Call's father told him all his life to never trust a magician and instructs him to fail the Iron trial, a test you need to pass in order to start your education to become a proper magician, so Call tries his best to mess up, yet he's chosen as a student anyway. He finds himself in the Magisterium, where he not only learns the truth about magic, but also about his past.
"Fire wants to burn, water wants to flow, air wants to rise, earth wants to bind, chaos wants to devour, Call wants to live."
Usually I'm not a big fan of middle grade books, mostly due to the typical writing, for example in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan, that just makes me feel like this book is actually written for primary school kids and I'm a super immature teenager who still reads that stuff, but I honestly have to say that the writing in The iron trial and the sequel The copper gauntlet is very good and genuinly suprised me since it is very similiar to the average writing in Young adult books, so I definitely enjoyed it. Apart from that, the only differences from the Young adult genre is that there's way less romance in it and it's rather focused on friendship, which I honestly liked quite a lot because too much romance can get cheesy and boring very very quickly and can ruin the story for me, and the plot isn't as dramatic, too. Sadly, this resulted in the first part of both books, especially the second one, being kind of slow and nearly boring, but the pace picks up towards the middle of the novel and the story becomes definitely exciting and kind of amazing. Although I did like both books and I'm gonna pick up the third one when it comes out in September, I think because they have a lot of potential, they certainly could've been better. Anyway, the worldbuilding is good and even though the Magisterium sounds like a rather cold and uncomfortable place, I'd still love to be able to explore all the caves. I also quite like the magic system and even though it's not extremely unique, it does have some special aspects, my personal favorite of them are probably the chaos-ridden beings.
This series gets compared a lot to the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling and there are of course a lot of similarities, but once you dive deeper in the story you'll soon realize it takes a completely different turn and, as far as I can tell now, it'll become even more dissimilar as the Magisterium series progresses. A very unique aspect are the mostly small, but sometimes even pretty big plot twists, that are super enjoyable, as well as the humorous and funny way it's written and I'm not gonna lie, I did laugh out loud quite a few times while reading.
Nearly all of the characters are really adorabable and you can't help but adore them, especially the main character Cal and his chaos-ridden pet wolf Havoc. I loved Cal's sassy and funny remarks and thoughts and in general just enjoyed reading from his point of view. It's also kind of refreshing to not have Cal as the "hero" of the story with these awesome and special powers but instead only have him as friend of that "savior", which in this story is Aaron, who I liked quite a lot because of his rather calm and responsible personality and his patience, that's really important if you're friends with someone as chaotic as Call. Tamara is probably my favorite out of the three since she is - like Hermione, with whom she gets often compared with - extremely smart, but unlike her way more relaxed and not super focused on sticking to the rules all the time.
Anyway, if you like reading about magic and enjoy humorous books, I don't think you can go wrong with the Magisterium series, so it's definitely worth checking it out.
Rating:
The iron trial: 3.5/5 ✹
The copper gauntlet: 3/5 ✹
Sadly I couldn't find the matching cover for the second book and got instead this extremely ugly one, and I didn't want to include it in the picture at the top of this post, so here's a small picture of it.Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this review and you're having a happy day!
Leah
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