"Oh dear. You'll excuse me. Our sirens have
taken up residence next to the champagne fountain and trying to drown guests in
it."
In the spin off from the Mortal Instruments we follow Magnus and Alec as they explore their new relationship through a series of awkward character interactions, and unnecessary interruptions to their sex life.
Though I am not the truest of true Shadow Hunter fan, I still feel like this book has issues. So if by chance anyone loved the portrayal of Magnus and Alec from the Shadow Hunter tv show, I have some bad news.
But most of my critique has "I dont like this, but you may if you like..." kind of format.
For instance, I have a huge pet peeve with duel perspective when they have one characters chapter and then the chapter after that is what the other character does at the SAME time. I just dont like this because it feels, even if we are learning or seeing something new, it isn't progressing the story. I dont like the feel of time stopped, it aggravates the flow of the story. Its even worse when the perspective isnt needed at all! One chapter just has Magnus at a place, the next chapter is Alec getting to that place. Just WRITE Alec already being there, I literally could skip that chapter and have missed nothing.
This actually leads me to one of my more "objective" opinions about the book. (as objective as you can be in reviews) This book just has padding. I feel like it was obvious they didn't have enough to create a book that was more than 150 pages so they put a bunch of stuff in here that I think really ruined the flow, and just inserted unnecessary writing. This is where most of my issues come from:
For example, the unnecessary back pacing of the duel perspective mentioned above.
Next the story is supposed to be them enjoying their vacation and time together. So we get moments of them trying to do date like stuff, only to be interrupted by demons or whatever. I can see I guess where people would like this, especially if this was how the Mortal Instruments was written. But to me its annoying. For most of the time the plot isnt strong enough to warrant interrupting the building of this relationship.
(Especially for me who, coming from the show, assumed they worked through most of the initial relationship stuff so not only do I have to suffer through this again but I keep getting interrupted for some asinine pointless fighting.)
Though I do have to commend them actually being competent fighters. But then I just kept asking myself, "what the hell, what is this magic system that just seems limitless?" (I didnt count it against the books just because there were bigger issues and I didnt bother to read the first 6 books)
The second issue I had of padding and general bad writing is character interaction and cameos. I dont know how many and which characters are from the spin off series, but there seemed to be a ton.
Some of them I actually enjoyed like Tessa from Infernal devices. Others I absolutely hated like Raphael. Why was he here, and why is he so annoying.
I feel like cameos just weren't done well in this book. But I also come from the Percy Jackson Riordan series where I feel like he does cameos well, people show up and have a point and are well integrated.
There was someone who Im pretty sure is in the Spin off from the LA series. And conveniently at the end they make a pact to never speak of what happened in this book....so hooray now theres a canonical reason that they wont mention theyve met each other in the future. Thats....good writing?
There are some more very convenient people that show up out of nowhere. Isabelle tells Alec someone they are looking for is busy and cant help, that person just so happens to show up where Alec ends up going...how convenient? (Sorry I mean bad writing)They shoe-horn in some more gay representation which seemed unnecessary. But one REALLY aggressive and egregious bisexual who just immediately tells Alec to dump Magnus and to go hook up. It was cringey. But theres a bit of that going around. Like when the Shadow Hunters go up to a Mundane who just then spills EVERYTHING they did regarding the plot...like ok cool.
Ok was that all the bad? There's more nitpicking, but that's the worst of it.
All in all Alec and Magnus still had some good scenes together. But some of it came off a little too "extra" with them going out of their way to over praise each other. But now that most of that is out of the way I think the next book should be more evened out hopefully.
Finally, when we got to the plot in the end. It wasn't so bad. I'm genuinely disappointed how much the beginning of this book dragged down this decent plot and reveal. (Makes the padding seem more obvious, they clearly had this part down and figured out and just fumbled making it longer)
It's about immortals, coping with their long life and family ties. Some sweetness about not being alone and how some people handle it. So kudos for that stronger finish.
I know this is also co-written so I wonder if its obvious where Clare is influenced and when its Chu. Maybe the Mortal Instruments is better since its all from Clare? I dunno.
(Spoiler for the future:
Can't wait to see the fallout of Alec letting the Villain escape only for them to clearly still be the Villain in the next books...good move.)
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