Lady Midnight (Dark Artifices, #1)

by Cassandra Clare

[justine_manzano]

There's something about getting awfully sick that makes me read books at the speed of light. It's probably that I don't actually have time or energy to do anything but read. All I know is I don't generally read a 500 page book in 3 days.

The story didn't hurt though. I am a pretty vocal critic of Cassandra Clare's work and brutally hated Jace and Clary in The Mortal Instruments, but I fell for the supporting characters. This series is different. I fell hard for pretty much every character in this book, and the forbidden love angle was much less cringe-worthy and awful than the Luke/Leia dynamic of Jace/Clary. Forbidden to love each other by their government because of their bond as parabatai (closer than family, warriors who live and die for each other), Emma and Julian are very sympathetic characters. Emma can be reckless, but it is her drive for revenge for the death of her parents that makes her that way, not the arrogant bravado of Jace. Julian is easy to fall for, his love for his family and his need to keep his younger siblings together had him caring for children at the age of twelve.

Not only were the main characters easy to fall for, but I truly loved and cared for the large cast of family and friends living in the Institute. The story was interesting, but really, the characters won the day here, as I found them as interesting when fighting baddies as I did when eating breakfast together.

Still, Clare's stories often suffer from her offbeat preferences and here we go again. Her warlock, in the beginning, is strangely reminiscent of Magnus in the original trilogy, although he doesn't remain that way throughout. Clare feels the need to shoehorn as many mentions of her other characters into the book as possible, and it reads as pretty lame and repetitive much of the time, as if she needs to make sure she reminds us who Jace is from Emma, Julian, and Mark's points of view. She has more relatives hooking up, although they are distant cousins, but this habit is a little disturbing. And she seems to make all of her M/M ships feel highly sexualized without ever showing much at all of her one F/F ship, which makes me feel like she really enjoys fetishizing gay male relationships. Also, I guessed at the bad guy far earlier in the book, and a truly obvious clue was waved in front of the character's faces in a way that made the characters seem foolish for not figuring it out sooner.

Despite those suspicions and few annoyances, Clare's Shadowhunter world is an immersive one and I always find myself drawn in pretty easily. I just hope she manages to shed some of her odder tendencies in the future books of this trilogy (I always wish this, it never happens).