The best sex scenes you'll ever read

And a story to keep you up all night and off your phone: ACOTAR

I am not the same person who wrote the last piece you read on this Substack. No. I am now a member of a cult. I am an ACOTAR girlie. A full-blown, head-over-heels, don't-care-who-knows-it, devout follower of writer Sarah J Maas's epic fantasy fiction with faeries and magic and curses and winged creatures and love triangles and beautiful immortal men with 'considerable length' (among other impressive characteristics). All jokes aside, I have genuinely fallen hook, line and sinker for the series - starting with A Court of Thorns and Roses - which has been enjoying a resurgence on TikTok despite being quite a few years old. Which I'm not on, so by the time I got to it, I was very late to the party. 

I came across it when googling lists of the best erotic novels to read because - how else to say this - I greatly appreciate well-written sex scenes (and ones that aren't very well written either TBF). I was put off by the idea of something that asked so much of me. There are 5 books in this series, which apparently is just a gateway drug to the rest of her writing, with a series spanning 8 books and more. But one day, fed up reading books about separation anxiety to help my son (there are so few, and when you look up anything on this subject, you'll be mostly met with books about dogs' separation anxiety), I decided it was high time I read something that was just for me. Something that wasn't homework or self-improvement. And ideally something a bit, well, 'fluttery'. 

It's hard to write about why I'm horsing these books into me faster than a box of Pringles without giving spoilers - and you can google the premise which will write it better than I can - but these books deserve much more credit than being considered mere 'faerie porn'. The story - I believe - is as good as Game of Thrones (if not better because there's no incest), better than The Hunger Games and makes Twilight look like something you'd write in a high school essay. It has elements of all the series you already know and love, with the first book bringing the Beauty and the Beast energy. There's also a bit of Buffy in the mix, but thankfully no vampires because vampires are so 2008. I took to Instagram to share that I’d found it slow to start but now that I was halfway through, my loins were most certainly loining (I have to keep up with the internet speak). I was then inundated with messages from those who've taken this path before me saying, 'just wait until book two.' A Court of Mist and Fury. I read book two like it was the source of my oxygen, at which point my husband knew he'd lost me. Gone. Adios. Buh-bye.