All sorcerers are evil. Elisabeth has known that as long as she has known anything. Raised as a foundling in one of Austermeer’s Great Libraries, Elisabeth has grown up among the tools of sorcery—magical grimoires that whisper on shelves and rattle beneath iron chains. If provoked, they transform into grotesque monsters of ink and leather. She hopes to become a warden, charged with protecting the kingdom from their power.
Then an act of sabotage releases the library’s most dangerous grimoire. Elisabeth’s desperate intervention implicates her in the crime, and she is torn from her home to face justice in the capital. With no one to turn to but her sworn enemy, the sorcerer Nathaniel Thorn, and his mysterious demonic servant, she finds herself entangled in a centuries-old conspiracy. Not only could the Great Libraries go up in flames, but the world along with them.
As her alliance with Nathaniel grows stronger, Elisabeth starts to question everything she’s been taught—about sorcerers, about the libraries she loves, even about herself. For Elisabeth has a power she has never guessed, and a future she could never have imagined.

Well, there has been a respectable amount of hype surrounding this book lately and I really expected something to renew my faith in YA fantasy, since I couldn’t satisfy myself with anything that wasn’t on a Cruel Prince level. When I think about it, the Sorcery of Thorns had a pretty promising beginning, but halfway through I was dying of boredom and really couldn’t see anything that could interest me as a reader further in this book. I don’t want to sound pathetic bbbbut this is my fourth 2-star book in a row and I’m kinda slumping so I want this curse of boring books to stop. Life is laughing in my face, please just give me a good book already.

So, what is this book about?
Elisabeth is an orphan and has spent her entire life in a huge library, raised among the grimoires and wishing to become a warden one day. She’s been taught to fear magic because it represents something evil, as well as all the sorcerers. After she meets Nathaniel, a young sorcerer from the capital, her life abruptly changes – a sudden murder of her Director and destruction of a grimoire of which she is accused of bringing her on a trial in the capital, where she will find more enemies than she could ever imagine.

While reading this book I really felt like it was just a bunch of YA fantasy tropes that were thrown there because it was expected from the genre. The plot was so boring and dull, the “mystery” that Elisabeth was trying to solve was actually unraveled in the third chapter and by the half of the book, I was practically begging for something to happen. At first, I thought it would be cool that the book is practically about books and all, but it was SO damn long, like 300 exhaustingly pages too long.

Elisabeth is a real ass Mary Sue – shy, good girl who loves books and always know how to do the right thing. I’m not exaggerating but she has no personality. She doesn’t possess any inner motives or any kinds of flaws or traits characteristic to a heroine – she just exists with that embedded sense of righteousness and does everything because it’s “the right thing to do”, not because she wants it or actually has any goal in her life. Oh, and let me not forget, our little Mary is also a chosen one, she’s actually some kind of booklice that can resist sorcery or something, I don’t know, but she’s the most boring character ever, in a nutshell.

Her love interest, aka no-personality-Maximilian(or Mathias I already forgot what his name was, but it doesn’t really matter because he’s also boring) okay I’m going to stop myself right here with this anti-Maximilian rant because I’m feeling like I’m not being fair. This guy (it’s Nathaniel btw I just looked it up) actually has a respectable amount of backstory and character development – his entire family is dead, his mother and brother died in an accident and his father two months after in a necromantic attempt to bring them back so now he’s stuck alone with a demon that took 20 years of life away from him. It wasn’t that bad, but I felt like the author desperately wanted us to feel sorry for him, and now he’s just annoying. Not to mention that there wasn’t much chemistry between him and Mary and I absolutely HATE this trope where sassy sarcastic bad boi forgets about his charisma the moment he meets a girl, like did you get a concussion to forget all your witty remark from chapter one??

My two brain cells are dead and this review is a mess, so I’m really sorry. I’m going to try a book that I’ll like so I can stop being so bitter and frustrated xd