated. She is finding many connections to ancient history and putting the pieces together to save those she loves.

Maas does have incredible imagery in her writing. The worlds she creates are intricate in the way that a small side note in book 2 will lead to a huge twist in book 5. These are thought out very well! The characters are easy to get attached to. Celaena is all bite with soft edges. She tough, she’s arrogant, she is the best at almost everything she does. And if she’s not the best, she strives for it. Chaol is a big teddy bear wrapped up in an angry guard uniform, and Dorian is a spoiled royal who tugs at your heart and makes you want to save him. We learn back stories and hopes and more from most characters. Maas is brilliant at being able to jump POV’s multiple times in a chapter. It’s astounding that each jump is done well enough that I always know who is the POV and it flows smoothly.

This book came to me at a time I needed the distraction. It was so nice to get caught up in the story and forget life for awhile. I finished the book and wanted to grab book 2 immediately!

At the beginning of 2021, I made the goal to reread this series and do the content reviews for each one. Look at me finally getting to this in August! I think it’s important to show the progression a series can take with intimacy and violence. While book one of this series started out fairly tame (see the content summary below), the intensity in almost every category is increased the more you get into the series.

Content Summary: My biggest concern with this book is the detail it goes into with blood. There are vicious attacks and the bodies are found very mutilated. The blood and gore is somewhat descriptive. There have also been attacks on people, people killed brutally and fighting during the competition that have quite a few details. Everything else I feel falls into respectable YA boundaries.

Detailed Content Review

Language 

F***-

H***- 6

S***-

A**- 3

B****- 2

D***- 19

Bas****- 1

Religious Cursing

J****-

Chr***-

G**-

L***-

Derogatory terms and cursing unique to the book etc-

Gods

By the Wyrd!

Insufferable moron 

Harlot 

Alcohol, Drugs, Smoking

A man is drunk. 

A woman regularly smokes a pipe of opium. She claims it’s for headaches. She uses it multiple times. 

Wine is served at a party. One man reeks of it. A woman poisons a young woman’s wine, she loses muscle control and hallucinates. 

Intimacy, Sex, Immodesty

*No LGBTQ+ aspects included* 

“You’d be better off on your back, learning tricks useful to a woman.”

“She opens her legs, and you keep an eye on her..?”

A young woman’s monthly cycle reappears after being absent from prison and starvation. She is in immense pain and vomits. 

A woman flirts with a man, implying that she will go to bed with him. 

A man and young woman kiss passionately a few times. 

A man and young woman kiss and talk for hours on her bed. 

A man kisses a young woman. 

A man kisses a young woman. 

Violence, Weapons, Crime, Blood

Slaves are whipped. 

A young woman is forced to bow, her head slamming the floor. 

In a prison escape attempt a young woman killed 24 guards before being knocked unconscious.

A man slaps his adult son. 

It is rumored that a young boy of royalty beat his female servant so badly that they couldn’t conceal it.

A man is called Eye Eater because he eats the eyes of his victims. Another man is named Scythe for the weapon he uses to “torture and hack apart” his victims. 

A body is found of a man, “ripped wide open” and “in ribbons.” His “innards scooped out… brain was… missing.”

While training to be an assassin, a 12yo is given the choice to have her right hand broken or she could break it herself. She needed to learn better with her left hand. So she slammed her hand in a door, breaking two bones. 

A young woman was previously whipped 21 times in a prison. 

Previously at a prison, 4 people raped and killed a prisoner. 

A man shoves a man, knocking his head on the floor where he becomes unconscious. An arrow is shot through the aggressor’s throat. 

A man falls from a height with a shriek then a thump. Many look at his body. A man tries to cut a rope to make a man fall to his death. 

A man is found “brutally mauled and dismembered.”. 

Another body is found, half-eaten. His face is in a silent scream while his chest is ripped open with the insides missing.  A hole in his head shows his brain missing. Blood is used to write on the wall. The skin from his face was ripped off. 

Many spar during a Test. One young woman hits a man so hard he falls with a crunch and is unconscious. 

Another body is found similar to the others. His tendons had also been cut with a knife to prevent him from running. 

A leader has 500 people (including children) killed. 

A large creature charges a young woman. She moves and it shakes the walls with the impact. It chases her and she impales it’s head, stinking black blood spraying her. It bit her hand then died. Her blood is dripping continuously on the floor. She’s close to passing out. She passes out as her body turns to ice but the wound burns like fire. 

**SPOILER** In a duel, a man punches another man, breaking his nose and blood sprays. A young woman and man fight and she breaks his nose, relishing the crunch beneath her knuckles. She fights another man. He dislocated her shoulder and injured her with his sword and fists many times. He kicks her across the room, breaking her ribs and hitting her head in the process. He slams her head into a wall of stone multiple times. She stabs him in the side, blood pours onto her hands. She slices both his arms and knocks him down, holding a sharp object to his neck. 

A man lunges to stab a young woman, a man stabs his sword into his heart, blood “erupted” over him. 

A man asks a young woman what it was like to wake up between her bloody, murdered parents when she was young. 

Potentially Intense Themes

A young woman frequently dreams of “drowning” in a pile of bodies and getting buried alive. 

Half-eaten remains of dogs are found. 

A young woman sees demons from another world come to attack her. A woman fights the demons. 

A spirit (?) from someone long dead, visits a young woman multiple times. 

**Any quotes from the book are taken from the advance copy and therefore may not be fully accurate or correctly compare to the final copy of the book.

**As an Amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases. 

2 Comments

  1. Don’t forget the absolutely worst assassin ever part, where she totally skipped over trials to talk about boys, like I really just wish she had written Cinderella instead of trying to add fantasy into the mix because to me the entire thing utterly failed 😂😂

  2. This is one of my favorite series. I love seeing how an author’s writing changes as a series progresses and I think you can see a huge difference in these.

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