A review by eesh25
The Bronze Key by Holly Black, Cassandra Clare

4.0

I'd heard this book screwed with your emotions and made a big change in the series. Now I get why that was said. Because it's gonna take me forever to believe that what happened actually happened. Just... Oh my God...

In the last book, we saw that Aaron, Tamara and Jasper found out about Call being The Enemy and accepted it. Call's relationship with his dad was fixed and Call beheaded Constantine body (him taking the head out of the bag was the best scene in the entire series!) and everyone thought Constantine was dead. Call also got Chaos magic. Things were good, except for Master Joseph getting away with the Alkahest.

This book starts off just a few days before the Bronze year is to begin and Call, Aaron, Tamara, Jasper and Alastair are being honoured for killing the Enemy. Things don't got as planned at the ceremony and we find out someone's trying to kill Call. And that's all I'm saying.

The book follows the mystery behind who is trying to kill Call and why. Our three protagonists are trying to solve the mystery while also keeping Call's real identity a secret and dealing with problems from their teachers and the other student mages. While Jasper is being is usual useless self, whose only contribution is snark and unhelpful tips.

I loved the story and how fast paced the book was. Things picked up really quickly and continued that way. The book was also very funny and endlessly entertaining.

The wannabe-Makar-killer was someone I didn't expect. I figured it out like two pages before Call did and when I did, my reaction was:



I'm not ready to accept that it was that person (no, I'm not even revealing the gender). After that, more shit went down that I'm also not ready to accept. Basically, this book is gonna take a while, probably until I read the next one.

The only things that bothered me was the writing in some parts. The last two books flowed really well, but with this one, it seemed as if the authors were struggling a little. This could be considered the bridge book and they seemed to have a hard time with that.

Some important scenes weren't well written and the one that really upset me was the second last chapter. It was one of the most important chapters in the series and it wasn't done well. It was a little clumsy and didn't deliver as big an emotional punch as it should have. It kinda soured the experience.

But I'm hoping that, since the bridging part is over, things will become great again.

Overall, this was still a good installment (The Iron Trial remains my favourite) and it has me freaking out because, as usual, I've got no clue what's gonna happen next.