Review of Holly Black & Cassandra Clare's Magisterium: The Iron Trial
Release Date: September 9th, 2014
Synopsis as found on GoodReads.com:
Most kids would do anything to pass the Iron Trial.
Not Callum Hunt. He wants to fail.
All his life, Call has been warned by his father to stay away from magic. If he succeeds at the Iron Trial and is admitted into the Magisterium, he is sure it can only mean bad things for him.
So he tries his best to do his worst - and fails at failing.
Now the Magisterium awaits him. It's a place that's both sensational and sinister, with dark ties to his past and a twisty path to his future.
The Iron Trial is just the beginning, for the biggest test is still to come . . .
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Excerpts from The Iron Trial:
Fire wants to burn, water wants to flow, air wants to rise, earth wants to bind, chaos wants to devour.
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"I see through the masks of skin you wear," the Devoured continued. "I see your future. One of you will fail. One of you will die. And one of you is already dead."
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My friends and family know how much I love Cassandra Clare. I have been a fan of hers since the first Mortal Instruments book came out and have been a loyal follower of everything she does. I even drove one time to meet her at a small book store 3 hours away (Holly Black was also doing a signing there on the same night, so I met them both). I have also read most of Holly Black's books (Minus the Tithe series, because I am not a big fan of books about Faeries... the see the irony). With all that, I was still nervous to pick up this book. I waited until a friend told me to read it before I even thought about it. I loved the Harry Potter series and this book sounded a little too close to an American version of it.
The characters are different from any either of the authors have written about before. They are each flawed in different ways and that difference is what draws you into the story. Call has been raised thinking all magic is bad and has a limp from the debilitating break in his leg that happened in infancy. You definitely feel for him when he is being picked on and as the story progresses cheer for him when he does well. Tamara comes from a wealthy family of magic users who push her to do well. She has an older sister named Kimiya who also goes to the Magisterium, so she always has that person to look down on her when she isn't doing her best. Aaron has nothing. While he finished as number 1 in the Trial to be accepted into the Magisterium, he comes from a family of regular humans. That is as far as he knows they were human, seeing as how his mother is dead and his father left him when he was a child.
While the characters and general plot may be different than their previous work, there were quite a few scenes in the story where I saw similarities to Clare's previous work. The named blade that Call carries is similar to the Seraph blades that Shadowhunters carry in the Mortal Instruments series. There is a scene where the characters come in contact with a man who was once devoured by fire that brings to mind a scene from City of Bones where a witch with a Demon inside of her fights with the characters in that story. These are just 2 examples and though they might be small, they are noticeable.
I will say this, there is a twist in the story almost to the end. I didn't see it coming and it really made the whole book worth reading. I love when a story ends up being the opposite of what I thought.
Do not read this thinking about Harry Potter or the Mortal Instruments, because I don't want you to pick it apart like I did. I'm going to have to read it again just to love it as much as I was hoping to.
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