Bring Back Will And Jem: Sword Catcher Review

“I left you. I thought I was leaving them, but I left you.” 

In 2014, Cassandra Clare and Holly Black ruled the world. If you were on Booktube, or fandom Tumblr, they were everywhere. Authors and best friends, and people ate it up. They’d been friends for about a decade at this point, meeting back when Clare was putting out City of Bones and Holly was doing The Spiderwick Chronicles. I think they were neighbors too. Then they put out a book together… you just had to be there. 

Cassie Clare rose to fame on The Mortal Instruments series. By this point she’s written about a hundred (17) Shadowhunters books. I am a ride or die for the prequel series, The Infernal Devices (Will girls RISE!!!). I don’t even care that before she wrote City of Bones, she was writing Ron and Ginny inc*est fanfiction. It was even called “The Mortal Instrument,” and I’m so serious. The woman who wrote the Will/Jem/Tessa love triangle can do whatever she wants.

Coming off a 17-book run, there’s a lot of expectation that comes with an author starting a new series. Shadowhunters literally defined an entire era of online book fandom. I’m talking Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Divergent, Hunger Games level. Imagine J.K. Rowling comes off Harry Potter and writes something that just sucks and is not well-received! Oh, nevermind, that actually happened already. 

Sword Catcher came out in October 2023, and I’m not on BookTok or Booktube the way I used to be, but I still felt like it was published with very little fanfare. Maybe I’m wrong, but I didn’t see much about it anywhere. It’s blurbed by George R.R. Martin though! He said it’s “everything I look for in fantasy!” 

I picked it up, because I like The Infernal Devices so much. Also because my best friend and I agreed to read it together, but then she never read it. The synopsis sounded interesting enough. It follows Kel, taken as a child from an orphanage and raised to look, talk, walk, and act as Prince Conor does. He learns to take his place in public appearances, and is trained to die for him if necessary. The office of the Sword Catcher is a secret one. On the outside, Kel is a distant cousin of the prince. After a “failed assassination attempt,” Lin is brought into Kel and Conor’s orbit (I will explain the quotation marks in a second). Lin is Ashkar, a small sect of people still in possession of some magical ability, forced to live behind walls, ostracized. She’s a gifted physician. After said assassination attempt, they all mysteriously get pulled into the world of the Ragpicker King, the criminal overlord of the city of Castellane. 

What do I mean by “assassination attempt?” It’s not even. Kel gets cornered by a group of criminals, reporting to the Ragpicker King’s adversary, and they think he is Prince Conor. Prince Conor owes a debt, Kel gives himself away by not knowing what they’re talking about. Then Kel gets stabbed, but he lives. The reason I disagree with calling it an “assassination attempt” is because they didn’t think he was Conor when they stabbed him, and they also didn’t mean to stab him, really. Things got out of hand. Annie, that is so nitpicky, shut up! Authors don’t write their own synopsis. I know, I know. 

This book is fine. What I’m learning with Cassie is, you gotta give her a minute. Let her cook. Let it percolate. I didn’t love the first Infernal Devices book, but I stuck with it and I really love it now. Taken on its own, it's fine! It’s a good book! Cute! That is by no means an excuse to deliver a lukewarm first entry into a series, however. Most people won’t stick around. You don’t build anticipation for a series by holding out until the very end of the book and hope it's enough to draw them in for part two. I can’t even in good faith say “trust me on this” and recommend this book, because I don’t know if she will pull it off again, I don’t know what the next book will be like. 

Castellane, the city-state backdrop, is interesting. I like the socio-economic and political set-up of the Charter families being the ones really in power because they control all commerce. The monarchy holds absolute power in name, but it’s a “we all know what's really going on here” style government. Castellane is modeled after Rome. It’s easy to follow, in my opinion, for people who are familiar with fantasy worldbuilding. There’s so much meaningless world-building and set-up that by the time you get to the inciting incident, you’d trudged through a third of the book, leaving a bunch of scenes behind you that were basically handed to you on the back of the book. 

It’s all political strife and set-ups for the future that never pay off in this book. I don’t care about any of it when there’s no compelling relationship to sit in front of it. Conor and Kel are great, I love them. I love how they love each other, I just wanted more of it. There’s a lot there to be pulled apart, and I know Clare can write good old fashioned bromantic pining, I’ve seen her do it, but this never manifested here. Granted, I’m sure she wants to escape anything that reminds the reader of Shadowhunters, but when you’re good at something, you should DO IT! There’s not a single other character in this book that I care about. I don’t even think I can tell you a personality trait of any of them. The King, the Queen, all of Conor’s noble friends, Jolivet, Mayesh, Lin and the other Ashkar, they are all smudged into the background. Lin is supposed to be a main character, and I could barely hold on throughout her scenes. What are we doing, what are we talking about? And after all the doing and talking, where did it get us? She has so much potential to be a real character, unlike the Y/N female inserts Clare has been so good at giving us. And it felt like an honest attempt at it, but it was all prologue. 

Four small nitpicks, because I have to say them. 

One: Calling morphine “morphea” as a slight fantasy-ification of the word…. Girl…. 

Two: the Princess Luisa of Sarthe is ELEVEN years old. Why is she acting like that? She literally splashes the water and giggles and claps her hands at one point. You know, like a baby! She is most amused by a toy ball! You know, like a baby! Has Cassie Clare ever met an 11 year old? 

Three: a lot of the writing is great. This woman has written so many books, she’s got it down. But there are a few instances of what in the fuck is this, and here’s one: “Kel, feeling uneasy as if an ant had crawled into his collar and was scrabbling about…” HUH? 

And Four: We get it, they’re all gay. Why is it, that every time she brings up that a character was with someone, or could be with someone, or one character asks where another was, it goes like this: “You must have been with a girl? Or a boy?” Like she has to remind us that all the people in this book are queer and she has solved homophobia because hey!! Even the prince is allowed to marry a man. Just let them be bisexual in peace oh my god. 

Let me wrap up by saying, I think book two might actually be fantastic. In the last 50 pages, you can see this really start to light up. If you’re brave enough to trudge through the mud of the first 500 or so pages, you might be rewarded. Maybe! But there’s too much nothing in here to warrant the time spent. Kel I will avenge you, you deserved better. You could have been a really good character. 

I’ve seen some plagiarism allegations against Clare for this, saying she’s ripped of V.E. Schwab’s Darker Shade of Magic. I can’t speak on that, I haven’t read it. I’m just saying I know the allegations are there and don’t think I brushed over them. Clare plagiarized her own best friend in this very book! The scene where Kel poisons himself while poisoning someone else, is a very huge rip-off of a very famous scene in the end of smash hit worldwide phenomena The Cruel Prince by Holly Black. So I'm not shocked she’d plagiarize someone else too. I wonder what her reasoning to Holly was. 

2.5/5