Lord of Shadows Booktalk

Okay, so as I’m writing this, I literally just finished reading Lord of Shadows by Cassandra Clare. My eyes are still raw from tears, that’s how recent it was. And it. Was. Amazing.

Before we go any further, I’m just going to say that this post is going to be full of spoilers. So if you haven’t read The Mortal Instruments, The Infernal Devices, and The Dark Artifices all the way through (and that includes Lord of Shadows) then DO NOT READ THIS POST! I’m warning you, I really am. I’m not even going to put a disclaimer before spoilers. It’s just going to be me venting about stuff that happened in this book, so beware. I shall not be held accountable if you get spoiled, because I warned you. Got it? Good.

So. This book. What can I really say, except that it was so beautiful that there isn’t a word to describe it. It was so, so good. I think that the plot for the entire TDA series is just a work of art. So far, there are three series’ in the Shadowhunter world. So far, we know that there will be two more (The Last Hours and The Wicked Powers; more on that later) Just the fact that an author can spend so much time writing about one world and keep coming up with plots that are even greater than the last astounds me. It’s insane, and that is why Cassandra Clare is truly in my top two favorite authors. But let’s start talking about LOS.

I can finally understand why people describe books as a “rollercoaster of emotions” because this book is it if there ever was one. I’m going to try to go through the book’s events in chronological order, but forgive me if I mess up because I’m really excited to talk about this book.

So the book opens up at Kit’s point of view, and this is really one of my favorite scenes in the book because he’s having a heart-to-heart with Jace about Kit finding out that he’s the lost Herondale and what it means to be a Herondale. I love that Jace is trying to reach out to Kit and let him know that he’s there for him. Later in the book, we find out that Jace really wanted Kit to like him, and I love that he wants Kit to know that he isn’t alone.

Then we have Emma, Julian, Mark, and Christina at the pier hunting a Teuthida demon, which is essentially a squid. My favorite part of this scene is when Mark wins a goldfish and gives it to Emma. Mark pretending to be Emma’s boyfriend is so funny to me because he’d been with the Wild Hunt for about five years, so he’s still easing his way back into the human world. He’s trying so hard to make it believable, and it’s kind of endearing. More on Emma and Mark’s relationship, I was just really ready for it to be over. I understand the motivation behind it, but it was so agonizing to watch Julian be in pain over it.

Oh, ALSO, we finally found out what Mark meant when he said: “Why lie?” The question that has been killing us since Lady Midnight has finally been answered! After Lady Midnight, people were speculating over whether it meant “Explain to me why we’re lying,” or “Why lie when we can try to date for real?” Personally, I always knew that it was the second option because it just seems to anticlimactic to have the literal last line of Lady Midnight just be a simple question.

This may be skipping ahead, but I want to talk about the blights that the Shadowhunter world is experiencing. When Emma, Julian, Mark, and Christina go to Faerie, neither their Runes or Seraph blades work. In Alicante, Diana finds one of these as well, and we later find out that it’s the Unseelie King’s doing. Also later, one of the Riders of Mannan, maybe Ethna, is insulting the Shadowhunters and talking about how they would be nothing without their Runes and Seraph blades, which is actually kind of true. So the only explanation for the blights is that the Unseelie King wants to take away their power in any upcoming war. Another big ally that the Shadowhunters have are warlocks, and they’ve been getting sick and unable to perform magic, therefore getting rid of most options that Shadowhunters would have to defend themselves.

Onto Malcolm's return. I knew—I knew that something was fishy (no pun intended) about how Malcolm died in Lady Midnight. In Lord of Shadows, we’ve got all these sea demons popping up. And how did Malcolm die? He was stabbed and sucked into the ocean.

You shouldn’t just assume that he’s dead. He’s a powerful warlock messing around with dark magic, of course he’s not dead.

I have something pressing to talk about, and it concerns how Annabel was reawakened. We know that Arthur Blackthorn sacrificed himself to Malcolm so that the rest of his family wouldn’t be hurt, and that’s how Annabel got completely awakened. But we also know that after Malcolm killed Emma’s parents, her mind was awoken, but her body wasn’t. Then, in Lady Midnight’s epilogue, we see Annabel in her coffin, and water and blood seep through. She then opens her eyes. I looked it up online, and I even checked the book, that blood is Malcolm’s blood. The necromancy ritual requires Blackthorn blood, so it doesn’t make sense that Malcolm’s blood would have awakened her a little more.

