The Iron Trial Review

Magisterium: The Iron Trial by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare

“Call was afraid of magicians, and he was even more afraid he was one.”

Who is Callum Hunt?

Is he the innocent 12 year old misfit skater or maybe a newbie magician in training with great potential? If so why were the words “KILL THE CHILD” carved in ice by his mother, the last thing she ever did before she died?

Callum has grown up fearing magic and mages because of his father, who left the magic world after his wife died. He’s told of how careless the mage’s are with innocent lives and the experiments on students that happen in Magisterium.  So he when he’s forced to do these tests to win a place at the Magisterium Call is intent on purposely failing not knowing how bad he’s actually going to fail without even trying. Because there are three things needed to pass; magic, knowledge and control and Call has only one. So it’s a surprise to everybody when Call is accepted not only into the school but also be apprentice to the best Mage.

Call and his friends are told their futures in the middle of the book; one will fail, one will die and one is already dead. At first it seems pretty obvious to whom the fates are for but then there’s the shock twist. This isn’t that shocking as when we find out who Aaron is we know that Cal has to equal him in some sort of way.

I did like the aspect of the training and the monthly challenges even though we were actually told about only one challenge and there were only about three lessons which were gone into detail. I also liked the idea of being an apprentice to Mage and working with the other apprentice’s however I didn’t like the trio’s relationship because it felt like there was an entire chunk of their relationship missing, there should have been more scenes where they made mistakes and had adventures. In the book the characters are 12 and at a lot of points in the book it seemed as if they were older and it made it harder to picture a 12 year old going through these events.

There are a lot of comparisons between Harry Potter and The Iron Trial and in the beginning of the book I was mentally listing the comparisons. There were teachers and students very similar to ones at Hogwarts and elements/themes in the book which were also very similar.

One thing I really didn’t like was how many characters were introduced as sub characters because of this I couldn’t connect with most of the characters and I just didn’t care about them.

“Fire wants to burn, water wants to flow, air wants to rise, earth wants to bind, chaos wants to devour.”

★★★☆☆