City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’m giving it 2.5 stars.
City of Bones is the first book in The Mortal Instruments series, and has been on my ‘to read’ list forever because I have friends who absolutely love/loved these books, so I was sure I was going to enjoy them… right?
nope nope nope.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate this book, but holy balls was this thing SLOW!!! I am all for world building and setting up the story, but jesus this was horrible to try and read through because there was very little action and a whole lot of telling of things.
I’m not even really sure where to start or what to say about this whole thing.
Clary – I intensely disliked her from the very beginning. How obtuse do you have to be to completely miss that your best friend is in love with you? And despite all the fake attempts at making her a strong heroine… she just wasn’t.
Everyone kept saying I was going to love Jace. *insert blank stare* I liked him… but I did not love him. I liked the way he brought a little bit of levity to certain situations when things got overly dramatic or bogged down and did find myself chuckling on a few of those occasions, but I didn’t love him at all. I felt like his character does a complete 180 personality wise by the end of the book and I found my head spinning.
The story itself was quite predictable… from Luke to Valentine to Alec and Hodge I was able to read quite clearly between the lines and piece together the story before it was even told. And um… that thing that gets revealed at the end…
The writing… Let me just start with this sentence …
She took a bite. The apple tasted green and cool.”
*insert another blank stare here … because what exactly does green taste like?
I found the writing simplistic and somewhat boring. The action scenes were written well… when there was action. But what I found really puzzling was there were whole sections I found myself skimming over only to come upon a paragraph here or there that were really well written and engaging, so there were hints of what this book could have been along the way, it just fell flat 98% of the time.
The editing itself needed some work, the mix of POV’s and words missing or wrong words being used… all things that if I was really into the story wouldn’t have stood out to me as much and to be honest the flow of the story
And let’s be honest here, the bones of this story all come from different popular series. Harry Potter, Buffy, Star Wars… I’ll just reference This Review if you’re curious about the similarities. But everything was just so predictable and unoriginal. And I get that lots of stories come from other things, but what a good writer does is make them fresh and original and this just didn’t feel that way for me. And holy crap lets cram more stuff into this … There were fairies, vampires, werewolves, warlocks… I mean it was hard to keep track of who was what by the end and I still don’t get what the stele is or what the runes are all about.
What did I like… hmmmm maybe the lighthearted moments, the parts where Jace and Clary could joke with each other and get to know each other without pages and pages of a character telling me their backstory. I liked Alec and Isabelle… what we got to know about them anyway, and welp… that might actually be it.
To say I was disappointed would be an understatement, especially because of the hype surrounding it. Here’s to hoping that the movie is much better than the book!
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