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Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instrument Series (3 Books): City Of Bones; City Of Ashes; City Of Glass (2010)

by Cassandra Clare(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1442430044 (ISBN13: 9781442430044)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Margaret K. McElderry Books

review 1: Ok. I'll put it out there. I don't like this series. As an educated 18 year old girl, I picked up the City of Bones having seen the movie trailer and thought I should probably read the book before I watched the movie. I bought the first three books (in my defence, they were on offer) and dove in. All three, frankly, were disappointing.The whole thing is full of tropes- "good girl saves bad boy with heart of gold", "lead male is sexy, violent, funny and broken", "Good wrestles Evil in a World Beyond the Ken of Mankind", "all characters, regardless of age etc. are hot, badass and probably dressed entirely in black". You get the picture. Clare makes some attempts to freshen up the genre. Sometimes the humour is actually funny. Sometimes, not so much. The witty one-liners from... more Jace (the sexy, violent, funny, broken male lead) are forced. In trying to make the whole thing a rich, intricate, darkly humourous series, Clare has made every character sarcastic to the point that its hard to tell their lines apart. Admittedly some points are pretty good. At least the token member of an ethnic minority is Jewish rather than the standard African-American or Hispanic-American. Or, Heaven forbid, a member of a North American tribe that can shape-shift into wolves. This is fine. As a multiracial child, I like my stories to have a proper balance of ethnicities and so on. There are, however, more sophisticated ways of doing it. It’s fine to be politically correct. There is only so much to gain from notoriety. However, there comes a point when the subplots of a story can become too obviously contrived and it tends to be when people try to be suitably diverse, whether this be in the skin colour, eye colour, sexual orientation or political opinions of their characters. There is so much the reader does not care about. As you write, you may think that it is the best idea in the world to demonstrate the subtle interplay of emotions between a gay couple just to show how cosmopolitan you are. However, what the reader wants, really wants right now, is for you to get on with the yarn. On the other hand, the language is lurid to say the least. Not lurid swearing-up-and-down-the-page, but lurid I-left-the-metaphor-tap-on-whilst-I-went-on-holiday. There are soap opera-esque love-triangles, or possibly rectangles, all over the place. The fight scenes are overstated. The story line is melodramatic, convoluted and perilously close to tortuous. Clare mixes up mythology, twists every point of reference we have and expects it to morph into a moving, passionate, exciting saga that doesn't come across as overly extended. Unfortunately, it does. She might as well have dedicated a page at the start of each book to a notice saying "Nicked this from Myths and Legends of the Globe". A manuscript heavily sprinkled with awkward intertextuality does not a novel make. The quote from Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) at the beginning of the very first book is a cumbersome case in point. It's always nice when your series title has its origins in really CULTURED stuff.In fact, The Mortal Instruments ticks practically every box on the YA Fantasy checklist. It has supernatural creatures- read vamps, werewolves, faeries (spelled with "ae" for extra oomph), demons and their hunters, angels; gnomic utterances; quotes filched from poems, plays and classic books; hot young characters, hot older characters, hot immortal characters; an improbably blessed hero and heroine; a beautiful magical city that coincidentally exists kind-of-not-exactly in Europe, which is to all intents and purposes almost another world for a surprising number of Americans; cruelty, sex, violence, magic, death and music seem to feature overtly. At what point are YA authors going to realise that there is a market out there for intelligent YA fantasy?I realise thus far my review has been almost entirely negative- here's where we balance up. Kind of. I'm not sure how much balancing is possible. It's not a story directly about vampires/werewolves/faeries- demon-hunters are (as far as I'm aware) new for this genre. Not the most original, but new. This is good. I've seen reviews saying that the character development is incredible. Matter of opinion. Some of it is very, very predictable. Apparently the world Clare creates is "visionary". Again, this is a matter of opinion. It all seems quite standard to me. There are demons, there are angels, there are creatures that fall somewhere in between, there are humans and there are Shadowhunters (which are part human, part angel). There are weapons that kill all these creatures. The most interesting concept in the whole series is that of the Runes, the angelic equivalent of Expelliarmus, Avada Kedavra and so on and so forth, that have to be drawn with an angelic pen, or stele. I feel that more expansion could have occurred around this point, AND we could still have had the torrid romance, bloody fight scenes and glorious victories on the part of the good guys.Alright, its not Bella & Edward. The series can be amusing, even enjoyable in places. The female lead is capable of taking part in a fight without her boyfriend rescuing her- on occasion she rescues him, which is nice- but sadly she succumbs to the age-old stereotype of not realising that yes, she is attractive and she just cannot understand how she could be so lucky to be going out with this hot, sexy, badass demon-hunter. But this isn't the kind of intelligent fiction I would expect teenagers- let alone twenty-somethings- to be reading and enjoying for anything more than the comedy factor of the sheer OTT. This is not a revival of the YA fantasy sub-genre. This is the last shovelful of soil onto its coffin.
review 2: Like my favourite series ever. Such a captivating perspective on the world and personally, I love reading about fantasy and parallel worlds. This really suited my liking and all the characters are really well constructed. I'm really sad that the series has comne to an end, but Cassandra Clare has confirmed she is writing about three more series featuring the same world and similar characters. (The Dark Artifaces, The Bane Chronicles and short stories about Simon). less

Download links for: Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instrument Series (3 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass

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