The book of the week is City of Bones, the first book in the Mortal Instruments series. If the title sounds familiar, that is probably because this particular book was just made into a movie that was released within the last few weeks. The movie looked good enough to motivate me to read the book, something I had been meaning to do for ages anyway.
Summary: "When fifteen-year-old Clary Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City, she hardly expects to witness a murder—much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. Then the body disappears into thin air. It’s hard to call the police when the murderers are invisible to everyone else and when there is nothing—not even a smear of blood—to show that a boy has died. Or was he a boy?
This is Clary’s first meeting with the Shadowhunters, warriors dedicated to ridding the earth of demons. It’s also her first encounter with Jace, a Shadowhunter who looks a little like an angel and acts a lot like a jerk. Within twenty-four hours Clary is pulled into Jace’s world with a vengeance, when her mother disappears and Clary herself is attacked by a demon. But why would demons be interested in ordinary mundanes like Clary and her mother? And how did Clary suddenly get the Sight? The Shadowhunters would like to know...
Exotic and gritty, exhilarating and utterly gripping, Cassandra Clare’s ferociously entertaining fantasy takes readers on a wild ride that they will never want to end." Summary courtesy of amazon.com.
The Good: Obviously, this story is really unique. So much YA fiction is either really plain and unimaginative or just ripping off someone else's good idea, which really made this a breath of fresh air (There's too much first love and vampire fiction in the "teen" section at Barnes and Noble for my taste; I was there over the weekend and there is now a subsection dedicated to "paranormal romance." Why is there so much of it that it deserves its own heading? But I digress.). I really like the narrator, Clary. She seems older than her years, which I can certainly appreciate, because she's only supposed to be 15. I also really enjoyed the different ways that Cassandra Clare changed the norms for mythical creatures. Vampires, for example, have super-thin, needle-like incisors rather than fangs. Clare also developed a whole culture and homeland for the Shadowhunters that was very Harry Potter-esque in a way that a Potterhead like me could really appreciate.
The Bad: This, like the book from my previous post, was also too long. There was a really silly and unnecessary conflict thrown in involving one of the characters turning into a rat which added nothing to the story, just to the length. It would be a much better book without it, so much so that I couldn't help but wonder what Clare was thinking. It would have been much better suited to being a supplementary short story of its own. Clare also threw in a plot twist at the very end of the book that was a complete game-changer. It was a clever way to spin the story, but I hated it. So. Much. It changed my impression of the interactions between two of the main characters in the entire rest of the book, and not in a good way. This, too, was completely unnecessary, in my opinion. There was definitely another way to add in a plot twist without ruining a large part of the story.
Overall Score: The fact that this is the first book in a series and I'm not running to pick up the next book says a lot. Keeping this in mind, I'm going to give it a 5. I'll definitely never read it again, but I did like the story, overall. So it falls right in the middle.
Would I recommend this to a fellow bookworm?
I'm really on the fence with this one. I think that if you like fantasy, you'd like this story. It was definitely a page-turner, and I honestly did enjoy most of it. The end just soured my opinion of it so greatly that it's giving me a hard time. So I'm going to go with a strong yes for fantasy fans, but if you're not sure if this a story you'd like, then I would probably hesitantly give it a shot. If you're not hooked by the third or fourth chapter, I'd forget about it.
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