Feyre Archeron has many talents: she can skin a wolf and track a deer, and in the words of an amorous fairy she looks “absolutely delicious”. An impoverished hunter gatherer, Archeron is the protagonist of Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses, or Acotar as it’s known to fans. This five-book series belongs to a genre called romantasy, so called because it blends romance and fantasy. And it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that it has the popularity of both combined. Acotar has sold more than 13m copies and all five books are in the top 10 bestselling fantasy titles of 2025 to date. If you haven’t heard of them, the chances are that you have seen someone reading one on the train, perhaps concealed beneath the dust jacket of something less salacious.
Most of romantasy’s readers are women aged 18 to 44, and part of the genre’s appeal is its reversal of gender roles. Archeron, for example, can’t read. But that’s only because poverty has forced her to focus her energy on hunting. Her illiteracy is therefore ironically a sign of strength. Maas’s men, meanwhile, may live in gorgeous palaces with well stocked libraries, but as the plots develop they come to depend on Archeron for their salvation.
