Lord of Shadows

Lord of Shadows has been one of the most hotly anticipated Young Adult releases of 2017, since it was released in May it has been a very hot topic on book forums and BookTube and the reviews on this latest installment from Cassandra Clare have been rave with many hailing it her biggest success to date.

Now bearing in mind that at the release date of this book I literally had only read one of the Cassandra Clare books required leading up to this one, I have been marathoning all of them over the past few months leading up to the moment when I would delve into Lord of Shadows and have a chance to see if all the reviews indeed did the book justice or whether it was worthy of all the hype. I have been living through the eyes of all Clare's characters for the past few months and have come to love them and hold a special affection for many of them and so I really hoped this book would be as good as it hinted at being.

The first thing I was really pleased about in this book is that we are beginning to see the worlds of The Mortal Instruments, The Infernal Devices, and The Dark Artifices coming together. We have several of our favourite Shadowhunters and Downworlders featured in this book in various ways and this mixed with all the new characters we had introduced in Lady Midnight give us a real sense of being with friends. I am absolutely delighted to have Magnus and Alec back in this book as they have always been my favourite characters and they really made this book so much more engaging for me.

Secondly, as we did in Lady Midnight we get plenty of new additions to the story as well, my favourite being Kit Herrondale, the Lost Shadowhunter discovered at the end of Lady Midnight. His relationship with autistic Ty was one of the most beautiful friendships I've read about and I really liked him and his character arc in this book. I have a feeling there's lots more of his story we don't know about yet and I'm really keen to see where Clare takes this in the last installment of this series.

This is a hefty book at nearly 700 pages and so it took me a little bit to get through it but never did I find myself being frustrated with the story, it flowed really well and there was always lots going on to keep you engaged and hanging on for the next twist and turn. It is though a book that is clearly about setting us up for the showdown which is due to come in the next book in the series. The book has an almighty cliffhanger ending and a heartbreaking one at that. It was shocking and desperately sad and leaves us uncertain about what is to come. I can imagine with the excitement that people had for this books release we can only expect that to be increased for book 3 with the ending having so much tension and unanswered questions.

I didn't give this book 5 stars and that was only because if I had to compare it to Clockwork Princess or Clockwork Prince I'd still say those were my favourite of this series but I would put this as being of a much better calibre than many of The Mortal Instruments series, there is much more action packed within the pages and the stories seem to have become more encompasing of all the different facets of the Shadowhunter world which adds depth that some of the earlier books lack.