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| City of Bones (Thorndike Press Large Print Literacy Bridge Series) | 
 enlarge | Author: Cassandra Clare
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $23.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  107 reviews
Sales Rank: 513971
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Lrg
Reading Level: Young Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 670
ISBN: 1410409589
EAN: 9781410409584
ASIN: 1410409589
Publication Date: September 3, 2008 (New: This Week)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 102 more reviews...
 YA? April 16, 2007
108 out of 156 found this review helpful
As a high school teacher I am always looking for a good YA book to use as a Directed Reading Lesson for my students to get them more interested in reading for pleasure. I had heard good things about, City of Bones, so I bought it.
I wish I could give it a good review, but I cannot. Why? There are two reasons and I will explain them.
One, as a teacher, I could not in good faith say with a straight face to a parent that this book was age appropriate for *any* high school student, unless they were over 17 years old and in a Gifted and Talented program. Meaning I consider this to be an R-rated book (if we were going by movie standards).
And before you label me some right-wing Bible-thumping conservative, I am the direct opposite of that. But I know what PARENTS want their *children* to read and I don't think this book is it. I think the book's target age should be 17 and up, so that lets out all my 9th, 10th and 11th (and some of my 12th) grade students.
And why do I think my students who are under 17 shouldn't be reading City of Bones? Because of the violence and sexual content (incest factor and the homoerotic content). I would have a hard time explaining to any parent or my local school board why I was reading a book to my students about a boy who French-kissed his sister in a scene.
And while *I* have no problem with homoerotic content in movies and books (see my other reviews *g*), I think most parents do not want their underage children reading about that topic without some discussion beforehand. And quite frankly it just isn't my job as an instructor to explain homosexuality to students, that is their parent's job.
The second problem with the book besides not being able to use it in a classroom or school setting because of the above discussed problems, is that the plot lacks orginality. This is another factor I must have when I pick a book for my students. I want them to read about something exciting and *new.*
City of Bones is fast-paced, but its characters are all ones we've seen before. The main female character, Clary, is a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Leia from Star Wars. Just as Jace is Luke from Star Wars and Angel from Buffy. And if Simon isn't Xander from Buffy, I'll eat my hat. Plus Hodge is Giles (and a little Albus Dumbledore, complete with bird thrown in for good measure). Isabelle is Cordelia from Buffy and Alec is Draco from Harry Potter -- who is in love with Jace. Plus my favorite rip-off is Valentine, the bad guy. He's Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine all rolled in one. Get it, Palpatine = Valentine?
As a huge Star Wars fan if I saw one more Star Wars reference I was going to write to George Lucas and tell him he should be getting royalities on this book!
So, if you were thinking of buying this book for your teenager, I would take a pass. If you were thinking of buying it for yourself and you are over 17, I would buy it with a grain of salt and know that you are not getting something new, but plots that have been used before (and much better in my opinion).
It's like watching an overly-expository trainwreck, only more boring. March 25, 2007
102 out of 138 found this review helpful
In an underage Goth club where kids openly are handing out pills without fear of conveniently missing bouncers, the "shy" fifteen-year-old NYC native Clary charges unarmed and alone into a confrontation where strangers with knives are trying to kill each other, where she intends to stop them by talking them down. Some may call this suicidal; the reader is supposed to see it as heroic. This scene is exemplary of what you're getting into if you pick this book up.
This isn't Clary's first stupid action: she makes a habit of putting herself in harm's way by doing things she has little or no reason to, especially when there's others around telling her to stop. Other characters also do unreasonable things, if only to further the plot. A character is caught hiding in someone's bushes because he decided THEY were suspicious while he was sneaking around their house, but never gives a reason for his initial trespassing. He later drinks a magical potion with unknown effects for no good reason whatsoever, despite having someone who'd know better at his side telling him not to.
The book has no sense of continuity. Characters' eye colors, voices, abilities, and builds change, sometimes within paragraphs of their initial descriptions. (Clary's mother goes from "compact" to "tall and willowy" in paragraphs on page 24; Madame Dorothea's voice goes from familiarly "shrill" to familiarly "gravelly" on page 95; Alec's eyes go from blue to black and back again throughout the course of the book; Isabelle's skin is as "unblemished as the surface of a bowl of cream" on page 58, but all Shadowhunters are later described as covered in scars from their Marks.) A character puts himself and his love interest in mortal danger without hesitation, but later blames his poor performance in a fight on his worry for her. A fire hot enough to melt metal and turn bricks to ash (bricks melt at about three thousand degrees and don't contain enough organic material to burn to ash) doesn't reduce any bones - even an infant's bones - to ash, and manages to leave cloth fragments behind as well. Clary can do magic with runes that she literally should not be able to know, and Simon is able to see a magical glow to things and the invisible Shadowhunters even though he's supposed to be a magicless human.
