Chain of Gold (The Last Hours #1)
I know what you’re thinking.
Oh. My. God. Another one?
How can she possibly be cranking out these 5,000 long page novels year after year after year?
I think the exact same thing and yet….
I still read them. Every single one. Well, except for some of the companions, guides, and novellas that accompany them because come on nobody has that much free time. And we don’t talk about the show Shadowhunters that Freeform monstrously created. Ever.
Except for Cassandra Clare maybe, since, you know, she wrote them. Or co-wrote them. Or kinda wrote them. Whatever, the true authorship isn’t important here.
What is important, however, is that there is a new Shadowhunter series on the horizon and THAT IT IS NOT TY AND KIT. I REPEAT. This new massive compendium is not the next installment of the Dark Artifices. Instead, it is an entirely new-but-not-new-Cassandra-Clare style book for the newly developed The Last Hours series in which no one asked for nor expected.
You might be asking yourself: do I need to have read the other 76 books in order to understand this one? Cassandra Clare and others will have you believe no. They’ll say, “Nahhhh, don’t stress, it’s a new cast of characters!”
They are dead wrong.
I mean, I guess you plausibly could but you would be horribly confused and befuddled for the entire sequence. I was largely confused and befuddled for the entire sequence and I have read most of the other 76 books-which, is a joke, of course, except not really, since the current canon world spans 14 main books across multiple timelines (all of which are the opposite of miniature by the way) and at least five companion novels and counting that are more important than they let on.
It is extremely, extremely daunting for new readers.
That being said, as we are all stuck at home quarantined due to coronavirus, you probably have a lot of time on you. Just gonna say that Amazon and Barnes & Noble deliver, folks, jump on it. E-books also exist if you do not have room to house these monstrosities, a problem I do not blame you for.
Now that all of that is out of the way, what is this new book about and how did I feel about it?
Well. To start, this new series takes place in the late 19th century in London, a setting we’ve seen before in The Infernal Devices, the first of the canon spinoff series.
This new series mainly tells the story of the children from the first spinoff, with highlights on Tessa, Will, and Jem. As most of Clare’s books, this one also has alternating POV’s. This particular installment switches mainly between Cordelia Carstairs, James Herondale and Lucie Herondale with little snatches of others in between.
To make this overly large series very, very simplified and contained, here is my plot summary:
Girl moves to London. Girl is in love with her best friend’s brother (a little cliche, but okay, Clare). Brother is a special little nugget that can see the demon world because his mother is a warlock (cue Infernal Devices here). His sister, the other special nugget and said best friend from above, can talk to ghosts, but not only that, she can also command them. The applause sound goes here.
There are demon uprisings. Some shadowhunters get poisoned while everyone runs around incompetently trying to find a cure, but don’t worry it’s none of the main characters so you don’t really care. The brother special nugget from above is also pretend in love with a girl with a very dark home life that reeks of manipulation (cough cough obviously the bracelet is bewitched in some way) and is somehow enchanting him to do her bidding, but is really in love with the new girl that’s in love with him. Gasp.
Special nugget also has a best friend that is most likely a bisexual alcoholic and the girl who moved to London has a drunkard father who’s currently in prison and a brother who was previously a bully because he was gay (amongst other reasons) and is not as much of an asshole, but is still an asshole. Unrequited love is also strewn about handomsely.
Yup. That about sums it up.
If you’re confused, then that’s okay, as the book is confusing.
Plot aside, this book was enjoyable to me for one main reason: it’s a shadowhunter book. Despite all the jokes I’m making on its behalf, I do love the series. It’s expansive and interesting and angsty and romantic and most of the characters and action and plot twists are really incredibly good.
Truly.
However, this book, for me personally, was more on the burdensome side of the Sahdowhunter lore rather than the uplifting one that added to it, even if I did buy it the first day it came out.
Clare throws so many characters at you in this first installment that it’s actually impossible to keep track, primarily because no one other than the true main characters are ever clearly defined or characterized or shown significance in any way and also because THEY ARE ALL DAMN RELATED IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER AND BECAUSE THEY ALL HAVE THE SAME FUCKING NAMES.
I’m not even kidding. How Clare got to her original series and The Dark Artifices series without having incest galore is a miracle to me. The same people in the same families fall in love every damn time that at this point they all have to be interconnected Slytherin pure-blood style.
We didn’t need a sickly sweet epilogue of Tessa and Will’s wedding day at the end of the book. We needed a well drawn out and thoughtfully labeled shadowhunter family tree in full color because this shit was so confusing.
This was a big turn-off for me. It was almost as if Clare was suffering under the expansiveness of the world she had built, which is why the book was over 600 pages when it really could have easily been half. The last 90 pages read as an annoying epilogue that should have been twenty at most but just kept going and going and going like a Geico commercial.
She has so many characters with so many names and so many little tidbits about them that it was actually alarming. I get it if Clare knows who everyone is, that’s great. She’s the author. The point is, however, is not so that the author understands, but the readers do too. I can say with 100% certainty that no one understood who everyone was unless they study the main series every night before they go to bed, which is largely impossible.
In addition, this particular story is just...fine. It’s fine. It’s not the best of Clare’s work (Dark Artifices, baby!) or the worst (I don’t know...maybe Red Scrolls of Magic) but it gets the job done. I don't hate the characters like I have some others of Clare’s creations, but I don’t love them either.
James seems to be like every other male character that Clare has ever created, Cordelia seems...okay. Lucie is rather annoying, as is Grace and her mother Tatiana, who are so evil it’s stupid. Thomas and Christopher don’t matter in the slightest and neither do the parents, which is a shame considering they were the main cast in Infernal Devices. Jesse was...alright.
Honestly, the best characters in my opinion were Matthew Fairchild and Anna Lightwood. I would have loved a saucy, dramatic Oscar Wilde inspired entourage where they were painting the town red and smashing stereotypes all over the place.
But no. We get the main love story of James and Cordelia, the new girl and the best friend’s brother. Which has never been done of course. Super unique idea.
Cue eye roll.
In the end, odds are, if you are going to read Chain of Gold, you were going to read it to begin with because you’re a Shadowhunter fan like me and you’ll gobble up anything Cassandra Clare throws at you, whether good or bad. If you’re interested in picking up a book, this is not the book to start.
If you want a super long, mostly tantalizing read that will take over your life for the next few months then I recommend starting with the OG City of Bones and painstakingly making your way from there. You’ll most likely not regret it, even if your bank account and your heart will be crying by the end.
Recommendation: Shadowhunter fans unite! Chain of Gold is out and ready to be devoured! Everyone else, either stand back or pick up a book and get reading because this book is on a train that will keep chugging and chugging forever.
Score: 6/10
