Review: Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

Shadowhunters, warlocks, vampires, shape-changers, demons and even some humans have been keeping me company the last couple of days and now that they’ve left, I miss them. Yes, you read that right – I even miss those demented demons.

Cassandra Clare's new book, Clockwork Angel, begins when Tessa Gray, sixteen and orphaned, leaves America to join her brother in London to begin a new life. It turns out that London is not quite what she expected. The story follows Tessa as she navigates London’s Downworld. It’s replete with creatures that don’t exactly have her best interests at heart, but also some that, surprisingly, do. The author has a knack for imbibing her characters with distinct personalities that convey humour, anger, bewilderment and many other traits. Interaction between the characters is one of things I enjoyed most about this novel.

The pace of the story is perfect. It starts out with an action sequence and drew me right in. The book is well over 400 pages but it took me just two days to read it – and I didn’t want it to end. The action took place in settings that were well-described: Victorian London with mysterious fogs; horse-drawn carriages; gothic dwellings. It set an atmosphere that I wanted to stay in. I would love to see these books turned into movies! Why not? They did it with Harry Potter and Twilight after all.

Clockwork Angel is the first book in the Infernal Devices series and is the prequel to the Mortal Instruments series, which I have not read yet. I do have it though (actually I have a signed copy of one of the books so, being the book nerd that I am, I need to get a reading copy to read it instead of the signed one). There is nothing in Clockwork Angel that made me think I should have read the Mortal Instruments series first – it stands on its own quite well but is so much fun it just makes me want to read the Infernal Devices books now. The only drawback to having finished Clockwork Angel is that I have to wait an entire year to read the next book!

Review: KITTY TAKES A HOLIDAY by Carrie Vaughn

Thanks to Miriam at Hachette for sending me this book!

I was really looking forward to reading this book since the last one I read (Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards) was such a depressing novel. All the while I was reading Mercy I was thinking ‘just a bit more and I can start the next Kitty book’. What a relief!

This is the third in the ‘Kitty’ series and it changes direction a bit with plot. The first two focused on Kitty’s job as a night time DJ and her challenges dealing with lycanthropy – a condition wherein the ‘patient’ metamorphoses into a werewolf during full moons. In Kitty Takes a Vacation, Kitty gets away from it all in a remote cabin in the woods to write a memoir detailing her experiences as a werewolf. It’s not long, however, before odd things begin happening and odder still when the people in the nearby town show their distrust for Kitty and her ilk. Throw in Ben and Cormac – characters first introduced in the previous books – and you have another fun, light read.

I won’t give away plot points, but if you’re a follower of the series you’ll meet some other otherworldly creatures called ‘skinwalkers’ and their particular brand of powers. The secondary characters are somewhat chilling in that they display some personality traits akin to the witch hunters in Salem a century and more ago. I also like the fact that in the Kitty books the endings are not always completely happy but a sort of compromise (not saying however that that was the case in this particular book – you’ll have to read it to find that out!).

Kitty Takes a Vacation didn’t disappoint me – it lifted my mood and that’s what I expected from it. I’m going to read the next one, Kitty and the Silver Bullet, in May.