The Red Scrolls Of Magic by Cassandra Clare | Book Review

Name of the book – The Red Scrolls of Magic

Author – Cassandra Clare

Genre – Fantasy

My Rating – ⭐⭐⭐

My Review (non-spoiler)

First I would like to warn you something about this book – brace yourselves for extreme boredom in the beginning. The first half of the book was so monotonous, I nearly DNF’d it. But I was curious so as to who really was the villain (emphasis on curious, because in most books, I am not merely curious, I am dying to find out) so somehow I continued reading. I must admit, I am glad I did, because the rest of the book was much better.

The action and the actual plot began after around 60% of the book. And its not like there was any character-building or world-building in the first half. Come to think of it, the first half of the book wasn’t telling any story at all.

^{“I’ve realized—I don’t need to change. And neither do you, Helen, or you, Aline. It’s the world that needs to change, and we’re going to be the ones to change it.”}

Then I would like to tell you that the synopsis was a little misleading. You know, the “revealing the secrets they’ve both been keeping” part. Firstly, there was no such secret Alec had (I was actually looking forward to this) and secondly, Magnus did not reveal his secret.

The twist (I mean the one where we know who was the ‘villain’) was very unexpected and quite clever, I must say. It was one that I should have seen coming, but didn’t. As for the other twist, the one on the very last page, very last sentence, well, THAT was a big and really shocking one.

^{“He did not want to die in this banal pit, surrounded by the pallid ghosts of past mistakes, but if he had to die, he planned to die with style.”}

Raphael Santiago is officially my new favorite character. I loved how he was portrayed in this book, as somebody who pretends he is heartless, when he actually does care about people, and does his best to help them. That moment when Alec found out who Raphael was texting at the party, that just broke my heart.

Although I rated this book 3 stars, which is a pretty average rating, I don’t think I will be reading the next books in this series, because this just failed to engross me and have that need to know more (know that feeling anyone?).

Hope you liked my review and it helped to convince you to read or not to read this book. I would also like to tell you that while this book was not that great, all the other Cassandra Clare books I have read (the Mortal Instruments series and the Infernal Devices trilogy) were really good, so I’d recommend that you check them out!