Sarah’s Review of The Mortal Instruments Book Six City of Heavenly Fire by Cassandra Clare

City of Heavenly Fire is the last book in the series The Mortal Instruments and this last installment did not disappoint! The concluding novel was amazing and written superbly. It should be said, that in order to fully understand the book you need to read the others. In short, Clary and her friends, Jace, Alec, and Isabelle are Shadowhunters, they help to guard the world from demons by fighting them and sending them back to their world. This world where Shadowhunters are needed to fight demons also inhabits vampires, werewolves, warlocks, even faeries or the fair folk.

In City of HeavenlyFire, Clary and her Shadowhunter friends are faced with the biggest challenge they have faced so far. They are challenging Clary’s brother, Sebastian Morgenstern, who has managed to turn Shadowhunters against one another with the Infernal Cup. He has turned them from brave, demon hunting Nephilim to almost robotic like beings that have no resemblance to their former selves. They are called the Endarkened and the Shadowhunters are faced with fighting these Endarkened who were once one of them, which leads to some very hard feelings. Sebastian begins by attacking different institutes, turning more and more Nephilim into Endarkened, growing his dark army ever bigger and tearing families apart. With the institutes being attacked, the rest of the Shadowhunters run to Idris, which should keep all demons away, but it can’t even keep out Sebastian. It seems as though every Shadowhunter is locked away in Alicante, which means that nobody is out there guarding the rest of the world from demons.

Clary, Jace, Alec and Isabelle find out about a huge betrayal amongst some of their so called allies and decide to take the fight against Sebastian and the Endarkened into their own hands, even if it means entering the demon-realm, Hell, without knowing if they will ever return.

I want to start off by saying that I found it a little bit difficult to get wrapped up into Part One of the book. There wasn’t much action and it was a lot of building up for new characters (which will be a new series) and working the way to the climax of the book, which inevitably was found in Part Two. But as soon as I began the second part, I could hardly put the book down. The action and the writing just draws you in and leaves you wanting more.

So many themes are found running around in this book. While the biggest them of course is about good and evil, Heaven and Hell, angels and demons, you find that almost everywhere you look there is also love. One thing made clear through the book is that it is so important to be honest and open with the ones you love and to trust them. I found this final book to wrap up the series beautifully.

This book will leave you with so many emotions. Some will make you happy, some will make you sad, angry, mournful, ecstatic, etc. But that is what a true writer does. She can take the pen and create her words to take you into a world like you’ve never known before and yet feel as though you’ve always been there right beside the characters. Her writing also shows through her characters that some memories and experiences are so important that nothing and nobody can take them away from us. Even if they are blocked from our conscious mind they are still there subconsciously, molding the person we are. The past makes us who we are and we should not hide from it, even if we are not fully proud of where we came from or some of the decisions we have made. Every experience we have helps to make us into the person we are today.

The characters are so relatable, even some of the eccentric ones. I think at some level we can see bits and pieces of ourselves somewhere in the Shadowhunter world or within their friends and allies. I love how the author makes each character so different. They are all so unique and it’s that uniqueness that makes them work so well together. This book dives even deeper into the lives of the Shadowhunters and friends and we feel like we really know who they are inside and out.

The ending to the series has everything you’d ever want in a Shadowhunter book and then some. As the big battle gears up we inevitably expect to read about loss, but being invested in so many main characters makes you nervous. Not to worry though. I won’t give any spoilers, but each person’s story concludes in a pretty spectacular way, some leaving you wondering what could happen next in their lives. I’m sure the new series will touch upon their stories as well, at least I’d hope they bring in some of these characters.

If you have read the other books in The Mortal Instruments series, then I’m going to say that you definitely need to read this last and final book. The outcome is amazing and even though some parts make you think you know how it’s going to end, you are never sure until it happens and then it isn’t what you’d expect. I was surprised at how everything came to end, but it was fascinating.