Where do you even start with this book? So much happening, so much emotion, so much angst!!

Lady Midnight takes place a few years after The Mortal Instruments and focuses on Emma Carstairs and her life in the Los Angeles Institute with her parabatai Julian Blackthorn and his family. We met all of these characters in City of Heavenly Fire so it was nice going into a brand new story still feeling like you knew the characters or already had some measure of who they were. It was also very refreshing getting a story from the POV of a character who has grown up in the Shadowhunter world and already has it a part of their very soul like Emma.I definitely felt the loss of a sassy, handsome, slightly tortured male love interest like Jace and Will Herondale but I felt at times that Emma was a female version.

There was so much in this that had been hinted at in City of Heavenly Fire and The Shadowhunter Academy novellas about Mark and I' so glad he was a main character in this book. He's so tortured and intriguing and I think I would have loved him to be in every single scene because Mark, Mark, Mark!

There was definitely a lot of tropes overused as usual in a style I've come to associate with Cassandra Clare but for the first time in one of her series, I wasn't totally invested in the romance. It was always Jace and Clary for me, and then Tessa and Will but Emma and

Julian

just didn't do it for me for a long time. I think it might be because Julian is so different to our normal characters, he was a bit more of a Jem and as you can tell I'm a Will girl. He's so safe and dad-like and for me that's boring. I actually shipped Emma with Mark for a while

(which means I'm interested to see how things play out in the next book because I want some pretend feelings to become real, oh yes I do).

This was such a strong start to what's going to be a great series. I've been wondering about the lose Herondale since the second novella in the Shadowhunter Academy. I knew it wouldn't have been mentioned so off-hand without it being some sort of significance later on. I definitely suspected

Kit

of being the lost Herondale so I'm glad I was right. I can't wait to see where it goes - especially with the fact he has grown up in the world so isn't a complete mundane alá Clary and Tessa.

And can we talk about Ty for a minute? I LOVE that we have a character like him (who seems to fall on to the autistic spectrum), and Arthur and that it's talked about. I hate The Clave, always have. Pretty much everything they do is awful and imprisoning people for mental health is archaic. I really hope this gets more time, and turned around, in the rest of this series. I can't wait to see where we go from here!

And can we talk about that Clary and Jace story? CLARY WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?