A Court of Thorns and Roses Themes

A Court of Thorns and Roses, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, is extremely focused on exploring both romantic and familial love—particularly the way it’s so often bound up in pain or cruelty. After 19-year-old Feyre unwittingly kills a faerie, she is taken from her father and two sisters in order to pay a debt by living with the High Fae lord Tamlin in Tamlin’s Spring Court. Feyre agrees to…

Many characters’ development over the course of A Court of Thorns and Roses pertains to their growing ability to have compassion and respect for all beings, no matter how different they are from oneself. The fantasy novel takes place in a land where faeries once ruled and enslaved humans. Five hundred years ago, the faeries and humans developed the Treaty, which separated the faerie realm Prythian from the mortal realm and forbade human slavery. Since…

A Court of Thorns and Roses is extremely concerned with art and beauty of all kinds, describing in detail everything from paintings and lavish furnishings to the conventionally (if inhumanly) attractive High Fae. On the whole, the novel suggests that an appreciation for beautiful things is something that all people possess, but that experiencing poverty or other hardship severely limits one’s ability to access or appreciate the world’s beauty. Feyre, for instance, became extremely…