A Conjuring of Light — Shades of Magic, Book 3

A Conjuring of Light Review

A Conjuring of Light is the conclusion of one of the best fantasy trilogies of the 2010s, and it delivers. Schwab spends 600 pages dismantling the world she spent two books building — not out of nihilism, but out of a clear-eyed understanding that the threat she has staged requires real stakes.

The antagonist introduced in A Gathering of Shadows turns out to be the most formidable the series has staged: a power that doesn’t want to conquer but to consume, with a logic of its own that Schwab renders carefully. Holland, the book’s most morally complex character, comes to the fore — his chapters are some of the best in the trilogy, and his arc resolves in a way that is both surprising and inevitable.

Kell and Lila: The central relationship, carefully calibrated across three books, reaches its conclusion without collapsing into easy resolution. Schwab is more interested in who these characters are becoming than in giving readers the ending they’ve been rooting for — which turns out to be far more satisfying.

Rhy: The prince’s arc, which began as a complication to Kell’s story, becomes one of the trilogy’s most genuinely moving threads. His chapters in this book are where Schwab’s emotional intelligence is most fully on display.

The ending: Generous without being saccharine. Schwab honours the losses the story has required while leaving her characters somewhere worth arriving at.

Verdict: The finest volume of the trilogy and a thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the Shades of Magic world. Essential reading for fans of character-driven fantasy.

Shades of Magic Reading Order

1. A Darker Shade of Magic
2. A Gathering of Shadows
3. A Conjuring of Light ← you are here

Reading Guides

• V.E. Schwab Books in Order: Shades of Magic, Villains, and Complete Guide (2026)

Holland’s Arc: The Trilogy’s Moral Center

If A Darker Shade of Magic belongs to Kell and Lila, A Conjuring of Light belongs, in its most essential passages, to Holland Vosijk. The White London Antari introduced as an antagonist in the first novel — controlled, ruthless, apparently without conscience — is revealed across this final volume to be one of the series’ most tragic figures: a man who has been controlled and used for so long that he no longer remembers what he wanted for himself.

Schwab gives Holland chapters that reconstruct his history with the same careful attention she has given Kell and Lila, and the effect is to reframe the entire trilogy in retrospect. Holland is not a villain but a victim of the system the trilogy has been critiquing — a world in which power is hoarded by the few, in which Antari are instruments rather than people, in which White London’s brutality was always structural. His arc ends in a way that is both surprising and completely earned: a resolution that cost him everything and was, in its own terms, a kind of freedom.

Osaron and the Nature of Magical Corruption

The antagonist is Osaron, the sentient magic that consumed Black London and has now found a way into Red London through the events of the first novel. Osaron is not a character in the conventional sense — it is power without conscience, magic that has developed the ability to want things and cannot distinguish between wanting and consuming. Schwab renders it carefully: a force that promises exactly what each person most desires, and delivers it in a form that destroys them.

As a villain, Osaron is less personally menacing than the human antagonists of the first two books, but it serves the trilogy’s larger argument. The magic that killed Black London was not external corruption — it was the natural endpoint of a magic unchecked by the human capacity for restraint and sacrifice. Osaron makes the question explicit: what does it cost to refuse the thing that is offering you everything?

Rhy Maresh: From Complication to Revelation

Rhy, Kell’s adoptive brother and the prince of Red London, enters this book as a character whose life is literally bound to Kell’s — a consequence of the first novel’s crisis. In A Conjuring of Light, Schwab takes that structural fact and makes it the center of Rhy’s psychological story. He cannot die while Kell lives; he feels every wound Kell sustains; he must navigate what it means to live a life he knows was bought with someone else’s choice, and what he owes to the people of Ravka who need their prince whole.

Rhy’s chapters are where Schwab’s emotional intelligence operates most fully. His relationships with his parents, with his own grief, with what he wants and what he is willing to sacrifice — these are rendered with a subtlety and care that elevates him from supporting character to one of the trilogy’s most genuinely moving presences.

What the Conclusion Does

A Conjuring of Light earns its ending not through triumph but through honesty about cost. The people who survive the events of this novel are different from the ones who entered it. Some of those differences are damage. Some are growth. Schwab does not pretend these are easy to distinguish. What the trilogy has been asking — what is the relationship between extraordinary power and the ordinary human being who wields or is shaped by it? — is answered here not with a thesis statement but with the evidence of lives changed by the encounter.

The Shades of Magic trilogy is one of the finest completed fantasy series of the 2010s, and A Conjuring of Light is the conclusion that justifies everything that came before it.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.6/5 — A Conjuring of Light is the conclusion the trilogy earned — emotionally devastating, structurally tight, and generous with its characters in ways that make the inevitable losses land harder. Schwab closes the Shades of Magic world with a confidence that has made it one of the decade’s most beloved fantasy series.