Book Review — The Infernal Devices Trilogy
By: Agastya Sharma
Tags: Cassandra Clare, Books, Opinion, Tid, Review

Continuing the tradition of the past few days, I’m back with another book review! Yay! No, it won’t affect viewership, Karl. Go back to your desk at marketing and shut up. Anyway, minor inconvenience. But the book I’m going to talk about is going to be a major inconvenience for your heart. Welcome to the Land of Sorrow. You’re not leaving.

The series I’m going to be talking about is The Infernal Devices, by Cassandra Clare again. This series precedes the Mortal Instruments series by about a century (I also wrote a review about that, please read it, Karl from marketing will have my head) and is basically the story of the ancestors of the characters we fell in love with previously.

We kick off with frightened little sixteen-year-old Theresa Gray getting off a steamboat on the ports of England, and getting picked up by one weird driver and two weirder sisters. She is carted into one dingy building, where she is tortured for a long, long while to use powers she never knew she had. The Dark Sisters, as we come to know them, work for someone we call the Magister, a person who wants to exploit Tessa’s powers for his own good.

The angelic race of Shadowhunters (yay) come to rescue Tessa, and the first person to find her is greeted with a nice floral jug to the hand. Thrown by Tessa herself. Amazing. They trash the building and escape to the London Institute, the safe haven of the Shadowhunters. There, Tessa meets Jessamine Lovelace, resident snobby idiot, Sophie Collins, resident really cool maid-in-waiting, James Carstairs, resident guy who’s going to die, Henry and Charlotte Branwell, the Institute heads, and William Herondale, Mr. Got Hit with a Jug. Your usual assortment of characters. And in the center of this whirlwind is Tessa, adjusting to the Council and the Clave, helping the Shadowhunters in their brave (read: foolhardy) quests to catch the Magister, and the feelings she can’t help but have about both James and Will, both who are also parabatai, brothers by pact. Nice work, lady.

She also must find her brother, Nate, who sent for her to come to England in the first place. While also battling the Magister (whoever that may be, wink wink) with the group of friends she’s made at the Institute. This is all happening while the Clave is not comfortable with having a warlock in the Shadowhunter sanctuary, because that’s what they think Tessa is.

The path she walks is wrought with betrayal and death, love and hope, and I know those are polar opposites, don’t shout at me, because that’s just how Cassandra writes. What goes through her mind while writing:

1) Take hearts of readers.

2) Mush it into pieces.

3) Return the aforementioned mushy heart into a cavity in the chests of readers in a way that they never feel it again.

4) Mission accomplished!

And to be completely honest, this series followed this rule list on loop. Just the way her sentences are phrased, or the way she precisely details characters and the way she cracks them like an egg is enough to make the toughest cry.

Another series from the Queen of Fantasy that makes her deserve the title just a lot more. Cassandra Clare is known for good books, and she literally never disappoints. I can’t say this enough, to be honest. The books are brilliant, the author is amazing, and (insert other example of alliteration in here ’cause I can’t think). One of the best series I’ve ever read.

Thank you for listening! I’m going to go now because I’ve been writing this for hours and the words are all like the readers’ hearts. Mushed-up. Do I need an optometrist? I don’t know. But that’s not your problem. See you soon!