Sunday 21 December 2014

The Iron Trial by Cassandra Clare and Holly Black I Review



Title: The Iron Trial
Series: Magisterium
Authors: Holly Black and Cassandra Clare
Genre: Children's, Fantasy
My Star Rating:


Blurb: 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 . . .

When reading this book I hate to admit it but the similarites to Harry Potter were hard not to pick up on, there were even entire scenes where all I could think about was JK Rowling wrote this part better. Cassandra Clare is obviously a big fan of popular fiction in the genre she writes in, which was a problem because I think at points, the parts she stole from other books weren't even intentional.
I decided not to include these points when deciding my star rating because I wanted to look at it as a book on its own and not compare it to other books of an unrealistic standard.

I didn't have any attatchment to any of the characters but I quite liked Aaron and I suppose Call was tolerable. I gave the book its four stars for the story line. To start off with it was more of a three star and I wasn't to interested in the story but soon enough I found it got much more exiting. I was expecting the ending to be predicatable but it wasn't quite what I expected, which is always nice. 

There was a bit of "convienient information dropping" which could have been done much more subtly. The pacing was good and I was glad the story only took up 295 pages as often fanstasys like this one are much longer and I would have hated to see unnecesary filler scenes in a book like this one. 

It must have been well edited because there was no distinct difference between the two authors voices as I know can be a common problem in dual writer projects. 

Love Always,
Freya

No comments:

Post a Comment