Sunday, April 22, 2012

A Whole New World for Clary, Let the Adventure Begin



City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
Clarissa Fray and her best friend Simon go to Pandemonium, a teenage club in New York, for a little fun on one fate-driven night.  As Simon and Clary dance, she notices a boy following a beautiful girl into a storage closet, but it just wasn’t a normal make out session, she noticed that the couple was being followed by two guys and one of them has a knife.  She sends Simon to get a bouncer and follows the group into the closet, what happens next shocks us all, they can’t figure out why Clary can see them.  As she witnesses a murder in that closet, she can’t shake the feeling that there is something quite different about her life now.  The next day, her mom goes missing, kidnapped by a dead man, Clary learns more about her life than she ever thought possible.  Will the truth set her free or dig her deeper into the rabbit hole of a world she never signed up for? 
I loved this book.  I bought this book last August, but my line-up for books has been too crazy to get them all taken care of, so it has sat on the shelf for some time.  When I decided to pick it up, I was so glad that I did.  There was mystery, suspense, and a great love story.  From the beginning to the end I was addicted to the story and wanted to get to know each character more and more.  Clare expresses this new world to Clary through Jace and the other Nephilim in a way that had me hooked.  I love it when a character learns about their life that they should have been living in from birth, but didn’t because of someone else’s decision.  Clary’s mom decided when she was born to hide her true identity from Clary and everyone she has met.  Whenever she meets Jace he explains the new world that she has just started seeing for the first time.  As the audience goes through the story, I know that I was eager to see what was going to happen.
I have read some reviews that talk about Clare’s writing style, one person said that she switches tenses not only between the character’s points of views, but within the same paragraph.  I usually have a keen eye for these types of editing mistakes, but I didn’t notice at all, I think mainly because I was so enraptured in the story, that the world could have blown up around me and I would have died happy and never known the world was on fire.  I only feel sorry that the person whose review I read didn’t have the same experience. 

Without giving any spoilers, I’m just going to say that I hated the development in the end.  But I wasn’t surprised.  I guessed Jace’s true identity almost from the very beginning and I hated it.  I don’t want to give away too much, no spoilers, I promise, just know how disappointed I was.  I hope that it’s wrong in a future book, I have a feeling that it’s not true, but I do go back and forth on my opinion. 
I can’t wait to continue this series and learn more about the Nephilim and how Clary will continue to fit into this new world of the Shadowhunters.  I hope that if you read it that you loved it as much as I did and also that you can’t wait for more of these books to come out.  I haven’t done any research on the Mortal Instrument Series, maybe it’s over, I don’t know, but I can’t wait to start City of Ashes, TODAY!  Keep reading my friends!

***Side note, I wrote this blog 2 months ago, I have finished all of the Mortal Insturments that are released to date, and I have pre-ordered City of Lost Souls, which comes out in a few weeks!

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