The Bronze Key is the third instalment in the Magisterium series. Picking up a year after book three (The Copper Gauntlet), Callum and his best friends are now entering the third year of their magical training. Callum has now revealed the truth about his soul to his close friends, as well as his frenemy Jasper and his own father, but is still struggling to maintain his anonymity. However, when a Gold Year student is found murdered, Call becomes aware that there may be an extremely dangerous saboteur in his midst.
This novel is my favourite of the series to date. Not only did we see spectacular breakthroughs in character development, but we also were given a diverting sense of mystery for the entire duration of the novel. This novel kept me constantly on my toes, and I managed to finish the novel in just under three hours. One of the hallmarks of a good mystery novel is having a wide range of possible subjects for the specific crime–which was, in this case, murder–but then completely shocking the audience when the true criminal is eventually revealed. I actually had to put the book down for a few moments just to process what was going on in the story, only to ravenously hang onto the last few pages.
Another fascinating element of this book was how all the characters continued to evolve. When the novel began with The Iron Trial, all of the characters were naive, innocent and careless, but with this novel, the growth of all of the characters was evident in every page. The maturity of the characters was, I suppose, inevitable because of the new challenges they were facing, but I was positively surprised by how the characters had different ways of responding to certain things in wake of their earlier experiences that had shaped them.
All in all, I have nothing bad to say about this book–the characters are great, the story was equally entertaining and poignant, and I can’t wait for more.
Margot McGovern’s Neverland is a complex look into mental health through the lens of a mythical world that most people will be familiar with. Kit, who has repressed memories from traumatic events in her past, finds herself on the island that was her childhood home, now a facility for mentally ill teenagers. As she struggles …
GHOST BIRD follows the tale of Aboriginal twins Laney and Stacey, who grew up in their lower-middle-class rural Australian town. Their idyllic life, however, is thrown for a curveball when Laney mysteriously goes missing after going out with her friends. Through a bizarre series of premonitions that fringe on the supernatural, Stacey becomes obsessed with …
Astrid Sholte’s novel combines urban fantasy and murder mystery in a setting that echoes the popular dystopian-style factions of young adult fiction, but with enough unique elements to make it stand out. The world of Four Dead Queens is reminiscent of fantasy, but instead of magic, there is strange and interesting technology that serves as …
Kate O’Donnell’s debut novel, Untidy Towns, sets up an escapist fantasy, and then fills it with the reality of running away from your troubles. Who hasn’t dreamed of abandoning school and clinging to the safety of home? When Adelaide walks out of her suffocating boarding school, she thinks she’s free to live her life however [...]
The absolutely electrifying Australian crime novel ‘The Tell’ by Martin Chatterton weaves a wickedly satisfying tale of Raze Tanic, an upper-class Sydney student whose family-run an illustrious crime ring in the heart of the Australian city. Raze has everything he could ever want, except the relationship with his father, who has been jailed in a …
The Wishing Spell follows twin siblings Alex and Conner Bailey, who grew up with fairy tales read to them by their grandmother. But when Alex and Conner are magically transported inside their grandmother’s fairy tale treasury, they will be thrust into a world where all their fairy tale characters are extremely real. The two will …
Book Review – The Bronze Key
This novel is my favourite of the series to date. Not only did we see spectacular breakthroughs in character development, but we also were given a diverting sense of mystery for the entire duration of the novel. This novel kept me constantly on my toes, and I managed to finish the novel in just under three hours. One of the hallmarks of a good mystery novel is having a wide range of possible subjects for the specific crime–which was, in this case, murder–but then completely shocking the audience when the true criminal is eventually revealed. I actually had to put the book down for a few moments just to process what was going on in the story, only to ravenously hang onto the last few pages.
Another fascinating element of this book was how all the characters continued to evolve. When the novel began with The Iron Trial, all of the characters were naive, innocent and careless, but with this novel, the growth of all of the characters was evident in every page. The maturity of the characters was, I suppose, inevitable because of the new challenges they were facing, but I was positively surprised by how the characters had different ways of responding to certain things in wake of their earlier experiences that had shaped them.
All in all, I have nothing bad to say about this book–the characters are great, the story was equally entertaining and poignant, and I can’t wait for more.
Ratings:
Characters: 9/10
Writing: 8/10
Plot: 10/10
OVERALL RATING: 9.5
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