Sword Catcher

another long prolog disguised as the first book in the series. good thing i have it in me to push trough 😭

It was... nice. I like the world building and some characters. It's not a new story, tho. I love the dynamic with friendship and desire, but I believe not all characters behave like adults, even though they are. I see where the story is going, but the first book is just an intro to it. Nothing really happened. But, I am glad she is writing something outside shadowhunter's world. It is nice to read her always.

This was my first Cassandra Clare book and most of the time, I had a lot of fun. I liked the world, the characters, and the premise, but I think we could have lost about 100 pages and made the pacing tighter. The prologue is like 40 pages and the second chapter basically repeats the first just from a different POV that doesn’t lend us any more information.

I think because of some of this slowness and repetition, we lost the plot a little bit. Around 400 pages I found myself wondering what all these characters were doing and whether it mattered. However, the last 50 pages had me excited and wanting to learn more.

Having a sword catcher is an interesting idea, and I hope we explore more of how it’s impacted Kel’s life as he becomes more aware that he is a person in the world and not just a shell to be Conor’s stand-in when he needs it. I actually enjoyed the romantic tension between the two potential couples and I’m looking forward to seeing that develop as well.

There were parts of this book that gave me pause i.e. the Ashkar and how closely it related to Judaism. Most I think is just Clare drawing on her own experience and culture which is fine, but there were definitely pieces that felt too much like Zi*nism and gave me a queer feeling….

I am at a bit of a loss how to review this, to be very honest with you. There are two sides battling within me - one which read the book with good intentions and one that kept rising her eyebrows more and more as the Ashkar plotline developed. The latter seems to be taking precedence because I do not feel that I can, in good conscience, review this as if it is just an aspect of the novel as I am not comfortable with this. On the other hand, we are within the first book of - what to my knowledge is - an undeterminate amount of instalments. (Some words have been censored because I do not even know what platforms snipe people's accounts for what anymore).

So let me open with this. The Ashkar are - quite obviously to anyone who has lived in the Western world at least - heavily based on the Jewish people, down to living in a ghetto, being institutionally ostracised and even being allowed to wear only certain clothes so they can be easily identified. Cassandra Clare herself is Jewish and she has the absolute right to take inspiration from the history of her own people, especially where it is tastefully done (e.g. I would not call RFK's <i>The Poppy War</i> that). I was generally pretty happy with that; she could have kept it more vague if she wanted to make a point about institutionalised discrimination in general but that is neither here nor there.

What make me uncomfortable, however, were a couple of sections and mentions in passing that seem to resemble a little too closely the real-life ideology of Zi*nism that is currently used in order to enact what is, by all definitions of the word, a g*nocide. I was surprised that only one review sort of touches on this - and comes closely to the issue but misses - given the intensification of the assault on Palestinians in Gaza since 7th October and this matter being at the forefront of everyone's minds. Originally, I assumed it was due to the book being released prior to 7th October 2023 when - I understand though this has not been my experience - a lot of people in the West simply neither paid much mind to Palestine or were not even aware of the matter, in spite of it being ongoing for 3/4 of a century. My own sensitivity has also increased since, too, so I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

But the book was published 3 days after the 7th October. At which point I started questioning whether I am being overly sensitive and, frankly, whether I am going insane. Jewishness is not equal to Isr*el or Zi*nism after all, and neither has Cassandra Clare spoken out on the topic either way (unlike, say, Sarah J. Maas talking about how she has based Aelin's development on her own Birthright journey). But I wanted to put this out there to see if any of this has registered with any other readers of the book, what their understanding of what is written has been, etc.

For example, some things that gave me pause were: the Ashkar having names strongly based on common Jewish names while the duplicitous Sorcerer-King has a very Muslim name (Suleman). The legend of the land of origin of the Ashkar paints it as a small and peaceful country which then betrayed and attacked by its greedy neighbours, led by Suleman, and in order to save themselves they have to leave west and abandon their homeland; they leave the land inhospitable and unihabitable. (There seems to be some misconception that the real-life region was inarable until the arrival of the settlement). The Ashkar now wait for the rebirth of their Queen / Goddess who will unify them once again to return to their homecountry of Aram which they are noted to still feel belonging to.