A good editor would pick these problems out - but unfortunately, upon comparison with the "uncorrected proofs" of the Advance Reader Copy, it seems that the most basic problems haven't even been touched. For example, screaming characters still switch indiscriminately between italics and ALL CAPS, and the missing quotation mark from page 449 of the ARC is still missing on page 452 of the hardcover. Other words and descriptions still stand out as extremely out of place. Horses "snarl." Arrows make "hot buzzing sounds, like a huge bumblebee." Octopuses have "tendrils" instead of tentacles, and antifreeze and spring grass are somehow the same color. Another world's sun is described as hanging "limp in the sky like a burned cinder" - I don't even know where to start with that one. Water is described as being "the color of lead, churned to a whipped cream consistency." What feels like whipped cream again - the water, or the lead? And how would that even work?
Also, very few things in the work hail as original. Clary Fray (not Whedon's Slayer Melaka Fray) goes to Pandemonium (not The Bronze from Buffyverse), sees something she shouldn't, and is taken in by the Shadowhunters (not Dark-hunters), who call normal humans "mundanes" or "mundies" (from the set-in-NYC-comic Fables) and who power up and do magic by carving or drawing runes on themselves or other objects, just like in Weis and Hickman's Death Gate Cycle. They do this with a particular wand/knife hybrid called a "stele" - which, unlike the Stiehl of Terry Brooks's Shannara series, is a real word...for a headstone. The secret group of Shadowhunters is trying to rescue a magical relic before the big bad guy Valentine (whose past is Voldemort's, only without any character depth whatsoever) gets it, a plot that's been done completely to death. Finally, the "twist" of this book comes straight out of Star Wars and is guessable from chapter two.
The characters are also terribly flat, cliche, and inconsistent. Clary is "shy" but slaps people she barely knows; she's "clumsy" but the reader never sees her act that way. Jace is the stereotypical snugglebug in a jerk suit, straight out of a bad romance novel and so blindingly beautiful that absolutely everyone must comment on it. It frequently seems that cast of characters doesn't have personalities; only unbelievable dialogue, redundant and clunky metaphors, and little tics that are supposed to identify them.
Granted, there are some hilarious parts. Clary's makeover sends her out on the streets of New York City in a shirt (worn as a dress) that barely covers her rear, with high-heeled boots, fishnet stockings, lots of makeup, and no bra. Then she fights vampires while dressed like this. Later on, no one can figure out why her mother's won't come out of a coma.
(I'm not sure if those two events are related, but I'd like to think they are.)
The sheer number of errors, derivative ideas, and pages of copy & pasted fanfic bits is hideously sloppy and exemplary of lazy writing and lazier editing. It's as if no one cared to check things over before putting the book on the shelves. It's insulting to the reader to not try to fix any of these problems, and then to expect the consumer to shell out their money for something that isn't new, isn't different, isn't even coherent, and frankly just isn't very good. Don't waste your money on it.
Awkward and unrealised, but has potential March 20, 2007
97 out of 138 found this review helpful
A new entry to the young adult urban fantasy genre, but not really one that adds anything new to it.
Overall, I wouldn't say this was a great book, nor would I recommend it for younger teen readers - it's plodding and slow-going, and people will tear their hair out waiting for the pace to pick up. I think this book probably suits adults more in that respect (in a way - I wouldn't say the subjects were interesting to adults in general, just those with an interest in young adult fiction) - it's like the very long introduction of the first half of a longer story.
It was surprisingly uncool (setting/character descriptions, dialogue etc) as far as books with vampires/demon hunters in it go (sorry - I'm from the Buffy generation and that's just how I saw it), and I thought, given the supernatural element of the book, there were many missed opportunities to present new ideas on how a demon hunting otherworld might exist. Instead, old, pre-existing ideas were rehashed, and not in a way that would make them more compelling than before.
Given that the book is part of a trilogy, I expected there to be a lot of boring set-up pieces for the benefit of the next two volumes, but that's no excuse for this novel to be dull. There was potential for more here, and even though the book is quite long (because of the laboured, awkward way a lot of it is written), by the end it still felt like there was a rush to fit in important plot elements (the location of the most important relic of the book was really boring; it should have been one of the most - if not *the* most - exciting things that happened). I felt a bit ripped off that some of the more interesting things in the book were not given enough attention, and things like the colour of people's hair in certain shades of light was (I like that sort of detail, as well, but not all of the time. That the physical appearance of certain characters was constantly made light of was distracting. It even made them seem less attractive than they were portrayed as being).
There was one big emotional pay-off at the end from otherwise unrealised lead characters. Unfortunately, despite that one pay-off, it wasn't enough to make up for the rest of it.
