Book Review: These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong...broke me in ways I never thought a book would. I thought that this was a nice, cute story about Juliette and Roma being all cute and stuff, BUT NO. Throw in a monster, and OH HELLO Y’ALL. This book immediately sucked me in the moment I read the first line in the book-In glittering Shanghai, a monster awakens. If that sentence doesn’t pull you in, I don’t know what will.

This fantastic book is about two gangs-The Scarlet Gang, ran by the Cai family, and the White Flowers, ran by the Montagov family. A madness is going around Shanghai, and it’s affecting the gangs, and both Juliette and Roma work together to stop all of this...if one can stop trying to pull out guns and knives at one another, this would be a perfect book. But nope. Add in the communists, a monster, a French gentleman who reminds me WAY TOO MUCH of Dex Dexter from Dynasty, and you have one hell of a story.

I loved the action so much in this book, and the monster and how it seemed like the Communist Zhang Gutai was behind it all. I honestly believed that it was him after all, summoning the monster to get rid of nearly half the workers and the gangsters on both sides-but at the end, they were wrong. So, so wrong. It wasn’t Zhang Gutai like they thought.

No, no, no.

It was actually his assistant, Mr. Qi Ren, who turned into the monster and sent out all those bugs after everyone-and I think he was controlled by Paul Dexter, that scheming son of a gun. But the shocker was the truth about what happened at that bombing with Juliette’s Nurse, and then Juliette getting her revenge on the White Flowers by telling them where Lady Montagova was. BUT WHEN JULIETTE SHOT MARSHALL...I went “Juliette WHY” and thought he was dead, but then it was all a rouse to show her cousin, Tyler (whomst I hate with a passion), but at least Marshall is okay.

BUT THE SIDE CHARACTERS. Kathleen, Benedikt and Marshall, Alisa, Tyler-ALL OF THEM WERE SO, SO GOOD. They were so fleshed out that I liked and loved all of them-all except Tyler, he can go to hell. And the secrets that came out...OMG. I was hanging on to my seat while reading them. I give this book a five out of five stars because of how good it really is. A Romeo and Juliet retelling? Sign me up PLEASE.

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Book Review: Clockwork Princess, an Infernal Devices novel by Cassandra Clare

Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book...was so beautiful that I cried. Yes, I, Brittany, cried after I read this book. This is the third book of the Infernal Devices, and I didn’t mean for it to just come and hit me like a trailer truck like that. I was expecting so many things to come at me all at once, to tell you the truth. I thought it was going to be a happy ending for me, for my favorite couple, everything. But NO. NO, NO, NO, NO. It just...fuckin’ hell, it hurts like hell and I kept crying at the end of it.

So basically it starts off at the end of Clockwork Prince, where Will’s sister Cecily shows up, demanding that he comes home, but thanks to the law, he cannot go home ever again. So Cecily became a Shadowhunter while the Lightwood boys, Gideon and Gabriel, stays there as well. Gideon had fallen in love with Sophia, but Sophia was worried about what Charlotte says, because she’s a maid at the London Institute and didn’t want to leave Charlotte alone. Gabriel’s just upset that his father was slowly going mad-and he did go slowly mad. He was mad because of Mortmain, and he turned into a giant snake that killed Tatiana’s husband. Everyone went to the Lightwood Manor and fought the snake monster, only for Gabriel to kill the demon by shooting an arrow in the eye (oof).

Then Consul Wayland shows up at the Institute after writing Charlotte a bunch of letters telling her to stand down and basically starts yelling at her and reminds her that he’s the Consul and she has to to everything she says, thinking that because she’s a woman she runs with her feelings and not with her heart, which is first of all sexist and bullshit because Charlotte can take care of everyone in the damn place, so fuck you my guy. Just fuck you. Then the worst thing came to light, when the clockwork/infernal devices came and took Tessa away, and then Jem, my poor baby Jem, was dying. And this was when Jessamine came back to them with the Silent Brothers, only for her to get killed by the clockworks that came to take Tessa away.

On his deathbed, Jem told Will to go and get Tessa back, but not before he asked him, “What did Magnus mean by asking you if I knew you were in love with Tessa?" to which, I shit you not, in Will’s head I think he went ‘DAMN’ and then those two had a talk about it, in which Will confessed to Jem about being in love with Tessa, but he couldn’t because of the engagement between her and Jem. After they talked about it, Jem told Will to go get Tessa back from the Magister, and he did, and then he died and was turned into a Silent Brother and was given a new name, Brother Zachariah, but to both Tessa and Will, he was still their Jem.

At the same damn time, both Lightwood brothers are being used as a pawn in Consul Wayland’s plan to bring down Charlotte, asking them to spy on her, and they did do it, sending false letters about what was being talked about in Charlotte’s letters, but it turns out that Charlotte wasn’t writing about anything bad-she talked to her uncle who was dealing with a sickness, and anything else that wasn’t doing anything bad.

But Tessa...poor, poor Tessa. Getting kidnapped by the clockwork that turned Mrs. Dark into a clockwork herself, she was presented to the Magister and was forced to turn into his father and watched horribly as she/his father wrote a spell that uses demon energies to tie to something-in this case, Mortmain’s clockwork soldiers. The more Tessa begged for Mortmain to let her go or to stop it, he took her to a village...where he killed everyone (all except Will, who escaped) and told her not to play on his humanity-he has none left to give. Sadly, that didn’t stop Will from finding her, and the two confessed their love for each other I believe and then they intercoursed until they were interrupted by Magnus Bane, who came in through the portal that he and Henry made to come and save Tessa. Once everyone is there, that is when Mortmain shows up with his clockwork army, and a fight commences.

Henry lost his legs, Will was surprised to see Jem fighting as a Silent Brother, and Tessa turned into the angel locked up in her necklace to stop Mortmain and the clockworks. In the end, Will proposed to Tessa, Gabriel and Cecily are dating, Sophia ascended, Charlotte became Consul and had her child, and Magnus left for New York. And the epilogue broke me, but at the same time I loved it so much that I really didn’t care because it left me in tears. A Five out of Five book for me.

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