On a Saturday afternoon in mid-October, the Community Room of the West Des Moines Public Library will fill with people who have strong opinions about a winged faerie lord named Rhysand. There will be trivia. There will be a photo booth. There will be non-alcoholic cocktails and a craft involving faux stained glass. And there will be, if the organizers have read their audience correctly, a great deal of squealing.
The event is called "A Court of Books and Bat Boys: A Party Celebrating Sarah J. Maas and All Things ACOTAR," and it runs from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 17, 2026, at the library at 4000 Mills Civic Parkway. It is free, it is aimed at adults, and it is the kind of programming that would have been unthinkable in a suburban library a decade ago. Registration opens at 9 a.m. on October 1, and the library is explicit that spots are limited — a warning that, given the fandom in question, is probably not boilerplate.
The title itself is a piece of insider shorthand. "ACOTAR" is the acronym fans use for A Court of Thorns and Roses, Maas's fantasy-romance saga about Feyre Archeron, a mortal huntress who kills a wolf in the woods and finds herself dragged into the faerie realm of Prythian as payment. The "Bat Boys" are the series' three Illyrian warriors of the Night Court — Rhysand, Cassian, and Azriel — winged, brooding, and the subject of an enormous volume of fan art, fan fiction, and merchandise. A library that puts "Bat Boys" in the title of a public event is signaling, unmistakably, that it knows exactly who its readers are.
The timing is not accidental. The party is built around a "series recap — to get ready for the new book," and the new book is a genuine event in publishing. In March 2026, Maas announced on the "Call Her Daddy" podcast that the sixth and seventh ACOTAR installments were coming, with the sixth scheduled for October 27, 2026, and the seventh for January 12, 2027. On August 17, 2026, she revealed the titles: A Court of Splintered Harmony and A Court of Forgotten Melody. That puts the West Des Moines gathering ten days before the release of the first new ACOTAR novel since 2021 — a five-year gap that has left readers primed to refresh their memories of who betrayed whom, and which court is which.
That gap has been felt well beyond fandom. Bloomsbury, Maas's publisher, reported that its sales fell 10 percent in the 2025–2026 fiscal year, a decline the trade press attributed largely to the absence of a new Maas book. Few living authors can move a publicly traded company's revenue line by taking a year off; Maas is one of them. Across her three series — Throne of Glass, Crescent City, and ACOTAR — she has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, and the ACOTAR series alone has been a fixture on the New York Times bestseller list since the first volume appeared in May 2015.
The series has also been a defining engine of the "romantasy" boom and the #BookTok ecosystem that drove it. The blend of high fantasy worldbuilding with explicit romance found a vast readership among young women, and the platform's recommendation algorithm turned backlist titles into perennial sellers years after publication. Publishers took note; a wave of similar series followed. The genre's commercial gravity is now such that a library's decision to throw a themed party for it is less a novelty than a recognition of where its patrons actually are.
There is one more piece of ACOTAR lore worth knowing, and it explains why a library might feel comfortable going all-in: the series was optioned for television by Hulu back in 2021, with Ronald D. Moore — of Battlestar Galactica and Outlander fame — attached. As of 2026, that adaptation has still not reached screens, a delay that has become its own running joke among fans. The library's event listing includes a gentle disclaimer that "Sarah J. Maas will not be in attendance," which is the sort of note that suggests the organizers have fielded that question before.
What the afternoon actually offers is a fairly charming inventory of fandom ritual: a trivia contest, the recap session, themed drinks and snacks, the "Fae Photo Booth," and the faux stained glass craft — the last of which nods to the stained-glass aesthetic that recurs in the series' imagery. It is a party designed by people who have read the books, for people who have read the books, in a room that on most Saturdays hosts storytime and technology help sessions.
That juxtaposition is the real story here. Public libraries have spent the past several years rebuilding their adult programming around the idea that grown-ups want to gather over the things they love, not just the things they ought to read. Book clubs, craft nights, and fandom events have become a standard part of the calendar. But a suburban Iowa library throwing a two-hour, registration-capped celebration of faerie romance — complete with a photo booth and mocktails — is a small, specific marker of how thoroughly the romantasy wave has moved from the internet into civic life. The bat boys, it turns out, have made it to Mills Civic Parkway.