Book Review: The Infernal Devices
“Whatever you are physically...male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy--all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. All those other things, they are the glass that contains the lamp, but you are the light inside.”
As you may remember, or as you can now read, I liked the series, but didn't love it. So, I was hesitant to try to the spin-off series, The Infernal Devices. Especially since I liked the series better before the author had a crisis of new income sources and expanded the very nicely packaged up trilogy into a six-book series, basically because she was making too much money. I was afraid that Infernal Devices would be another one of those.
I was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong. This series was significantly better than The Mortal Instruments, even though it was written concurrent to the last three of The Mortal Instruments. At first, I thought that basically Cassandra Clare looked at the world and said, "Wow, people are making a lot of money off of Steampunk/Clockpunk fantasy. Let's do that." But it was actually good.
So, the main idea is that this series takes place in the same WORLD as Mortal Instruments, but in Victorian England. Some of the characters are related (such as ancestors of Mortal Instruments characters), and some characters carry-over (such as Magnus Bane and Camille Belcourt, a warlock and vampire respectively, so they don't age). This time, there's this crazy guy who is making animatronic armies to destroy all Shadowhunters. Yep. Bad news bears.
Thus, the Victorian version of our intrepid adventures, William Herondale (Will), James Carstairs (Jem) and Teresa Gray (Tessa) and (eventually) Cecily Herondale, along with their "guardian" Charlotte Branwell, and some miscellaneous Lightwood family members, must stop this evil from going down. Along the way, Will and Jem necessarily have to have a fight over Tessa. Oh, and they're parabatai, so that adds a whole new level of angst. And they have their own personal angsts as well.
There is some minor character-recycling going on, but not as much as people are saying. Will is not a copy of Jace. He has similar characteristics and temperaments, but not identical. For one, Jace is a perfectionist. Will is devil-may-care. Yes, they're both snarky and have that annoying habit of, "Kiss me. No *push away*. Go away. I hate you." But for very different reasons, actually. And Will's reason is actually fairly compelling. They both have complicated childhoods, but in completely different ways. They are intrinsically different. If you need no further proof: Jace's bedroom is described as no one lives in it. The maid is constantly complaining about Will's. That seems like a minor difference, but it really isn't. As much as people claim they are, Simon and Jem are not the same character by any stretch of the imagination. Main case in point: Jem is completely at peace with his fate, his life and everything else. Simon is at peace about nothing. Two people being quiet and perceptive doesn't make them the same. Unless Isabelle is an impetuous, ungrateful, grating idiot, she and Jessamine have nothing in common. They both like clothes. Apparently that's a major character trait, now.
Tessa and Clary...yeah, I have to give you that one. Tessa Gray and Clary Fray. Clary isn't quite as judgmental as Tessa (some of that is era), and Tessa is a little less, "oh woe is me," but they're the same obnoxious character who doesn't deserve any of the men who fight over her. Probably because I've always been a little bit suspicious that Clary/Tessa is Cassandra Clare, and we're supposed to like her, because she likes herself. But if she is as obnoxious in life as her Mary Sue characters, she's probably obnoxious, too. For the last time, Clary AND Tessa, when a trained fighter says, "No. You can't come. You'll be a liability," take their word for it. And if Will says, "Jem and I can handle it. You'd get in the way," don't go into how women can fight. He's said he's fine with women fighting. He fights demons with Charlotte at his side all the time. He's the one who convinced you that women fighting was okay, in fact. He didn't say you can't come because you're a girl, he said you can't come, because they're going to go battle demons and you're not TRAINED!
But I was very mixed about my feelings this entire series. The follow are all thoughts and emotions I had while reading it.
) Well that was a beautiful passage!
2) Seriously...enough with the calm sea vs. storm eye color descriptions
3) My heart has just been ripped out of my chest
4) Oh, he's got an angsty past too?! How YA of you!
5) She seriously wrote this work of art in the same time-frame as the disorganized money-grab that was City of Fallen Angels?
6) Seriously...why does anyone even like Tessa? She's pointless, worthless, talentless and obnoxious
7) She seriously wrote this package of beautiful in the same time frame as the "What the heck-YA-sludge" that was City of Lost Souls?
8) You've got to be kidding me.
9) My emotional core is under attack, and I love the way it feels!
10) Let us sexualize the male body in any way we can. (this was sarcasm, by the way)
11) I think I am falling in love with William Herondale
12) It takes a special kind of non-talent to strangely sexualize the surgical removal of shrapnel
13) I think I am falling in love with James Carstairs
14) Oh, wow...more thinly-veiled metaphors
15) Frustration at characters not seeing the hints feels so GOOD!
