27 - 28 - 29 - The Mortal Instruments Trilogy

City of Bones, City of Ashes, and City of Glass by Cassandra Clare

Simon & Schuster, 2008 / 2009 / 2009

512 pages / 496 pages / 560 pages

Date completed: late March 2010 / April 5, 2010 / April 9, 2010

The reason I was drawn to this series in the first place has its roots in my very nerdy past. You see, I started reading the Harry Potter series when I was in...I think it was 4th grade or so. Maybe 5th. But I LOVED Harry as soon as I was able to get past the boring first chapter of Sorcerer's Stone and delve into the world of Hogwarts. So the first foray I was allowed to have on the internet occurred when I was in about 6th grade, when my parents read an article in Time magazine about Harry Potter websites. They thought I would enjoy them, so pretty soon I noticed Harry Potter fanfiction. Please don't judge my nerdiness. I didn't get into it very much-- but there was one author's work that I really liked, and I read her chapters for years, as she posted them. That author was Cassandra Claire.

Since then, apparently there was some sort of plagiarism scandal involved with the HP fanfic. But she dropped the "i" from Claire and has reemerged as a full-fledged published author, with three books available at the moment and two more scheduled for publication (one in summer 2010, and another in early 2011). So I decided I needed to check these out.

It took me awhile to get into the first book of this series, City of Bones, but once I did, I was hooked. At times I was confused about what certain things were because they were mentioned so quickly and then disappeared for a long time and reappeared, but that cleared up the more I read.

The one thing that constantly distracted me, throughout all three books, was the overuse of strange similes, such as describing a character's eyes as being the color of "antifreeze." The other one that sticks out at the moment is that she kept saying that the air reeked of "ozone." What does that even mean? What does ozone smell like?

As for the story itself, however, I thought it was pretty addicting and well thought out. I could sit down and read these for hours at a time (generally when I was supposed to be sleeping, ahem). The characters were really well developed...I can't think of many that were two-dimensional other than side characters who didn't have a huge role. That helped a lot...often in YA lit the characters don't seem as developed to me as they could have been, but I think Clare did well.

Although some of the plot points reminded me of HP and Star Wars, and some of her characters bore uncanny resemblances to her fanfic characters, I'm not going to lie-- I liked them. I'm not sorry that I read them. Not always written super well, but the plot was addicting. These were refreshing, after all of the academic books I've been reading out of this term.

I don't want to write much else, because to do so would be to include way too many plot spoilers. Let's just say that sometimes Clary and Jace's relationship grossed me out a bit, so I'm glad that was taken care of at the end of the third book.