Lord of Shadows *spoiler-free*

Rating: 2/5 stars // Published: 2017

If you’re looking for a glowing review, this is not it. I actually enjoyed Lady Midnight more. I’ll be reading Queen of Air and Darkness because I’m just trying to find reasons for the hype here. I’m baffled. But I’m going to keep going because I have really enjoyed some of Cassandra Clare’s other books, so I’ve not *completely* lost faith yet. A spoilery review will be coming for those of you who have read this book and may be looking for more detailed explanations, which is understandable.

Ok so usually when I write my reviews I just start writing and see where it takes me. But for this book, man I have so many thoughts on this that I actually ended up making a likes and dislikes list and the dislikes list turned out to be extremely long, and I realised like with Lady Midnight, I’d need to split this up into spoiler-free and spoilery. If anything to make these reviews shorter so I don’t overwhelm your eyeballs.

Let’s start with the likes just to explain my two stars because a lot of you may be wondering why it’s one star since I seem to have such a negative response to this book.

I actually did not intend to read this book. It was available on OverDrive so I thought I might as well give it a shot and see how it goes but I doubted I’d get through the first few chapters. Throughout the book, sometimes there was only a single thing keeping me reading. A SINGLE thing.

And that is something that Clary told Emma in the beginning of the book, that concerned some dark things. I was just really, really annoyed when I read that. Because Clare is basically using these old characters, to make this book more interesting, because she assumes a lot of the readers love them (which is true, myself included). But the fact that she doesn’t even return to it in this book really ANNOYED (to say the least, since I don’t want to succumb to bad language on this blog) me.

I loved Magnus’s appearance, he’s always been one of my favourite characters – his personality is just warlock goals. Honestly, I felt like all the characters that made an appearance from previous books, including Jessamine, just made the book so much better, which exposes, really, how bad I found this book. Because these are supposed to be just little interesting things added into an already good book. But no, they made the book so much better because in my opinion, the book wasn’t that great to begin with.

I like Ty. I find him a likeable character, I like how Clare strives to add as much diversity to this book as possible. However, after a while there were just too many scenes with him and Kit and Livvy and it was just boring and I was bored. So yes, he’s likeable, I don’t not like him, but I think he’s boring. The autistic side of him had already been explored in the first book, and the only new thing is Kit just put a name to it.

This ties into the boring POVs. I’m not going to go too into this in my spoiler-free review, but there were just so many POVs I did not care about. This also ties into how overambitious Clare was with this book, and how she’s attempted to put in loads of different characters and plot-lines, presumably to make the book more gripping, and honestly, the fact that I had to really scavenge through Goodreads to find a negative review on this book that at least somewhat agreed with my views, shows that although she may not have appealed to me in this sense, she appealed to a bunnch of other people. Which is great, and I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way or anything but genuinely, if you loved this book, good for you, because it’s 700 freaking pages long – so 700 pages of enjoyment!

I feel like Clare was going for quantity over quality here. Sure, loads of characters, loads of plot-lines, loads of things happening (which I will discuss in more detail in my spoilery review) but… honestly I just felt it wasn’t up to that quality that I’ve seen in Clare’s previous works. A lot of things felt rushed over and were left underdeveloped, which left this book with a sort of… not that great of a feeling.

Also, the romance. *deep breath* I generally do not like romance. I skip the romance whenever it turns physical. But all these love triangles and everyone falling in love with each other was just ridiculous to me, and I was actually surprised about how much Clare stretched this, and just throwing people around with each other in as many ways as possible. I will go into this more in my spoilery review.

Because my points were tying in with each other, I forgot to mention something very important – and that was the slowness = boringness of this book. I was just really bored a lot of the time. I think this book is way too long and things were way too stretched, and that this book could be so much better if it was just packed into an epic book of 300 pages. There were just so many unnecessary bits like Emma and Julian just having toast and arguing over cleaning. The things that actually really interested me: the Clary and Jace thing, and the Unseelie King, were just brushed over.

Also, the ending. What was that?! I obviously can’t say much because it’s spoilery, but I was not impressed with the ending. There was a lot of action and things Clare tossed in for shock factors, but not much meaning or depth to it. I was left rather disappointed and kind of just waiting for something else to happen that never did??

The story just felt kind of unoriginal as well. I feel like Julian = Clary and Emma = Jace. More on that in my spoilery review! As well as that, I just want to add something with the parabatai bond… since it’s deeper than marriage, and has such a strong impact on the two people’s lives, why were they allowed to have this bond when they were just twelve years old?!!

So these are my spoiler-free thoughts on this. WOW that was long and I’m kind of drained after writing all that. Please understand I am in no way saying that this is a terrible, atrocious book and am demanding why anyone in the universe can like it – I completely understand and respect how we all have differing opinions, and these are mine!