16) Umm, can I just read that paragraph over and over again until my soul melts from beauty?17) Let's all watch as Cassandra Clare attempts to show us how cultured she is, but really just makes me think that she either didn't write the last three of the Mortal Instruments series, or she didn't write this series. Because where one is a sloppy money grab, the other is a masterful beauty!
17) The Tale of Two Cities allusions! One of my three favorite books ever written!
18) He's a Shadowhunter, not a piece of meat. Stop describing him as an object of desire (and I only used the male pronoun here and not a name, as that sentence could apply to Will Herondale, Jem Carstairs, Gideon Lightwood or Gabriel Lightwood).
19) Finally! A female love interest who is actually likable! (Cecily Herondale...NOT Tessa Gray)
20) Does she even know how physiology works?
21) All of the stuff that seemed random and pointless in the last three of The Mortal Instruments turn out to be easter eggs for people who read Infernal Devices and is actually beautiful.
22) Does she even know how violins work?
23) Did she just destroy my heart and then put it back into my chest better? Yes, she did.
24) Okay, that "mark like a bruise" that you're describing has a name amongst us violinists. It's called a "violin hickey." And don't try to make it sexy, because it really isn't. Of course, this is coming from the female violinist who once tried to explain to a roommate why the fact that Joshua Bell flips his hair and sweats profusely while playing is very attractive.
25) So many things make so much more sense now.
26) All right. The foreign languages need to stop. I could tolerate it in past books when there were a few phrases or it mentioned that Will was frustrated and muttered under his breath in Welsh, or Gideon got startled and swore in Spanish. But one of the best quotes in the book should have been applied to the book: "You may not know who we're talking about, Cecily, but I'm the only one who knows what you're saying. Speak English." We get it. Will and Cecily speak Welsh. Gideon speaks Spanish. Jem (and Will) speak Mandarin. All Shadowhunters speak Latin and Greek.
27) Why do men like this not actually exist? I want to find one of the following and marry them: William Herondale, James Carstairs, Gideon Lightwood. If I have to settle for a Gabriel Lightwood, I guess I can do that.
28) Why does Will speak Welsh? Because he's Welsh. I will buy that, but why is he Welsh? So that he can speak Welsh, which is really hot. (And don't try to tell me that it's because we needed him to be Welsh so that we can have the decoder ring of "You are a terrible Welshman, Will Herondale," as that shouldn't have needed a decoder ring, as there was no reason for it to be coded)
29) I am in love with William Herondale
30) Why did William learn Mandarin for James' benefit, but James (the more considerate of the parabatai apparently) never learn Welsh for William's?
31) I am in love with James Carstairs
32) Did you notice that she had racial diversity in this series? Except that it can't be TOO racially diverse, so he can only be HALF-Chinese. I actually don't care about racial diversity in literature so long as it's consistent with the time and place. But why not make him full?
33) The feels! The feels! There are some of the most beautiful exchanges in literature in this book, and I don't use that lightly.
34) Just stop already. You're embarrassing yourself with the cliches and melodrama!
35) Don't stop! That was beautiful!
Are you seeing what I'm talking about? Mixed.
We once again have a heroine who everyone loves but nobody should. And we've even adjusted for inflation with not one, but two drop-dead gorgeous males with angsty pasts. But somehow, I find both of their angsty pasts considerably more tolerable than most YA literature.
Over all, I still cannot get over how obnoxious Tessa is, and I don't know how I feel about Cassandra Clare in her professional personality and etiquette. But this series is FAR above what I thought her capable of. It was delicate and poignant. It was well-thought out and well-felt out. Sometimes, the cliches screamed YA-trash, but sometimes they screamed artful Nineteenth Century Pastiche. But generally, it was basically Victorian pastiche got hit by YA fantasy on the highway, and that is a compliment, even if it doesn't sound like it.
And I do have to say: Thank-you Cassandra Clare for actually understanding the meaning and purpose of the literary device known as "love triangle" and applying it correctly. Too often, YA writers forget that for a love triangle to actually be compelling, all three members have to be deeply in love with one another (if not always romantically...the classic love triangle is Arthur-Lancelot-Guenevere, which would have been a pointless love triangle if Arthur and Lancelot didn't have the bromance of bromances). So, with our complete love triangle, I'm not going, "Seriously? A love triangle?" but instead thinking, "Oh, this is so emotionally distressing!" I don't know, however, how I feel about that love triangle being resolved by almost literally putting one of them on ice for 125 years so she didn't really ever have to choose between them.
Long story short, I thought this was a little older in tone and story, a little less obnoxious in the teen angst (though not devoid...it's YA and they are teen characters), and generally more creative. There was also less sex, which is fantastic! (possibly era-related) though not devoid with one very obvious innuendo. Comparable violence, with some more stomach-wrenching descriptions, though.
This series earns a fairly-given four stars.
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