Sarah Janet Maas – turning disaster into success

 A career triggered by calamities has proved super-successful for “romantasy” author Sarah Janet Maas. Her interest in  fantasy took off after the 9/11 attacks as she leant on her fascination for magical fairy tales and folklore to provide her with an escape from real life. Her first book, Throne of Glass, written when she was sixteen in 2002 is an alternate Cinderella in which the heroine is an assassin not a maid — attending the ball not to meet the prince, but to kill him.

  Her books span themes of authoritarianism, loss and grief, trauma, friendship and happily-ever-after epic romance and her teenage escapism has spawned a juggernaut literary empire in which she created her own JRR Tolkien-esque universe populated by sexually charged fairies. She has released more than a dozen books in the past 12 years giving a further boost to Bloomsbury, JK Rowling’s publisher.

  Where her sales exploded recently was with the pandemic as women readers were looking for escapist fiction and were introduced to her on Tik Tok and Instagram. Her recent release — House of Flame and Shadow — sold more than 360,000 copies in the US in its first week. To date Bloomsbury has sold more than 40mn copies of her books.

  She was born 5 March 1986 in New York and is a Sun in Pisces with Jupiter and Venus also in Pisces. With her Saturn, Mars, Uranus in Sagittarius in a variety of squares to her Pisces planets; plus a confident and successful Jupiter trine Pluto sextile Neptune.

  She sounds a notch above E.L. James with her sensationalist sleazy Fifty Shades of Grey though they both have Sun and Jupiter in creative, imaginative Pisces and have Venus Mars hard aspects which can create a robustly sexual approach. More blatant with EL James since she has Mars in Leo opposition Venus in Aquarius.  

  When 9/11 happened the transiting Saturn opposition Pluto was square Sarah Maas’s Pisces Sun and hitting on her Sagittarius planets giving her life an almighty jolt; with her Solar Arc Uranus Mars in a panicky, highly strung conjunction to her Neptune sending her off into fantasy land.

  When the pandemic struck in 2020 the transiting Saturn Pluto conjunction in Capricorn was conjunct her SA Mars Uranus; her SA Pluto was conjunct her Saturn and tr Uranus was opposition her Pluto.

  Difficult influences don’t always spell disaster.