“Ah,” said a voice from the doorway, “having your annual ‘everyone thinks Will is a lunatic’ meeting, are you?
“It’s biannual,” said Jem. “And no, this is not that meeting.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
I’ll start this review much like Kat did for her review for City of Glass. In Clockwork Prince; Jem is kind, Will is a jerk, Tessa is confused, the plot fades in and out of the background letting the various love triangles, squares and polygons shine. Oh and as per Cassie Clare style the characters keep cutting each other off when they are about to say something im—
Counting this I’ve read 5 Clare novels and I am familiar with her writing style and generally got what I expected writing wise. At times it was filled with tension, mystery a bit of whimsy and a bit of steaminess; while other times I wondered how many ways she could describe Will’s eyes.
Keep in mind this is probably a good book, but it just isn’t the type of book for me, I say this because people LOVE this book.
Clockwork Prince was more like a backstory novel, it’s like the Half-blood Prince of this series; we get background on the villian, and then everything else is relationshippy. Also, HPB is the sixth book in the Potter series, this is the sixth book in the Shadhowhunter series, they both have a prince in the title. I’m just saying . . .
The novel just didn’t really carry on the plot from the first book. Instead, it created so many new tiny threads of plots that I had a hard time keeping up with. Seriously, the Lightwoods need their own book with all their family drama.
I feel like this series would be better if each book was its own story, it feels like there wasn’t enough material and a lot of the stuff was filler.
One of the improvements I’ve noticed in the book is that Clare finally gives her characters motivation, granted they all generally have different versions of the same motivations, it still made the characters feel more defined. . . well except for Tessa, for some reason she just seems like a blank slate to me.
As a sequel, I felt this book didn’t really tie together and now that I think about it I can’t believe it actually ended the way it did, it was like a deux ex machina.
Like any Shadowhunter (Is there a name for all 9 books ?) reader I appreciated the generous appearances of Magnus Bane and the little shouts outs to the Mortal Instruments.
1/2 of the blogging duo at Books and Sensibility, I have been blogging about and reviewing books since 2011. I read any and every genre, here on the blog I mostly review Fantasy, Adult Fiction, and Young Adult with a focus on audiobooks.