Funny, but ultimately uncreative. March 20, 2007
78 out of 97 found this review helpful
[Moderate spoilers ahead, beware, beware!]
City of Bones was an incredibly frustrating book.
Holly Black - an author whose work I'm rather fond of - called it "funny, dark, and sexy." Was it funny? Absolutely. Was it dark? There was a lot of killing, but only of nameless monsters - it was about as dark as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 1. (Which is to say, not very.) As for sexy? There are two kisses in the entire book, and neither of them could be described as particularly sexy. Huzzah for romance!, yes, but not sexy.
Now, moving on.
An urban fantasy in which a young artist named Clary goes clubbing and sees a cute guy attack people with claws and get murdered. Unfortunately, by the time her adorably nerdy best friend Simon brings the bouncer to check on it, the body's vanished, and no one seems to be able to see the murderers. Then, later, she attends some poetry readings where people wail about their loins, and gets stalked by one of the murderers who seems intent on lounging about invisibly, talking about how good-looking he is, and belittling her a lot. She goes home to find her mother's vanished, and a demon like an alligator from the sewers crossed with a hairball ready to eat her face.
It had some good dialogue, (nothing particularly quotable, but funny at varying points - not unlike Jennifer Crusie in her better novels, only without the sex) a fast-paced plot, and very varied characters. That being said, the writing is stuffed with errors like "bending like a blade of grass bending sideways". There is an overabundence of similes as well, meaning that "as if"s, "as though"s, and "like"s are found in plenty. Usually, this doesn't bother me much, but when there are three to every page, it grows extremely tiresome. Her prose is clear - if not particularly inspired - but those similes may make you skip them in chunks.
What bothered me most about it was the exposition-heavy dialogue. There was nothing remotely subtle about it, though it usually came under the guise of telling the new Shadowhunter Clary about their world. On the other hand, heavy exposition tends to slow down the narrative, and City of Bones certainly slowed down a lot. Despite the fact that all the exposition was of a subject typically interesting to me - how to kill demons, types of weapons to kill demons, demons themselves, the characters' Pasts of Pain (TM) - the blatant obviousness of the ploy made me want to toss the book across the room.
Neither should you pick up this book if you're looking for a subtle read. The author doesn't hesitate to hit you with brief, immediate emotional descriptions: "she was stunned." "he felt nauseous." and so on and so forth. The characters may lie to each other, but Clary - who seems to be a very perceptive sort except when it pertains to her best friend Simon - seems to find it easy to spot those lies immediately. But those occasions where it's necessary for Clary to pick up on something aren't as common as they could be, though not for the best of reasons; for the most part, they tell each other painful truths from their pasts immediately. You find out fairly quickly about Jace's tragic past and rapidly identify him as the anti-hero who conceals his inner pain with witty ripostes. (He tells Clary a bit of it as a bedtime story, and you might think that this can be explained by the fact that he is minorly obsessed with her. On the other hand, when a minor character who doesn't even like them tells them about a vicious incident involving his father in his childhood, you know something's up.)
And then, of course, there is Alec, whose secret Clary notices pretty much immediately, though adults who've known him all his life can't see it. It would matter less if she were marketed as perceptive, but it doesn't feel as though she is; her nature seems to happen by accident, a convenience for the author to let on more about her characters.
The people who are good tend to fall into varying shades of gray. Unfortunately, the antagonist receives no such treatment. He abused his son emotionally! He gathered loners while he was going to school and made friends solely in order to have loyal followers! He hates all demons indiscriminately and wants them all razed off the face of the earth! There's what seems to be a half-attempt to explain his evil towards the end of the book, but it's never explored very much, and honestly doesn't alleviate any of his evil into something that even resembles humanity. At present, the villain's not a character; he's a plot point on legs.
Many of the other reviews have already covered the romance angle, so I'll simply add that I agree with the ones who called it a Star Wars moment in an urban fantasy novel. There never seemed to be much depth invested in it; there were some minor sparks, but it was hardly given any build-up before Jace and Clary were kissing before her room, and Simon - in love with her for the past ten years* - opened the door be confronted with the pair of them.
Then, of course, he stormed off after throwing his love in her face, but came back to drive her to the Shadowhunters' next assignation with the forces of darkness.
* They've only known each other for ten years, mind. And they were five when they first met, I assume. When he tells her about the ten years, rather than sympathise with Clary and Simon, I rolled my eyes. He's been in love with her since the moment he knew her?
That's probably what I find most annoying about the whole thing. Character development wasn't carried off in the least - in one chapter, Clary definitively identifies herself with the human race - the "mundies", as Jace calls them, scornfully. Once the next arrives, she doesn't bother to defend her best friend Simon when the Shadowhunters mock him, and she's thinking of herself very much a Shadowhunter. Simon's just had his heart broken, and a few lines later all is well with the two of them again. Isabelle is mentioned to dislike Clary, but there seems to be nothing in it other than a few glancing lines of mild slighting. Alec, who dislikes her because Jace is straight and only a blind English teacher could fail to notice all the chemistry, concludes the first book fine with her.
