A review by naomi_andino
The Dark Artifices, the Complete Collection: Lady Midnight; Lord of Shadows; Queen of Air and Darkness by Cassandra Clare

2.0

Sometimes while reading Clare’s books I remember back in English class when my teachers would cross out sentences or even multiple paragraphs from my essays because they were unnecessary. There are so many chapters that don’t add anything to the story. Plus 60% of the books are just small talk. :(

Why was Emma so upset about Julian eating lettuce? Why is this even relevant to the story?

Characters
Livia and Octavian being nicknamed Livvy and Tavvy just bothered me so much, why not just one v? It was such an My NaMe IsN’t LiKe OtHeR nAmEs type of vibe.

The fact that they kept calling Diego perfect Diego made me want to barf.
Regarding the Spanish: I let this slide with Raphael because I love him. But I can’t do that anymore with this series. I’m not really sure how to explain but as someone who is bilingual, we can tell when bilingual characters are written by non-bilingual people.

Also, Regarding Raphael, HE WAS MY FAVORITE CHARACTER IN TMI SO
Spoiler when they brought him back in that alternate universe, HE WAS NOT HIMSELF, like, Cassandra straight up forgot what his character was like and just invented some other personality


THE CONSTANT MENTION OF THE WORD PARABATAI. I GET IT. EMMA AND JULIAN. CLARY AND SIMON. JACE AND ALEC. JEM AND WILL I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW ALREADY.

Kit: I love Kit. He should have just stayed human.

Parabatais: A Forbidden Love Story had so much potential but ughhhhhh Emma and Julian are just UGH!!! Barf.

THE BOOKS
Lady Midnight: It was a good start to the trilogy, I’m pretty sure I gave it a good rating. It had a murder mystery and I though the whole finding bodies in ley lines thing pretty clever. But that’s it. As soon as I started reading Lord of Shadows I started losing interest. The story lines from TMI and TID just keep on repeating over and over and over again. CC’s literally just milking this cow as much as she can. Queen if Air and Darkness was a complete train wreck :(

Is Cassandra Clare losing her touch and just trying to profit off this once-amazing saga? Probably. Will I continue reading her books? Yeah, I love ranting about them :)