The Iron Trial

 

Synopsis: Most kids would do anything to pass the Iron Trial.
Not Callum Hunt. He wants to fail.
All his life, Call has been warned by his father to stay away from magic. If he succeeds at the Iron Trial and is admitted into the Magisterium, he is sure it can only mean bad things for him.
So he tries his best to do his worst – and fails at failing.
Now the Magisterium awaits him. It’s a place that’s both sensational and sinister, with dark ties to his past and a twisty path to his future.
The Iron Trial is just the beginning, for the biggest test is still to come . . .

 

My thoughts:

The Iron Trial is the first in the Magisterium co-wrote by Cassandra Clare and Holly Black, two of (in my opinion) the go-to authors of teen fiction. So naturally as soon as I heard that they'd teamed up to write a novel for younger readers I was on right on board.

But as you may have already read across the interwebs, it has a huge flaw, which is possibly brought to the forefront if you believe the 'conspiracy' behind Cassandra Clare's not so humble beginnings.

 

Don't get me wrong, I really wanted to enjoy this. The cover reveal had me with the shivers only a book nerd could have, despite the hugely comparable design.

Two boys, a girl and a looming man that looks almost like an exact representation of the later on-screen death eaters. Something seems fishy.

Unfortunately, it is physically impossible to read this novel and NOT in anyway compare it to the Harry Potter series.

 

The beginning was enjoyable, interesting and intriguing without being pelted with too much useless information. We're given a fairly good idea about this hidden world of magic before returning to the mundane tale of Callum Hunt. Callum has been raised to believe that Magician's are dangerous, due to having lost his mother in a tragic magical war. He is then tested to see if he can attend the Magisterium, a magical boarding school(more like concentration camp) burrowed underneath mountains of rock, laced with elementals, and apparently the Devoured, and an integrated underground river system(worked by magic) to get around. He is bunked with an extremely smart girl and a not so bright boy. Sound familiar?

 

From here on in, the writing isn't the best(especially when compared to the existing works of both authors), it feels rushed, not so well thought out and there are info-dumps galore, like this one, pertaining to the Enemy:

 

"The Enemy was a great mage-maybe even the best-but he went crazy. He wanted to live forever and make the dead live again. That's why they called him The Enemy of Death, because he tried to conquer death. He started pulling chaos into the world, putting the power of the void into animals... and even people."

 

You know who that sounds like.

 

I feel like a lot of the description is repeated, as if we can't remember when we were first told a couple of paragraphs before, at some points, it does become a little insulting.

 

It's not a total rip off from the original series. There are some themes which make you second guess whether Clare and Black actually realised they were writing something so incredibly similar but there are things that I enjoyed in the book, for example, the inclusion of the elementals, and the underground rivers which I can only assume was to replace the grand staircase of Hogwarts.

 

The elementals each have their own personalities, but aren't entirely trustworthy, must like the ghosts of Hogwarts.

They betray and mislead, getting the students lost frequently and sometimes leading them into the maws of danger. The school even has unsavoury inhabitants which strangely, the Elders don't see fit to banish or at least block off passage to unsuspecting students.

 

Some, if not all of the events in the book have their comparisons to the Harry Potter series, and no doubt I'll shunned because of my comparison to the series, but in my defence, that in no means expresses my enjoyment of the book.

 

I loved the world building that Clack/Blare (ha!) did. The elemental concept, and magic science are extremely intriguing, especially the idea of being completely consumed by an element.

The school itself seems beautiful, especially the mica and quartz laced walls, and not forgetting the magical version of "Be Kind Rewind", in which one student recreates favourite pop culture films using air magic.

The characters and their relationships unfortunately were both predictable and unconvincing, again playing to their obvious comparisons.

And events in the book were predictable, and I feel, sometimes rushed.

And I pretty much spent the entire novel guessing the numerous endings that could have been and yet, I'm pleased to say I was pleasantly surprised.

Yet how the twist could possibly play out is beyond me. It seems very reminiscent of Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant's later books of the series.

I'm only hoping that Clack/Blare unwittingly copy that too.

One series I can cope with, when done well, but two.

Then you are asking for trouble.

Overall, I was expecting something more from Clack/Blare, something wondrous and enticing as most younger novels tend to be, but this really did feel like a remix of an old classic, and despite my enjoyment, I can't help but feel a little disappointed.