The ACOTAR Series in Order

The first is where A Court of Frost and Starlight goes and whether it counts. The second is whether you need to read Maas's other series to understand the fifth book. Both are answered below, along with the two additional titles Maas has confirmed but not yet published.

The ACOTAR reading order

Published order is reading order. There is no alternate route worth taking:

1. A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015) — Feyre kills a wolf in the woods and is taken across the wall into Prythian. A Beauty and the Beast retelling, and the most conventional book in the series by a distance.
2. A Court of Mist and Fury (2016) — The book that changed everything — for Feyre, for the series and for the genre. Most readers who bounce off book one are told to push through to this one, and most of them are glad they did.
3. A Court of Wings and Ruin (2017) — War arrives. The largest cast, the biggest battles, and the resolution of the Feyre arc that began in book one.
4. A Court of Frost and Starlight (2018) — A short winter bridge rather than a full novel — low on plot, high on aftermath. Not skippable: it sets up the next book's central conflict and several of its relationships.
5. A Court of Silver Flames (2021) — Nesta Archeron takes over as protagonist. Longer, angrier and more interior than anything before it, and for a large slice of the readership it is the best of the five.

Maas has confirmed two further titles — A Court of Splintered Harmony and A Court of Forgotten Melody — scheduled for October 2026 and January 2027. Neither is published yet, so no reading order that lists them as available is describing the series as it currently exists.

Is A Court of Frost and Starlight skippable?

No, and the question comes up constantly because the book is short, quiet and mostly about people recovering from a war. Nothing dramatic happens. That is the point: it establishes where every character has landed, seeds the tension between two of them that drives the whole of A Court of Silver Flames, and sets up a plot thread that would otherwise arrive out of nowhere.

Treat it as a long epilogue with a job to do. It takes an evening.

Do you need to read Maas's other series?

Not to read ACOTAR itself. But there is a real crossover in the other direction: House of Flame and Shadow, the third Crescent City novel, intersects directly with this world. If you intend to read both, ACOTAR should come first — at minimum through A Court of Silver Flames — or that crossover lands as noise instead of as a payoff.

Throne of Glass is the other Maas series and remains independent of both. It can be started at any point.

Where ACOTAR fits in the romantasy boom

ACOTAR is the hinge. Before it, fae romance was a niche within paranormal romance; after it, the fantasy-romance crossover became a category with its own tables in bookshops. Almost every series marketed as romantasy since — The Empyrean, The Plated Prisoner, Powerless — is being read by people who arrived through this door.

If you want the older tradition the genre grew out of, the historical shelves are full of the same story engine: an outsider heroine, a dangerous male lead, and a court with rules she has to learn fast.