Clockwork Angel

Overview

Cassandra Clare's Clockwork Angel opens The Infernal Devices, a prequel trilogy to her Mortal Instruments series, transplanting her modern urban-fantasy premise into gaslit, fog-bound Victorian London. Tessa Gray, a young American, arrives in the city expecting to reunite with her brother and instead is seized by the Dark Sisters, agents of a secretive cabal called the Pandemonium Club. Her captors are less interested in her person than in an ability she has only just discovered: she can transform, briefly, into someone else entirely.

Once she escapes into the protection of the Shadowhunters, demon-hunting warriors who police the boundary between the human world and the supernatural one, Tessa finds herself entangled in both a conspiracy against them and a quieter, more personal complication: an evolving attachment to two young men, James and Will, whose closeness to each other is as central to the story as their closeness to her.

The novel builds its stakes around a masked mastermind, the Magister, who wants Tessa's shape-shifting power for his own ends, forcing her to weigh loyalty to her brother against the safety of the people who have taken her in.

A Victorian Frame for a Contemporary Sensibility

Clockwork Angel sits at an interesting angle to the rest of Clare's Shadowhunter universe: it keeps the mythology of demons, angelic weaponry, and hidden societies that made City of Bones popular, but filters it through Victorian manners, class anxiety, and clockwork gadgetry rather than present-day New York. That combination has made the trilogy a gateway text for readers moving from historical romance into fantasy, and vice versa, and it has kept the book in steady circulation among the same young readers who found the original series through school libraries and word of mouth.

The novel is also notable for how openly it develops emotional and romantic tension between three characters at once, including an intimacy between Will and James that many readers and critics have read as more than platonic friendship. Clare has been candid that this thread was intentional, and it has become one of the more discussed aspects of the series among longtime fans, distinguishing the book from more conventional YA love-triangle plots even as it uses that structure on its surface.

Why Clockwork Angel Has Been Challenged

Objections to Clockwork Angel, which this catalog records as challenged in 3 states and 5 districts, center on the same broad concerns raised against much of Clare's work: depictions of romantic and physical intimacy considered too mature for the middle-grade and early-teen readers who make up a large share of its audience, and the queer-coded relationship between two of its central male characters. Some challenges also point to the book's occult trappings, including demons, dark magic, and secret societies, as inappropriate subject matter for school shelves. Because the novel is frequently shelved alongside the original Mortal Instruments books, it has at times been swept into broader challenges targeting Clare's work as a whole rather than objections to this title specifically.