A conjuring of light has nothing to do with conjuring light. It is the penultimate book in the series concluding Rhy, Lila and Kell’s adventure together. It wraps up a lot of their storylines very well, but failed to surprise me at all.

So the plot of this novel is to rid themselves of Osaron. His dark magic is spreading like a plague, infecting the city and destroying the world. Kell and company must find the magical McGuffin to save their land. Their goal is standard for a young adult novel and none of the actions that occur deviate from that designation characters that aren’t important die and the ones that aren’t don’t. There is no real sense of tension throughout this book. The only thing that was really surprising was how long it took for the journey to begin, well the journey itself wasn’t much of a journey… The story is divided into three acts. The first act follows the events directly after the second book takes place in Red London, this is the majority of the story. The second act includes discovering the McGuffin, acquiring a ship and sailing to where the McGuffin is. The third act is sailing back and fighting Osaron. The structure would not have been a detriment to the story, if an equal amount of time was spent on each part. Occurrences before discovering the McGuffin and leaving London did little for the story.

There were a lot of character backstories here, but they should have been present in book one or two. It was hard to care about these characters at this point, when the main three have had two stories prior to warm up to the audience. It felt like we were made to care about them, so they could be thrown away. I won’t spoil who but characters that were given a backstory here, were killed off unceremoniously. It felt cheap and the payoff wasn’t there. I do think that the back stories for these characters were well written out and it did make me care for them a little bit, but it was too late. Kell, Rhy and Lila are all still working through some of their issues that were present in the previous two books. Given that the time span of the series is relatively condensed I can forgive that they still haven’t resolved all their problems. The main three do you have some good moments with one another, but nothing new. One character that I do think has some truly interesting development is Holland. He gains the most from the backstory that is present in this novel. I loved getting to learn about him, but I do wish it had come earlier in the series. Otherwise, I think that, even though he doesn’t change his character that much, the context that his story gives to his current persona is so much of a benefit to his character that he may be the best character in this book. The whole series? I’m not sure about that.

There are some really interestingly, written scenes within the castle between Rhy and his father, but the length of that section of the story was so long that I was constantly waiting for the adventure to begin. It dampened the impact of these moments. The action really began when the heroes left to go get the magic object, and that part of the story was too short. If the story had a better balance between its acts, I think it would have been the best book in the series.

If you’re already picking up the third book, then you might as well finish the series. It was an easy read, it only took me a couple days to finish the story and I’m glad I did. The Shades of Magic world is really interesting in its lore. King Maxim’s background in particular is something that I would like to learn more about. The allusions to his adventures really piqued my interest, but it looks like the author decided to write a spin off for Lila instead. I don’t think this is a great choice, because of how the story ends. (She’s also one of the hardest characters to like, for me.) I don’t know how that is going to go, but I’m not interested. For me, the Shades of Magic series ends here and it won’t leave a lasting impression.