Tuesday, October 1, 2024

A House of Sky and Breath (Sarah J. Maas)

Five years ago I reported on the frequency of throat bobs in Sarah J. Maas's books. She has since published four more books.  I've read three of them and am happy to share an updated chart of the progression of throat bobs across Maas's ouevre.  The steady rate since page 4800 has continued, with a few runs here and there during especially emotional moments.

One major change is the number of unnamed characters whose throats bob.  For the first 7000 pages or so, only named characters throats bobbed, and now four unnamed characters' throats have bobbed in the last 2000+ pages (though I suspect that the unnamed alpha mystic will get a name in House of Flame and Shadow).

  




House of Sky and Breath boasts the third-most throat bobs among the novels:


... and Bryce is now tied with Aelin as the queen of throat bobbing, with a whole book to take first place.




2 comments:

  1. Alex, this is hilarious! And it reminds me of somebody somewhere analyzing Ken Follett's books over characters who bite their fists over some surprising development. I think he had a litany of them.

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    1. That's awesome! I've been thinking about expanding the analysis to counting every time someone puts their hands in the pockets or their manner of speech is described as a drawl, but will want to be certain of everything I want to count before getting the ebooks out of the library and running searches. :-)

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