Let me just start this off by asking you not to hate me... but I really do not get the hype about Cassandra Clare. Whether it is incest or infidelity, she cannot write a normal love story and I cannot be bothered to read about the Shadow world any longer. I tried really hard to love these books. I read the original Mortal Instruments series a few years ago, and they were okay, a solid 3-4-star reads. But I had never picked up any other Clare novels until now, and I regret it. These books are so renowned in the book world and they have such good ratings and reviews, so maybe it is just me – but I was so beyond bored reading them.
Plot: This is a prequel to the Mortal Instruments series. The books focus on Tessa, a young girl who was kidnapped because she is able to shape-shift into other people. She is said to be a new race of Shadowhunter/Warlock and is supposedly ultra-powerful, although we never really find out why or what she can really do. Tessa is wanted by an evil mastermind, the protagonist Mortmain, who hates the Shadowhunters because of his past. He has created automatons to defeat them entirely and start over with Tessa to create a new, more powerful race of Shadowhunters. This is all that happens in three books. That's it. They lack so much plot and nothing ever really happens besides a crappy angsty romance. The entire plot is revealed in book one and we are left reading the remainder of the series to see if it plays out, which it does exactly how we guessed it would. Since the entire plot line was revealed, there is next to nothing shocking about what happens. There is also the horrible love triangle that we have to endure for three books, and *SPOILER ALERT* she ends up getting both of them. Which a) is super annoying and b) kind of goes against the whole love triangle trope, which you might have noticed I am not a fan of. Picking from two gorgeous men that love you must be hard. Tessa picks Jem, but, in the only good plot twist, Jem becomes a Silent Brother and is forced to leave regular society leaving Tessa to then pick Will, until 200 years later when the immortal Tessa and Jem find each other again and live happily ever after. Kill me. I also understand that this series is supposed to take place in the 1800s but the amount of sexist comments in the text also made me super uncomfortable.
Characters: Besides a crappy plot, the characters are also not the best. I loved the Mortal Instruments series because all of the girls are strong and powerful and fight just as well as the men in the series. Here, however, our main heroine is the weakest character ever written. She never learns how to fight properly despite being taught, and in every fight scene she is only a nuisance. She ends up constantly being kidnapped and needing to be saved. What’s more, she never fully masters her powers, and uses them for evil a few times, because she is the worst. Also Tessa only takes a whole 5 minutes after believing her fiancé is dead to sleep with Will, so there’s that too. The whole focus of the story was so centered on Tessa and this lame love triangle that I was unable to care about any other characters, so when they died, I couldn't have cared less. Even when Jem was supposedly dead for a while, I still didn't care.
The only fun thing about the characters was seeing a few connections between this novel and the Mortal Instruments series – having Magnus Bane really saved these books.
All of that being said, my rating would have been lower if it weren't for the last few chapters in the last book, which really saved the whole series. I really feel like I must have missed something because I seem to be the only one who didn't like these books.
Not terrible, just too many tropes I couldn't stand.
Clockwork Angel: 3/5
Clockwork Prince: 2/5
Clockwork Princess: 2.5/5
Overall: 2.75/5
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