WHHAAAAAATTT SO MANY QUESTIONS I FEEL SO CONFLICTED AND SAD AND UGH THE CLICHES BUT GOOD CLICHES WHAT IS THIS

Have your YA-fantasy cliche bingo cards at the ready folks, this is going to be a busy ride.

Having gotten that out of the way, it's not a bad ride (unless said cliches send you running for the hills). The writing style was pretty smooth. Everything flowed well, even if there were one or two events that felt like filler.

The weakest aspect of the book would be the main characters and their awkward relationships. Clary is a Little Miss Average with a penchant for geeky things who gets thrown into a shadowy world of supernaturals along with her puppy-dog best friend Simon. Naturally, she hasn't noticed that he's making moon-eyes at her. They meet Jace, the classic YA handsome bravado-meister who's probably hiding some deep trauma with his snark. Siblings Alec and Isabelle are the nasty "shun the outsider" brigade. Add in Hodge as the wise mentor figure and sole adult for the most part of the book along with rumours of a not-so-dead baddie named Valentine and there's a distinct whiff of Harry Potter. While I'm not the biggest fan of the boy wizard, this book could learn a lot on subtlty and character interaction from Ms Rowling. The love triangle(s) are obvious a mile off, as is the shock "reveal" towards the end of the book.

It's an alright start to a series, paving the way for more supernatural goings on. However it being such a long series, I fear the pacing will be a drag if it continues to focus in on the characters more than the events they're involved in. I'm going to continue with an open mind and hope that the cast do get the time to mature.

I read this book a while back purely for entertainment and because everyone else I knew was reading it before me. So, obviously I couldn't leave a book unread that everyone else was talking about. I promptly checked out the whole series and dived into the story before me. Well, I did not finish the series. I never stop in the middle of the series. I think that can tell you a lot about how I felt about this book.

Later I heard about the whole plagiarizing debacle and resulting problems. Even though I now may have some problems with the author, that is not what I am here to talk about. Nor am I here to talk about the movie (which I haven’t seen but looks awful.)

This first book was probably my favorite of them all. The story was interesting at first and had good potential. The idea was fairly original at the beginning, well as original as a YA/paranormal/romance can be, and was entertaining. It was as I got deeper into the end of the book and the rest of the series that I started feeling like I was trudging through quicksand. Here are a few of my major problems with the book:

-The author could not bear to kill off her characters. I mean, it is fine if you resurrect your character once, or maybe even twice, but more than that it gets a little annoying. Let their death be a heartbreaking surprise for heavens sake, not expected.

Spoiler

In this case I am talking about Simon mainly. They thought he was dead so many times in the course of this book and others.

-The writing, though good enough to get a book published and millions of fans, was actually not superb. There was a lot of description, yes, but that is not always the only thing that writing should be about. I found that the writing is definitely not why all the people want to read this book, but only because of the drama, sarcasm, and plot twists that purposefully pull at your emotions. The writing only tells a story but I would not call the writing “flowing” or “beautiful.”

-It goes on fooorrrrevvvverr. Well the series does at least. 3 books was enough .

-I read this in some other reviews too and I completely agree: everyone is sarcastic. I think it is good to make interesting, fun traits like that particular to one character.

-The author romanticizes some situations that should not be.

Spoiler

One big example of this is the relevation at the end about Jace and Clary being siblings. Yes, I know what happens in the end, but when they thought they were siblings, they should not have still been making out and such.

-I think the biggest thing that pushed me away from this book is its lack of originality. I am not talking about plagiarism, which I did not notice at all while reading the book, just how alike this book is to all of the others in its genre. I don’t know if anyone would understand this but, I just felt like the author was coloring inside the lines of the expected YA book instead of letting out her creativity to create a new picture. I know you can’t really make a “new” idea in this kind of genre, but I think a good author and a good imagination can rework the old ideas into something refreshingly different. This felt lukewarm.

There are a lot of other details I could mention, but if anyone is reading this, you probably do not want to hear me rant anymore :) Oh, and if you disagree with me, that is great! Well, not great because you are disagreeing but because I am glad you liked the book! I am happy that it turned out to be more of a success for you. I guess it just wasn't the book for me.