Pretty great at parts, pretty slow at others.
'The Bane Chronicles' are a collection of novellas from one of the side characters of (mainly) The Mortal Instruments series, Magnus Bane. He's pretty funny and has quite the back story. I am less impressed with the story itself than I am with the depth and understanding that Cassandra Clare has with her characters. Genuinely extremely impressive that she is able to write 400 pages on a side character.
I definitely understand why they are novellas because a lot of them just weren't very exciting and it was obvious why they didn't make the cut for any of the main books. That is why I say some parts were really slow. I definitely wouldn't say that it is required reading to understand the Shadowhunter Chronicles.
I really enjoyed that novellas where we got to learn more about characters we'd already met before, like Tessa and Will. I thought the part with Clary was pretty dope as well, and obviously the stories from France were dope. I like how she incorporated a little spin on historical fiction. It was very funny!
All in all, I am very indifferent. I skimmed a lot because at a certain point I just stopped caring about where this man's life was going. The ending really confused me, but that might have just been because I wasn't really in it to win it, ya know? I gave 3/5 stars on GoodReads because, like I said, it had its moments and those moments were great, but the rest were unimpressive. I did enjoy the book as a whole though, and of course it was very VERY well written, but we knew that was going to be the case with any of this author's works!