Review: City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, Book 1) by Cassandra Clare

~3 of 5 Stars

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

Goodreads Synopsis:

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.

Review:

Now, this is a very tentative 3 stars. Tentative as in it could be lower. I'm in a book club, and this was our book for the last few weeks. I was interested, and it sounded pretty good. I'd heard about it before, seen it before, and had almost read it before. I hadn't read it because of the length, (about 485 pages,) and I've found that in longer books, there's a bigger chance of the story being dragged on. And in this case, that's kind of true.

I'm going to start with what I actually liked about the book, which is the characters. I don't mind Clary, and I like Jace and Alec and Isabelle, among the others. They're all done very well, and I have a pretty good idea of who they are. And they've got my interest, almost enough to read the next book on my own. I would like to know what happens to them next.

And the plot is interesting. The world that it's set in is very interesting, and somewhat different from what I've read before, with the Shadowhunters and how all the other things work. Most of them, at least. There were a couple of twists, mainly the one near the end, that surprised me. And makes me wonder, a lot. I did like this quite a bit.

Now, with that out of the way, the writing. It's very simple, in a way that bothers me. And I didn't like how the plot played out. It's not that I think the information was given too quickly, but that there was always a problem, something going wrong. I understand that stuff has to happen in order for a book to be interesting, and one thing that bothers me with how she did it, is that I can't really think of how she would have done it differently. Something always went wrong, but they all had a point, and were foreshadowing to something. But it seemed kind of Disney-like, with the almost exaggerated writing and problems occurring one after another. This is the main reason that I had such a hard time reading this book. It bothered and annoyed me so much.

I will be reading the next book, because we are reading it in book club. But I will probably not enjoyed it any or much more than I did this one. I hope that I do, but I doubt it.