Should you read The Last King of Faerie?
What works
Dru was my favorite part. Her taste for horror and her habit of sizing people up give familiar Shadowhunter territory a different point of view. Giving her the lead changes what the story notices about the Blackthorns.
What may not work for you
The mission grows predictable halfway through. I wanted more time with the people making uneasy alliances and less time untangling the politics and mythology around those alliances.
Does the ending reward the effort?
I liked how the closing stretch built up urgency again. It gave the main conflicts of this volume enough of a landing that I felt satisfied, with questions I still want to see Clare take up in the next book.
Reading The Last King of Faerie closely
Dru is in her fourth year at Shadowhunter Academy when she is taken to Faerie and held by Prince Ash Morgenstern. Elsewhere, a disappearance forces Kit Herondale and Ty Blackthorn to work together again. There is enough in those two predicaments to get the book moving quickly. What kept my attention was the prospect of finding out how much these three had changed since The Dark Artifices.
The three leads make a good center for the final trilogy because they have such different ways of handling their history. Dru studies people and holds things close. Kit and Ty have years of distance to negotiate before they can even begin to speak plainly. Family loyalty matters to all three, and I liked that loyalty could survive alongside the awkwardness and hurt.
Dru Blackthorn gets to be strange
Dru had a place in The Dark Artifices as the younger Blackthorn sister. Here she gets room for the parts of her personality that role could eclipse. The horror-movie obsession is the most obvious one, but I liked the combination of an analytical mind and a genuinely dark streak. She pays attention to how other people behave, and her own feelings can be harder for her to sort through.
There is something refreshing about a lead who can be perceptive, eccentric, and uncomfortable in her own skin. I was interested in what Dru made of the people around her, especially in a setting where a prince's attention comes with danger. She gives the return to Shadowhunters a perspective of its own.
What Kit and Ty still owe each other
Kit and Ty can share a goal and still have good reasons to keep their guard up. Their silences have weight because the guilt and fear of hurting each other again survive the reunion. I liked that Clare lets those feelings linger even when the two have practical reasons to cooperate.
For me, that relationship does much of the emotional work of the novel. There is affection in it, but also distance and a complicated sense of loyalty. The same tension between caring for someone and understanding them gives Dru's place in the Blackthorn family its interest.
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Faerie is most dangerous when nobody can be taken at their word
I liked the oppressive atmosphere of the Seelie Court. In Faerie, attention from someone powerful can be as threatening as open hostility. Dru has to work out how much she can trust Ash, and that uncertainty gives their encounters an edge. I found the setting familiar for Clare, but the suspicion gives it enough character to affect what her leads do.
The politics are more effective when a character has to decide whom to believe. In the middle, the detours into court affairs and the explanations of how this world works pile up. By then the shape of the mission is already fairly clear, so another explanation can leave the plot waiting in place. I was more invested in the unresolved feelings among the leads than in the mechanics of getting them through the quest.
Should you read The Dark Artifices first?
I would. You can follow why Dru is in danger and what Kit and Ty are trying to do without having read the earlier trilogy. The bigger loss is knowing why a reunion that ought to be welcome can feel so uncomfortable. Lady Midnight, Lord of Shadows, and Queen of Air and Darkness give those scenes their history.
The guide to what to read before The Last King of Faerie separates the full Shadowhunters route from the shorter Dark Artifices route. If you already know that trilogy, the Dark Artifices recap refreshes the relationships and contains major spoilers for those three earlier books.
The eight books like The Last King of Faerie look beyond Shadowhunters for dangerous courts, uneasy alliances, and faerie stories that stand on their own.
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