Book review: City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

In what may start a trend for me, I got this book because someone on Twitter commented, “People who read Cassandra Clare, you deserve everything that happens to you.” I’m actually finding lot of music and books based not on rave reviews, but on the snarling outrage of the haters. In this particular case, that hate isn’t just for the story or for the writer, but for EVERYONE who ever picked up this book and liked it. And I’m like “Dayum, that’s some serious hate going on up in there. What the hell did the writer do to earn this kind of rage?” So I bought City of Bones, and I put it fairly high on my TBR pile. I was totally ready to hate this too, seeing as how someone wished doom and gloom upon anyone who liked it.

Now that I’m done, I have to wonder what’s wrong with that poor woman who would wish bad karma on readers for liking this book, because I can’t really find anything offensive about it. I can’t say it blew my mind or that it was the greatest book ever, and there were some parts of the character development that bugged me. Often the later chapters made me roll my eyes for how contrived the plot became, and for the dialogue becoming strained. But there was never an eyelid twitching scene, nor a “throw the book down” moment.

As far as YA goes, I found it to be a nice change of pace. It had third person perspective, and it had a heroine who wasn’t perfectly pretty. The story centers around Clary Fray, a girl who goes to a nightclub with her best friend and witnesses a murder that no one else can see. When she gets home, her mother is acting very strangely, and after having a fight, Clary leaves and goes to hang out with her friend. She meets one of the killers again, Jace, and he tells her that he has to take her to “The Institute” because she can see him, and “Mundanes” aren’t supposed to be able to see Shadowhunters. Clary gets a call from home just before her mother is kidnapped, and when she looks around, Jace has vanished again. So Clary runs home to a trashed apartment and an ugly monster.

When Clary first encounters a demon in her home, she manages through blind luck to kill it herself, and she doesn’t need Jace to act like the hero to jump in and save the day. Also unique is how there was no instant attraction between the hero and heroine. Jace certainly does all the insulting and self-centered bragging that you’d expect from YA male characters, but Clary doesn’t melt over him, nor does she feel like there’s “just something about him.” At one point, she even slaps him for being a jerk, and I was thinking, “Hey, for once, a YA story might break the mold. How novel!”

And then the romantic triangle was briefly thrown in. I say briefly because by the end of the book it’s clear that Jace and Clary will NOT be together, and for good reasons which I will not spoil. (But if they do get together in book two, I might see why some people would be mad.) The other point of the romantic triangle, Simon, is a longtime childhood friend, and the love he feels for Clary is unrequited throughout most of the story. So there wasn’t really a strong romantic angle. Again, not that I mind, and I liked that the main plots were more about finding Clary’s mother and finding out what the big bad guy wanted from her.

One thing I didn’t like is that both Clary and Jace are victims of child abuse, but neither one sees it that way. Jace is treated worse by his father, but in the story it comes out that Clary’s mother is erasing her mind every two years to cripple her. Both Clary and Jace feel badly for the other’s abuse, and yet neither seemed to acknowledge that they’re both victims. Shades of Stockholm syndrome? There’s five books in the series, so I suppose eventually this might be treated with more concern. But it was really bugging me when Clary was telling Jace, “You were abused,” and he’s all, “No, it made me tougher, so it was a good thing.” And at the same time, Clary already knows she was mind-fucked routinely, but that’s somehow different, and she’s able to readily forgive her mother’s monstrous abuses. I just don’t see much difference here. Both parents are kinda douchey.

Then there’s the fact that Clary rarely doesn’t need a dude to help her out. Despite rescuing herself in the first fight, almost every other encounter with baddies, a dude is coming to her rescue. And okay, she throws a dagger at a werewolf and it actually hits the target. But to escape that chase scene, she still has to rely on a dude. Well, two dudes, really….three dudes—NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION! Ahem. Anywho, it got a bit repetitive, to be honest.

And in the final chapters, the dialogue is really bad in places. It’s just struggling too hard to be cool or funny, and it all falls flat for me. Also, the ending is both tragically convenient, with everyone knowing everyone else, and no one at the all-knowing magical agency is aware of all this fuckery. Basically, the Clave is all-knowing when it’s inconvenient for the protagonists, and they know nothing about the antagonists because it’s convenient for the writer. Lazy, lazy, lazy. This really dragged down my enjoyment of the story, and that’s why I’m taking off a star. This book was going so well in the intro and middle, and it turns into a mess near the end.

Having said that, it’s not the worst book I’ve read recently, and I’m always looking for new paranormal series to get into. So while I give City of Bones 3 stars, I can say that I will be getting the next book in the series, City of Ashes. I kind of like Clary, and I’d be interested to see how this fight will escalate in later volumes. Nothing is really resolved in the first book, and the ending is open without being all that positive. Since I don’t see this kind of thing very often, with no happy ending offered, I kind of like it, even if the chapters leading up to it were a bit weaksauce.

So, I’d recommend City of Bones to fans of paranormal fiction looking for a new series to jump into about demon hunters. I’m not normally into this kind of story because the hunters are always cast as the ultimate good guys, but I think that’s what I like here, that the demon hunters are deeply flawed, and that their job in tracking down rogue mystical races isn’t so cut and dried as it is in some other books.

And now this review is getting a bit long, so I’ll shut up and let you decide whether you want to read it or wish doom and bad karma upon me for not hating it vehemently.