Queen of Air and Darkness by Cassandra Clare is the last book of The Dark Artifices series. At 880 pages, this is a monster book. To be honest, it could have probably been two books instead of one. Other than the fact that it was really long and a little exhausting to read (of course, it didn’t help that I read three very long Shadowhunters books in the 9 days prior to starting this book), I loved it.
Thar be spoilers in this book review! Don’t proceed any farther if you don’t want some major spoilers for The Dark Artifices, and perhaps some spoilers for The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices.
When we last left the Shadowhunters, they were in the Clave meeting where Livvy was stabbed. This probably was really frustrating to people reading Lord of Shadows right after it came out, but for those of us who don’t have to wait, we can find out what happens right away. At any rate, Ty is devastated. He doesn’t want to accept her death, and tries to raise her back from the dead. Kit, his best friend, doesn’t want him to do this, but he goes along with his plans, hoping that Ty is going to come to his senses.
The corrupted Nazi-esque Clave is on a rampage, trying to silence anybody that disagrees with them. The people that know the truth are trying to stop them, but for a lot of Queen of Air and Darkness, I had to wonder how they were going to be stopped.
I love the ships in this book. Emma and Julian know that being in love as parabatai is dangerous, but there really isn’t anything they can do about it. They try to stay away from each other, but good luck with that. Christina realizes that she has a thing for both Mark and Kieran, in probably the most interesting love triangle I’ve seen. Both of these storylines will resolve in this book, and we have to wait until The Wicked Powers books come out to see more of them together.
You would think that you’ve seen everything in the world, but you haven’t. Clare continues to add to her world, and we are introduced to the land of Thule in this story: an alternate world where Clary died during the Dark War and the land turns very… dark. Here we are introduced to some alternate versions of characters we already know, like Thule Jace and Thule Sebastian, and another character I won’t mention because spoilers.
There’s a lot to Queen of Air and Darkness and the end of this book changes everything. It doesn’t leave you with a completely massive cliffhanger where you’re going to be upset for the next three years until you can read The Wicked Powers, but after reading this, you’ll know that nothing in the Shadowhunter world you’ve known about so far is going to stay the same.
There’s a lot more to look forward to in The Wicked Powers, whenever it comes out, but until then, there will be plenty of new titles coming out first. These books are so densely packed that I might want to do a reread between now and then. With the size of these massive books, that could take a while.