The only explanations to this, in my opinion, is that A) since he’s a warlock, his blood had enough magic to awaken her some more, or B) since Malcolm was taken in by the Blackthorns when he was a kid, that kind of makes him a Blackthorn by association. I don’t know, that’s just been bothering me since Lady Midnight and I finally got a half-answer.

So this is pointed out in the book, but Malcolm’s feelings for Annabel are similar to Julian’s feelings for Emma. Malcolm and Annabel have known each other since they were little children, as have Emma and Julian. At the time, Malcolm and Annabel’s relationship was forbidden, and Julian and Emma’s is as well. So, I can’t help but wonder…

We know that there’s a way to sever their parabatai bond, but doing so would break every parabatai bond in the world and make it cease to exist. That’s totally insane, and Emma acknowledges that. She convinces that there’s no way that they should ever do that. But then again, Malcolm bringing Annabel back from the freaking dead is pretty extreme too, so what if Julian becomes desperate enough that he goes through with it? He has become pretty intense. I will provide a list.

• He has kept Arthur in an attic for years so no one would find out that he was mad.
• If he had to choose between saving Arthur and saving the kids, he immediately responds that he would save the kids, with no regard for his uncle at all.
• He suggests to Emma that there are ways to hurt Diego without touching him.

I love Julian, don’t get me wrong. But he’s really become kind of crazy. I’m thinking it has something to do with the parabatai curse, but it could be due to the fact that he was put in a difficult situation at such a young age.

Aaaanyway, I got a little sidetracked. Onto the Centurions. This section can be summed up in three words: I dislike them. Especially when we meet Zara Fricking Dearborn. Everything that comes out of her mouth is just so astounding. You never think you’ll meet someone that ignorant, but then you read about her, and you do. Not all the Centurions are bad, but most of them are pretentious little trash bags, and I dislike them a lot.

An example: “It would be incredibly useful if, while we were gone during the day, you did our laundry. Ocean water does ruin clothes quickly, don’t you find?”

You see what I’m saying, right?

Okay, so Clary and Jace appear in this book quite a bit, and it’s really nice. In Lady Midnight, we rarely saw them, but in this book, they stuck around for quite a few chapters. It’s kind of weird how the younger characters see Clary as a mom now. There are a few lines in the book where her gestures towards them are perceived as motherly, and it’s strange, but it’s also really great.

I also want to talk about Jace’s proposal a little. At the end of Lady Midnight, Jace proposed to Clary, but we didn’t get an answer. In fact, Clary said she was dreading having to answer. This got the fandom in an uproar, and I don’t understand why. Clary and Jace obviously love each other. You don’t go through that much crap together and just have that love dissolve. Being in love does not mean that you have to get married. She has her reasons, which we find out in Lord of Shadows, but I really hate all the assumptions that Clace is going to break up. No. Getting married doesn’t gauge the amount of love one person has for another. They love each other more than life itself, the chance of them splitting up is very low.

We do later find out that she is having recurring dreams that are leaving her worried that she will die soon. She feels that being married to Jace would only make him feel even more pain if she were to die, so that is why she rejects him. That’s cool too! Like I said, she has her reasons, she can do whatever she wants.

So, let’s move on. Later in the book, the younger and lesser known Blackthorn, Dru, get’s transported into Faerie by a magical artifact, where she meets a fae boy her age with WHITE BLOND HAIR AND BRIGHT GREEN EYES.

Seem suspicious? That’s because it is. Now, I don’t know how many people were aware of Sebastian and the Seelie Queen, you know, doing it, but Jace and Clary certainly didn’t know. So what if this mystery boy is the son of Sebastian and the Queen? The chances are real high. I mean, white blond hair, half-faerie, green eyes? You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence. You just can’t. I know that Sebastian’s eyes were black because of the demon blood in him, but his mother had green eyes, and if I’m recalling correctly, in his last moments he appeared to have green eyes, so there’s that. But you cannot tell me that this dude is not the offspring of Sebastian and the Seelie Queen. You just can’t.

