Lord of Shadows by Cassandra Clare (2017)
It’s been only weeks since Emma killed Malcolm Fade, the high warlock of Los Angeles. While that should’ve been the end of Malcolm's game, it doesn’t look like it is. His body is still somewhere in the ocean, and it’s woken up sea demons throughout the coast. To try to combat this problem, the Ceturions arrive to the Los Angeles Institute, a highly skilled group of Shadowhunters. However, it seems that the Centurions have a different motive for being there, and that’s not the only thing that going on at the institute. Kit, who just discovered he was a Shadowhunter, is not settling in well is dragging Ty down with him. At the same time, Julian is trying to deal with the complications of his parabitai bond with Emma and Mark’s faerie past is catching up with him. The problems are adding up, and soon the structure of the Los Angeles Institute is going to collapse.
Lord of Shadows is a seriously daunting book. It’s about 700 pages long and the audiobook is 24 hours long. That’s the length of a whole day. Finally, I bucked up to buy the book, which was the first step. Then, I rented the audiobook from the library and both read and listened to it for two week. And let me tell you, Cassandra Clare never fails with writing good stories. After finishing, I think Lord of Shadows is her most progressive book to date.
First of all, let me talk about the characters, which were extremely diverse. Compared to her first book, City of Bones, that had almost no characters of color, this book definitely met the mark. A huge part of that was due to the Centurions being part of the book. The Centurions are a group made up of Shadowhunters from all over the world, so there were characters from many different countries and cultures. This book also explored the character of Ty, who has autism. I don’t have autism so I can’t speak for how accurate the portrayal was, but I did like Clare portrayed him as a super strong individual and as someone that deserves respect.
Dude, there’s about five million love triangles/terrible romance things that happen throughout this book and it got pretty overwhelming. I’ll talk about my favorite triangle first, which was between Mark, Cristina, and Kieran. I loved the bisexual representation that was happening with Mark, and I loved that even though this triangle was pretty complicated, Kieran and Cristina never held it against Mark for being bisexual or liking two people of different gender identities at once. Other than that, there was a pretty weird triangle between Kit, Livvy, and Ty that felt forced. Cristina was also in another triangle with Zara (the worst person ever) and Diego.
Then, of course, there was the whole fiasco with Julian and Emma that was going on. *Sigh*. I know, like, they’ll die and stuff if they get together but I would really like them too. Still, Emma and Julian’s problems, along with all the other triangles, felt like way too much too be packed into one book, even though it was super long.
I have some very complicated feelings on the plot. I mean, in 700 pages a lot happened. Something I really liked was the exploration of the Downworld. In previous books, it’s alluded that all the Downworlders have different societies, but this is the first book when one is actually explained and delved into. However, there was a lot of dead plot space that didn’t need to be in the book. I think the page count could’ve easily dropped down to 600 pages.
Then there was the ending. The ending killed me and was probably one of the most suspenseful endings of a book I’ve ever read. Overall, I really enjoyed Lord of Shadows and am looking forward to finishing this trilogy at the end of 2018.4 Stars
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