Overall: 3/5
Plots and Themes: 3/5
Characters: 3/5
Writing Style: 3/5
Attention Grabbing: 2/5
Chain of Thorns is the third and final book in the Last Hours, covering too many characters to list out succinctly. It's the children of the characters in the Infernal Devices, and as their children they're just obligated to get into twice as much trouble. We have demons, we have necromancy, and we have a lot of unlawfulness in a society where the law is hard but it's the law.
Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed with this book as a finale. At this point in her career, Cassandra Clare isn't just ending a trilogy summarizing 3-4 years of work, she's ending a trilogy that closes a chapter for our favorite characters from TID and leads into the drama that is TMI, TDA, and ultimately TWP. But it was a major let down. If we put all the continuity issues aside- because I will cut her some slack that it's been like 15+ years since TMI and we're living in a very different world than how it was then- the pacing of the series beyond book one has just been way off. I loved book one, I thought it was one of her best ever because it balanced the sort of plot-heavy vibes of TDA with the sedate yet action-packed rhythm of TDA. But she couldn't hold it together, she started threading in all sorts of things that just felt like they weren't really as relevant to the plot as they should have been. She couldn't mess with the TID parents because she had already written the Clockwork Princess epilogue and guaranteed their survival so she couldn't figure out how to write well-rounded characters where their parents were loving and supporting - since she also couldn't traumatize them by making their parents mean because it would destroy the integrity of TMI. And it felt like she realized with 50 pages left that she had about a million loose plot threads and so she decided to slam them all shut as quickly as she could with just about zero exposition or closure. I liked how we dealt with some of the characters trauma, but I think she committed to so many separate plots that she wasn't really able to do any of them justice.
To get to the spoilers: she should not have killed Kit. It was cheap and it was lazy. She paired off all the other characters (aside from Matthew, Charles, and Grace) and decided Kit was the one who could die. And the fact that there was absolutely no reaction, that everyone was more upset about Matthew and James being in Edom, was pretty cruel. And we didn't get to see the reactions of his parents, she could have easily banked a few points by giving us some heartfelt mourning especially since most people reading have already bonded with the parents and the aunts and uncles. But no, she used him as a throwaway character. And she let James and Lucie get away with everything way too easily. James in the treating Cordelia poorly for the past two books and Lucie in the committing literal crimes but not even having to testify. Cassandra Clare just decided you know what, I'm going to make him Jesse again and the notoriously brutally lawful shadowhunter society will just deal with it. It honestly was inconsiderate to us as readers who spent years trying to figure out how this series would end (and I mean literal years my friend and I have been tossing theories back and forth since we were in middle school ten years ago) to try and just sweep everything under the rug at the last second. And the absolute cherry on top was James and Lucie losing their powers, which makes no sense to me and is also another cheap tactic. Like, we know that Tessa retains her powers through TDA so how do her kids lose that of which is threaded into their genetic composition when Tessa doesn't? Her father should've just stayed a faceless eidolon demon.
This isn't really a review anymore more of just a rant, but I felt a little wronged as a reader. There were still good parts, I don't regret reading the series or staying up-to-date with it, but I think that Cassandra Clare should put in a bit more if she wants people to stick with something that has gotten as lengthy as the shadowhunter universe has. Sad that we're closing the story but happy to have seen more into their lives and into the lives of the TID characters (barely).
No comments:
Post a Comment