TITLE: The Iron Trial
AUTHOR: Holly Black and Cassandra Clare
RELEASE DATE: September 2014
PUBLISHER: Scholastic Press
PAGES: 309 pages
SERIES: Magisterium (Book 2: The Copper Gauntlet, Book 3: The Bronze Key)
GENRE: Fantasy
OVERALL RATING: 4/5
APPROPRIATE AGE: grades 5-8
SUMMARY:
All his life, Callum Hunt has been told that magic is evil, it is what killed his mother. When Call is invited to attend the entrance exams for the Magisterium, his father warns him to do whatever it takes to fail The Iron Trials. However, all of Call's failures blow up in his face, and even though his name is at the bottom of the leaderboard, he is one of the first chosen by the Mages. As Call enters the Magisterium, all of his father's stories about magic seem wrong and he begins to question everything. Will he survive the Iron Trial?
WHAT I LIKED: Holly Black and Cassandra Clare are two of my very favorite authors. You can definitely see both of their writing styles in this book. I feel like there is a little bit of Holly Black's magic from her White Cat series, mixed with a little bit of Cassandra Clare's evil demons/elementals in her Mortal Instruments series. When I saw this book, I immediately had to have it! I'm still waiting on my book order for the library with book two, but I know it will be one of the first I read when it arrives.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: I was kind of disappointed with the background of mages and elemental magic. The book starts out with a flashback from when Callum was a baby. Then throughout the book there are stories told by the students. But a lot of the students at the Magisterium knew nothing about magic before the Iron Trial. Pretty much there is a magic, it turned someone evil, there was a big war and a lot of people died. With as detailed as Cassandra Clare has always been in her series, I was disappointed with the lack of backstory. Hopefully book two will tell a little bit more, especially with the big surprise ending at the end of the story.
READALIKES: Mortal Instrument series by Cassandra Clare and Harry Potter series by J.K. RowlingWHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: I was kind of disappointed with the background of mages and elemental magic. The book starts out with a flashback from when Callum was a baby. Then throughout the book there are stories told by the students. But a lot of the students at the Magisterium knew nothing about magic before the Iron Trial. Pretty much there is a magic, it turned someone evil, there was a big war and a lot of people died. With as detailed as Cassandra Clare has always been in her series, I was disappointed with the lack of backstory. Hopefully book two will tell a little bit more, especially with the big surprise ending at the end of the story.
BOOK TRAILER:
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