A problem in this that does arise though is that the fae boy appears to be thirteen when Dru sees him. In the logical human timeline, the boy would only be five years old, at the most. But as we know, Faerie time can be confusing, and no one really knows how it works so the boy could have aged faster due to fairy time. Another theory that Christine from polandbananasbooks thought of is that since the magical artifact sent Dru through worlds, it could have possibly sent her through time.

Let’s talk about the diversity in this book. Cassandra Clare is truly amazing. Mark is bi, Kieran is gay (I think so, there aren’t any hints to suggest that he’s bi) and Diana is transgender. It really is amazing. YA fantasy generally doesn’t include characters who are transgender, but I love that Cassie is taking that leap. It makes me so happy that there is so much representation in Cassie’s books. She really is an amazing writer and person.

I want to talk about Gwyn. Throughout Lady Midnight, I always saw him as this dark, brooding figure, kind of like the Unseelie King. I thought of him as a savage, bad person, but his relationship with Diana really humanizes him. He’s very kind to her and obviously cares for her a lot, and it makes me appreciate him more.

Onto Mark and Christina. I had never really gotten into the idea of them being together. They both deserve to be happy, what with all the crap they’ve gone through, but them together isn’t really my favorite thing. If they do end up with each other though, I won’t be against it. It’s kind of so-so for me.

But Kieran and Mark… don’t even get me started, I love them so much. I think Kieran has toned it down a bit since Lady Midnight. In LM he was a really intense character, but in LOS, when he gave Mark time to figure out what they were and what his feelings were, he softened a little, and I think that was good.

Onto another relationship in this book, Ty and Kit. I am 99.9% sure that Kit and Ty are going to get together and they’ll be the main characters in The Wicked Powers series. They are amazing and wonderful and I am here for it.

So we learned that Lady Midnight is an actual person, and it was Annabel. We also learned that Lord of Shadows was the Unseelie King. The next book is called Queen of Air and Darkness, and I have a theory that it’s going to be the Seelie Queen. She’s more prominent in this book because of the deal she made with Julian and the others, and I think she’s going to play an even bigger part in the next book.

But I’ve also noticed that Kit’s mother is a recurring theme in this book. No one really knows who she is, save for Hypatia Vex, a warlock. There isn’t a theme to who the namesakes are based off of. It’s not like it’s completely nicknames for this group of people, and since we don’t have a synopsis for QOAAD, I’m thinking that it could also be Kit’s mother. Even if she isn’t, I think she’s going to definitely be introduced in the next book.

Let’s move on to the last scene in the book. Oh boy, where do we start? How about with Cortana. So, in the last scene of the book, Emma is battling with Annabel, who has gone crazy and is now wielding the Mortal Sword as a weapon. Emma uses Cortana and mother-trucking shatters the Mortal Sword. It shouldn’t be possible, yet here we are. Cortana absorbs the power of the sword, which is why Emma feels that shock up her arm. She felt the same shock when she stabbed Malcolm in Lady Midnight, and again when she stabs the Black Book at the ending of Lord of Shadows. I think that power that she had absorbed from Malcolm is the reason why she was able to kill one of the Riders of Mannan earlier in the book, and the added power from the Black Book is why she could shatter the Mortal Sword. More on that, if Cortana absorbs power, could it eventually be powerful enough to cut through the parabatai bond? This theory is brought up in Lady Midnight when we didn’t know that Cortana absorbs power, but it didn’t seem likely back then because there are other Swords made by Wayland the Smith that are said to be able to cut through anything. But then, if Cortana eventually could break through Emma and Julian’s parabatai bond, would it cut every parabatai bond? I don’t know, I really don’t.

So, Livvy’s death. Heartbreaking. I cried for twenty minutes, it was that bad. But it was also pretty unexpected. A few people saw the warning signs and saw it coming, but NOPE. NOT ME. It was awful. The moment I read about it I gasped and fell off my bed. It was just so awful and I hated it with every being in my body.

Before I close this up, I want to mention that Julian took pictures of the Black Book on his phone. The Seelie Queen wants the book, so maybe Julian will use it as leverage over her.

Lord of Shadows was a whirlwind of emotions and I loved it a lot. Let me know what you thought about it in the comments below. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do with myself for two years. Yeah, Queen of Air and Darkness is coming out in two years. I’m not doing so well.

But anyway, I must say goodbye for now.

Thanks for reading (this insane analysis),

-Ari

(Fun fact: this post is 2765 words long. Awesome.)