Clockwork Prince — The Infernal Devices, Book 2

Clockwork Prince Review

Middle volumes of trilogies carry the hardest structural burden: they must advance the story without resolving it, deepen the emotional stakes without paying them off, and justify their own existence rather than feeling like connective tissue between a beginning and an end. Clockwork Prince not only clears this bar but clears it with room to spare.

The threat to the London Institute — that the Clave will shut it down unless Charlotte Branwell can prove her leadership — gives the novel an urgent external plot that runs alongside the deepening personal entanglements. Will and Jem must identify the Magister, the architect of the clockwork army, before a deadline that also happens to coincide with Tessa’s growing impossibility of remaining neutral between them.

What Clare accomplishes in Clockwork Prince is making the love triangle genuinely painful rather than merely dramatic. In lesser hands, Will and Jem would be differentiated by type — one dark and dangerous, one gentle and safe — and the reader would know from the start which one the heroine should choose. Clare refuses this. Jem is not safe; he is dying, and his goodness is not softness but the hardest kind of courage. Will’s revelation — the curse he has been living under for years, the reason for his deliberate cruelty — arrives in the novel’s middle third and reframes everything that came before.

The scene in which Will finally tells Tessa the truth of his situation is among the finest Clare has written: emotionally specific, long-earned, and complicated by the fact that understanding Will’s behaviour does not resolve anything. Tessa’s feelings for Jem are just as real, and both young men deserve more than a love triangle allows.

The ending’s engagement announcement lands with the force Clare has been building toward all novel long.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — The finest middle volume in the Infernal Devices trilogy, and the book that transforms a promising love triangle into a genuine ethical dilemma.

Reading Order

1. Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, Book 1)
2. Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, Book 2)
3. Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, Book 3)

Reading Guides

• Cassandra Clare Books in Order: Complete Shadowhunters Reading Guide (2026)

What Middle Volumes Owe Their Readers

The best defence against the accusation that middle volumes are merely connective tissue is to demonstrate that they contain something that the first and third volumes could not. Clockwork Prince makes this case. The revelation of Will’s curse — the reason for his years of performed cruelty, the specific price he believed he was paying, the recognition of how wrong he was — could not have landed in the first book, because the relationship between Will and Tessa had not yet been built to the point where the revelation carries its full weight.

Equally, the scene in which Will tells Tessa the truth could not have been saved for the third book, because the resolution of the trilogy depends on Tessa understanding Will fully before she makes the choices she makes. Clockwork Prince is the novel that makes Clockwork Princess’ ending possible, and it does so without diminishing its own identity.

Charlotte Branwell

One of Clockwork Prince’s underappreciated contributions to the Shadowhunter Chronicles is its treatment of Charlotte Branwell. The plot’s external threat — the Clave’s campaign to have Charlotte removed as head of the London Institute — gives Clare the opportunity to examine how institutional power operates against women in the Victorian period, with the Clave’s Shadowhunter politics providing a fantasy parallel to the specific ways Victorian professional and social structures constrained women’s authority.

Charlotte’s competence is never in doubt; the threat to her position comes entirely from those who believe that competence in a woman constitutes a kind of illegitimacy, a violation of the natural order. Clare handles this without anachronism — Charlotte and the women around her operate within the constraints of their period while making visible the irrationality of those constraints.

The Will/Jem Parabatai

The parabatai bond between Will and Jem is the series’ emotional foundation, and Clockwork Prince is where Clare establishes its full depth. The rune-bond between parabatai — a formal magical connection between Shadowhunter warriors who choose to fight as a pair — is presented here as both a genuine intimacy and a structural complication. Will and Jem love each other in a way that the love triangle involving Tessa cannot diminish and cannot be separated from.

The tragedy of the triangle is not simply that two young men love the same woman; it is that three people who care deeply for each other are placed in a situation where it seems impossible for all three of them to get what they need. Clare’s resolution of this — which this volume does not provide but makes thinkable — required establishing the Will-Jem relationship with enough specificity that the reader feels its weight.

London 1878 in Detail

Clare’s Victorian London is rendered with attention to specific historical detail: the smell of coal smoke, the fog that makes navigation by familiar landmarks unreliable at night, the carriage routes and club structures that organised upper-class social life. The Institute’s particular position in London society — the Shadowhunters as neither fully part of the Victorian establishment nor entirely separate from it — is developed with more precision in this volume than in Clockwork Angel, as the external political threat forces its characters to engage with British mundane power structures more directly.

The period detail never becomes historical-fiction pedantry; it is always in service of character and atmosphere.