There a couple more clear allusions to Jewish folklore and history but it is the above ones that truly felt like they were threading into dangerous territory. On the off chance someone picks this up, I am making the followin caveat: yes, fiction is fiction but! it does not exist in a political vaccuum. Like it or not, our environment affects both the way we read and the way we write.

I am willing to give Clare the benefit of the doubt that, however in poor taste it may be to resolve real-life issues in fiction, she may reach the conclusion along that the Ashkar do not need Aram in order to be free and autonomous, for example. The main character, Lin, does wonder whether truly Castlellane is not home (when it is the only country some of them have known). Clare could write all of this under a degree of plausible deniability since Aram, for all we know, could truly be an inhabitable desert that does not have any current population. And of course, both the persecution and exodus of Jewish people are very, very real events; the relationship with the Promised Land as it currectly exists, too (e.g. the relationship between being rooted in a country, cultural and religious identity and state). But there are still a couple of things in the set up that make me feel uncomfortable to say this was written with enough sensitivity to political events of the past couple of decades.

As much as this is fantasy, I feel like the discussion is worth having, especially when the author choses to draw strongly on real-life precedent. I am happy to hear other readings of it, especially if backed up by strong evidence, since I am neither Jewish nor Muslim nor from the Middle East.

Beyond that, until I clocked that in, I found that the novel was quite competently written. Clare has some of the more polished prose in YA which is something to show for her massive output both as a fanfiction and as a traditionally published author. She also has the benefit of having always skewed towards the older end of YA so moving onto early NA fantsy feels comfortable enough.

The novel was plotted out dynamically enough to make me want to keep reading (in comparison to "The Will of the Many" which I'd read just before that and which was a pain to get through, with an only 3h extra runtime in the audiobook). In fact, I found that it helps that we do not know the characters yet so Clare is less tempted to fill the novel with scenes that have otherwise been free fan content on her blog (which is the majority of "The Last Hours"; I would much rather be reading this series while waiting for the Kit Herondale books). Could she still have cut some of this down? Probably. Few novels need to be this long.

But I still think some of the criticisms I see in the reviews are a bit exaggerated. I see where people are coming from with the ADSOM comparisons but I found that series average in the first place and, frankly, I think both rely on common tropes for the genre. If anything, after 20 Shadowhunters novels (if we count the Malec books), you can point out where she is starting to rely on her favourite tropes and themes from her own writing over anything else.

I also found the romance to be the least interesting element of the novel and I wish it had focused even more on the political intrigue and relationship between Kel and Conor (e.g. there can be so much that can be done with the inner conflict of Kel not owning his own body). The queernormative society idea was cool (though if two princes marry, a surrogate is to be used - what about the ethics of this? This, plus the girlbossification of sex work could also make ample ground for a discussion about body autonomy).

Like, overall, this is a completely serviceable novel on a technical level. There is just, as I mentioned, my discomfort with some of the ways some of its themes were expressed.

The book was a fun, slow read. It reminded me a lot of the Game of Thrones books in its worldbuilding and detail. Saying that, I think it needed to be much longer and the plot needed to be a little more exciting - the climax of the narrative comes right at the end, leaving you having to wait for the next book. I thoroughly enjoyed the characters and the world itself. I think it is too much to call this ADULT fantasy - I’d say it’s somewhere between YA and adult.

where to begin. info dump city. unsure if anything really happened. truly could not figure out if it was good or bad the whole time and i still don’t know. so long and so little.

nothing! happened! I think the premise is so cool and I liked the characters (loooooove kel, pls have him and merren get more scenes) but the world building was tedious because it was just a ton of info dumping and it made it hard to read. there were great moments to this book, but it was a bit slow and I almost quit quite a few times so be proud of me for finishing I am so brave