City of Bones was recommended to me by a friend a few years ago. Upon finally buying the book, I found that it was taking me too long to “get into it”. This has only happened to me once before, so, wanting to finally finish it, I brought it to my camp in Maine with me this summer, when I would have time to read it. Four fifths of the way through the book you come upon a major plot twist, and only then was I able to understand the storyline and finally feel the need to know what happened next to the characters. I felt that it had taken too long to finally get into the good part of the story, which is why I am giving this book a 2.5 out of 10. The only reason that it got a 2.5, for me, was that I eventually did want to finish the story, so the author got the last fifth of the book to be exciting enough to captivate me.
What I couldn’t understand though, was the reviews it got. Now, this book was turned into a movie last year, and they are looking to do the same to the rest of the series, but I just don’t understand how reviewers were calling it “a great read”, “awe-inducing to the end”, and that it had “a captivating storyline and ferocious heroine (which) makes for a thrilling story”. Book reviewers were certainly wrong on this one: the story was about a teen girl named Clary who goes to a club with her friend and finds out that she can see demons and demon-hunters (Shadowhunters, she later learns, is their real name) and one of them is the gorgeous Jace. The plot was filled with a boring love story, her always wanting to get closer to Jace, Jace toying with her emotions, that sort of thing. But as I said, it was unfulfilling. The twisted love story always had you clambering for more, you wanted to know what Jace was thinking about Clary, and since it was written in the third person when Clary and Jace were apart, and in the first person only when it was Clary’s thoughts, the reader was left with an empty hole that never told you how Jace was feeling.
The setting never took anything away from the story. It took place in 21st Century New York City, and the characters were fit to live in the setting they were born in. Little hints that tell you that it is the 21st Century are thrown in, like that they use motorcycles and subways to get to places, and Clary has a cell phone to contact her mom, who goes missing. There would be no story without the 21st Century technology that the characters use, so I’m glad for that little beam of hope for this series-Cassandra Clare knows how to use setting to her advantage.
To put it simply, Cassandra Clare wrote a good setting, but killed her “good” storyline with a drawn-out love story. As I told my friend Antonio who told me to read this, “You need to give me back 2.5 months of my life. The 2.5 months that I spent reading this book.” It was not as thrilling as it was advertised to be, and so I am putting it aside in hopes that the end of the series will be more thrilling than the beginning. I am currently on book 3, and my hopes are raised, so in case you are interested, the Mortal Instruments series does, in fact, get better.
What I couldn’t understand though, was the reviews it got. Now, this book was turned into a movie last year, and they are looking to do the same to the rest of the series, but I just don’t understand how reviewers were calling it “a great read”, “awe-inducing to the end”, and that it had “a captivating storyline and ferocious heroine (which) makes for a thrilling story”. Book reviewers were certainly wrong on this one: the story was about a teen girl named Clary who goes to a club with her friend and finds out that she can see demons and demon-hunters (Shadowhunters, she later learns, is their real name) and one of them is the gorgeous Jace. The plot was filled with a boring love story, her always wanting to get closer to Jace, Jace toying with her emotions, that sort of thing. But as I said, it was unfulfilling. The twisted love story always had you clambering for more, you wanted to know what Jace was thinking about Clary, and since it was written in the third person when Clary and Jace were apart, and in the first person only when it was Clary’s thoughts, the reader was left with an empty hole that never told you how Jace was feeling.
The setting never took anything away from the story. It took place in 21st Century New York City, and the characters were fit to live in the setting they were born in. Little hints that tell you that it is the 21st Century are thrown in, like that they use motorcycles and subways to get to places, and Clary has a cell phone to contact her mom, who goes missing. There would be no story without the 21st Century technology that the characters use, so I’m glad for that little beam of hope for this series-Cassandra Clare knows how to use setting to her advantage.
To put it simply, Cassandra Clare wrote a good setting, but killed her “good” storyline with a drawn-out love story. As I told my friend Antonio who told me to read this, “You need to give me back 2.5 months of my life. The 2.5 months that I spent reading this book.” It was not as thrilling as it was advertised to be, and so I am putting it aside in hopes that the end of the series will be more thrilling than the beginning. I am currently on book 3, and my hopes are raised, so in case you are interested, the Mortal Instruments series does, in fact, get better.