I sincerely apologize to anyone who is or was a fan of Shadowhunters books. Your opinion of these books is completely valid.

But all that aside, I used to be a fan of Cassandra Clare’s ubiquitous universe. After Anne Foley read City of Bones in seventh grade, the classroom copy taped over with Post-it notes because of the shirtless boy on the cover, I gave the series a try. And I was hooked on the stories of teenagers battling demons and navigating complicated, backwards politics and falling in love with all the wrong people. I read the whole series, and then I read the prequels, and I actually cried when Will Herondale died peacefully surrounded by his family in the final moments of Clockwork Princess.

And then the sequel series came out.

The Dark Artifices chronicles the adventures of Emma Carstairs and Julian Blackthorn, two incredibly flawed seventeen-year-olds who are supposed to be platonic best friends who stay platonic best friends, except then they fall in love, and everything goes wrong. 

And that gets dragged out for three. Whole. Books. 

These books are huge. I’m talking, 600-pages huge. Too-heavy-to-hold-in-one-hand huge. Can-probably-be-used-to-press-flowers huge. Take-up-more-than-one-shelf-in-the-library-yes-even-the-tiny-Lisle-Library huge. 

And I started to realize that these books … probably weren’t all that great.

They’re good for what they intend to do: entertaining teens. There’s adventure! Violence! Tons and tons of sometimes forbidden and mostly heterosexual romance but with an increasing amount of queer representation! Some of the first non-stereotypical portrayals of people of color in YA fantasy because yes that’s how long it’s been around!

But there are now, like, eleven novels and three short story anthologies set in this universe. Each of them very long. 

As I read The Dark Artifices over the years it was released, I realized that I was no longer reading this books because I genuinely enjoyed them. 

I was hate-reading them. 

Do you ever do that? Watch, read, or listen to something because you know you’ll hate it? I do that a lot. It’s entertaining. I get to feel like a critic even though that’s definitely not what critics actually do. 

So when I was getting my tour of the back room at the Lisle Library, where I started working recently, and I saw Chain of Gold sitting on a shelf waiting to be prepped for the library, I knew I had to hate-read it. 

Chain of Gold is the first book of The Last Hours, a trilogy about the children of the main character in The Infernal Devices. Except the protagonist isn’t one of them, it’s the great-great-aunt or something of the protagonist of The Dark Artifices. And another principal character is an ancestor of the protagonist in The Mortal Instruments.

With me so far?

If this premise doesn’t make you want to rip a book in half right now, I don’t know what could. 

So as I type this blog post with Chain of Gold sitting on my lap, ready to be read, I’m asking myself if I really want to get into this. Do I really think that this is a good idea? To re-immerse myself in a world that I used to be a fan of? To spend my time reading a book I know I won’t enjoy instead of reading a book I should really be reading for my semester project?

And I think the answer is yes. 

So stay tuned for updates on my reading adventure. I’m pre-writing this blog series, so by the time you’re reading this, I might already be done with the book. Who knows? We’ll see. 

Note: Just before I post this, I am still barely into this book. I wrote this blog post weeks ago. It’s so slow. I can’t deal with this. Hopefully it’ll be done by the next blog post, or I’ll have to find some other material to post about.