Item: Queen of Air and Darkness
Rating: 3.5
Author: Anjali Kay

Book Review :: Queen of Air and Darkness, by Cassandra Clare

Queen of Air and Darkness by Cassandra Clare
ISBN: 1471116700
Series: The Dark Artifices #3
Also in this series: Lady Midnight, Lord of Shadows
Published by Simon & Schuster Children's UK
on 2018-12-04
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult
Pages: 893
Source: Simon and Schuster
Find at Simon & Schuster AUS
Goodreads

What if damnation is the price of true love?

Innocent blood has been spilled on the steps of the Council Hall, the sacred stronghold of the Shadowhunters. In the wake of the tragic death of Livia Blackthorn, the Clave teeters on the brink of civil war.

One fragment of the Blackthorn family flees to Los Angeles, seeking to discover the source of the disease that is destroying the race of warlocks.

Meanwhile, Julian and Emma take desperate measures to put their forbidden love aside and undertake a perilous mission to Faerie to retrieve the Black Volume of the Dead. What they find in the Courts is a secret that may tear the Shadow World asunder and open a dark path into a future they could never have imagined.

Caught in a race against time, Emma and Julian must save the world of Shadowhunters before the deadly power of the parabatai curse destroys them and everyone they love.

Last updated on 23 January 2026

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My thoughts on Queen of Air and Darkness

This review is a long time coming. I was meaning to pick up this book over the summer and get it read by early January, but the sheer size of it slightly put me off. When I did finally get around to hiring a fork lift so I could move it from the floor up to my face for better and easier reading (only a slight exaggeration), this whopping great big tome that comes in at 880 pages was a mission and a half to get through. This post has been sitting in my Drafts folder for two weeks now, because I thought I would be done by the end of February, or at least very early March. I was not.

“As we all have an infinite capacity to make mistakes, we all have an infinite capacity for forgiveness.”

[An apt quote from the book – Sorry, Simon and Schuster, for taking so long to review your book!]

Because there is so much happening in this doorstop of a book, I’m not going to try and give you a synopsis of everything because we’d literally be here for days.

But just a few comments: Queen of Air and Darkness continues where Lord of Shadows ended; there’s a pretty major death at the end of that second book (don’t worry, I won’t tell you who), so the first few chapters of Queen of Air and Darkness are the rest of the characters mourning their passing and trying to deal with the remnants of a breaking Shadowhunter world.

There are a whole bunch of elements happening in this book, but the short of it is that cruel Shadowhunters want to rule over the Downworlders (faeries, werewolves, vampires, warlocks) and it’s not a happy time around the place. In fact, the whole book has this sad, grieving feel to it, and perhaps that is another reason it took so long for me to read.

What I enjoyed about Queen of Air and Darkness

Despite it taking me so long to read this book (19 days – that’s really long for me!), and me only giving it a 3.5 stars, I did actually enjoy it. I think it’s this whole world that Clare has created that always draws me into her stories and makes me want to know what’s happening and what the outcome will be. My favourite characters always seem to show up, and while many of the other characters I don’t really care for, it’s those few that keep me reading.

“People were made up of all sorts of different bits … Funny bits and romantic bits and selfish bits and brave bits. Sometimes you saw only a few of them. Maybe it was when you saw them all that you realised you knew someone really well.”

We finally get some answers in this book to the parabatai curse that Emma and Julian have to somehow break if they want to be together, as well as a few other bits and pieces which I won’t go into for fear of spoilers for you.

I’m happy with how it ended, and while I still think there are way too many Blackthorn children to keep a track of, I’m looking forward to reading The Wicked Powers series which won’t be out until like 2022 or something, but I believe it’ll follow Ty Blackthorn and Kit Herondale (who are some of my favourite characters from this series).

Things I felt a bit ‘meh’ about

The first book in this series, Lady Midnight, had a really good plot that involved more than just kicking butt and killing demons (there was a murder mystery element to it), and I especially enjoyed the introduction of Emma Carstairs. In the second book, Lord of Shadows, we have an interweaving of Institutes and the fleshing out of a few side characters who weren’t in the first book that much, more mentioned and maybe made a guest appearance every now and then. And then comes Queen of Air and Darkness and the whole thing gets way too complicated and there are too many things happening all at the same time.

Instead of following just a few threads of the story (like in most Shadowhunter books), we’re following about six (maybe more?!) and while they’re all interwoven and they’re connected to the story … that’s way too many.

The structure of the book is set out so one chapter might chop and change between narrators (all third person, mind you) and realms and locations, so you might have two pages of Emma and Julian doing something here, then a paragraph of Diana in a completely different location doing whatever, and then a page of Ty, then back to Emma … then. Calm down! While I don’t mind the chopping and changing of character perspectives in stories (in fact I think it definitely adds to the depth of a story), I really don’t like the jarring feel that this brought with it. The chapters could have been shorter, and dedicated to one story line at a time.

“Some lights were never meant to burn for long.”

Speaking of storylines, there was a lot happening in this one. I often found myself thinking “okay, but why? Why did this whole section need to be added in?”, and I realise that my gripe may be been length-induced (there comes a point about 500 pages in where you wrestle with wanting to know what will happen and wanting the book to be over), but there was a whole section of the book that I thought could have been reduced right down.

Emma and Julian manage to get into a whole other dimension called Thule, which is basically just Earth as it would have been if Clary had died back at the end of The Mortal Instruments series.

All the characters who are in our Earthly series are there in Thule (unless they’ve died in Thule, like Clary), but many of them are evil and in league with Sebastian Morgenstern who SURPRISE has shown up again because they’re in this alternative dimension. This whole section, which takes up probably about a third of the book, is so long and so unnecessary. The epilogue makes it at least a little worthwhile, sure (no spoilers from me), but we didn’t need it to take up as much room in an already massive book as it did.

Okay, okay. Gripes over.

In case you wondering, I did actually enjoy the book, I did, I promise. But there were too many urgh moments and aspects that meant I couldn’t rate it higher than a 3.5 (or a 3 on Goodreads). I have to say, just to end, I’m glad that The Dark Artifices series is now over; it was good, sure, but it went steadily downhill in terms of my enjoyment of it. I’m looking forward to reading the next series which focus on my favourite characters (Alex and Magnus in The Eldest Cruses series (April), and Ty and Kit in The Wicked Powers series (sometime in 2022)) and also meeting Cordelia Carstairs in Chain of Gold, the first in the upcoming (Nov 2019) The Last Hours series.

Also, check out this great review of Queen of Air and Darkness from Elise aka The Book Actress on Goodreads, because it’s brilliant.

What about you? Have you read Queen of Air and Darkness?

I received this copy of Queen of Air and Darkness from Simon and Schuster AUS for free, in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion or thoughts on the book.