(What I dislike most about this is the fact that Clary tells Alec, essentially, that the boy he has a crush on Jace - called him a coward for never having killed a demon. He hits her, and I felt rather vindicated for Alec, primarily because most of the cast is either indifferent to Clary or fond of her. Later, he comes back and apologises. She doesn't, and they both behave as if she stated some sort of truth. Jace himself says it - Alec's probably never killed a demon because he was too busy protecting Jace and Isabelle. That's not cowardice - that's secondhand glory, and Alec is incredibly brave for not wanting all the glamour when surely Isabelle and Jace must be pushed into his face all the time for being the great demonhunters that they are. That Clary is wrong and no one calls her on it deeply irritates me, particularly since I suspect that the reader wasn't meant to empathise with Alec in that situation.)
As well, there was the Really Old Cliche of the heroine being beautiful and not knowing it. Perhaps she's only beautiful in Jace's eyes - for Jace is the one who tells her so - but really, the amount of people who show up in fantasy books unaware of their own good looks is supremely annoying, and is not growing any less so.
The main reason I've picked it all to bits is because it could have been so much better. The writing was amateurish (the similes! they're massing for an attack!), the characters were barely fleshed out - you couldn't tell one's lines from another's, as if they were merely devices for throwaway one-liners - and the plot was unfortunate. On the other hand, there were some funny bits, ("It's the Mortal Cup, Jace, not the Mortal Toilet Bowl.") but it didn't give a new look on vampires, demons, or werewolves the way Holly Black gave a new look on Faerie. It's funny, but for the readers who want more from a book than funny, it doesn't quite cut it.
The random first-person narrative section -- told to add depth to Clary's mother's story, I presume -- was unnecessary to the extreme. At the time the tale was being told, they were in terrible danger. The character in question chose that time to pause and to expound -- in depth -- on Clary's mother's history? As I said: highly, extremely, incredibly unlikely in a character.
There was also an unnecessary reference -- I say unnecessary because I've heard something about accusations of plagiarism, and since the author doesn't specifically cite the text when she makes the reference, I assume people will be all over it like stink on cheese? -- where Luke asks Clary not to call him Uncle Luke, because it reminded him of Uncle Tom's Cabin. As his name is not Tom, this doesn't quite work as well as it did in the text it came from originally: Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones. I seem to recall a few other instances, but nothing that hasn't been repeated through culture, or that sticks particularly in the mind.
To summarise an extremely long-winded review: City of Bones had excellent dialogue for humor. Unfortunately, that one shining point was rather bogged down by the places where it lacked. It shows promise, and the humor nearly makes you want to wait for it, but I had no problem putting it down to attend to work - and that, for me, was the sign that it didn't work as well as it should have.
Disappointing and unoriginal: Do not buy March 20, 2007
67 out of 95 found this review helpful
The book has a number of problems. These problems all add up to make a book that is not worth buying.
The main character is a Mary Sue. The more obvious clues include her name, and where she lives. If you were to read this book and run Clary through a Mary Sue Litmus Test, she would score a raging Mary Sue. The Mary Sue Litmus Test would advise you to do a serious rewrite. Most people don't enjoy reading Mary Sues. [...]
The book does too much telling, very little showing. This happens frequently. The phone is across the room. You don't need to tell me that. How about "Clary ran across the living room and picked up the retro-red phone which sat on a table." That is better than, paraphrasing here, "The phone was retro-red. It sat on an antique table in the hallway, which connected to the living room. Clary ran to answer it." There are numerous scenes which do that. Many of them are much lengthier than that example.
The point of view frequently shifts and in doing so, characters will repeat what other characters have said. It makes things repetitious. Clary describes something. Shift in point-of-view, sometimes mid-scene, Simon describes something that Clary has just described. When this happens, it doesn't add to the plot, nor the understanding of the characters.
[...]
The plot is highly derivative. It rips from Harry Potter (Why hello there Draco, I mean Jace. Hello there Harry Potter, I mean Simon). It rips from Buffy. (Why hello there Spike, I mean Jace.) It rips from Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunters. (And she sent Cassandra Claire, her agent and publisher a cease and desist note on the use of the word Dark-Hunters.) You can read parts of the work and wow, [...] It whole sale rips from Star Wars. The plot involving parents, siblings, the reveal of relationships, the battle against evil, just lock stock and barrel Star Wars. The foreshadowing is so heavy that you know this plot is coming by the second chapter. And the book delivers on it, as promised. This plot could be written in an original manner, adding new insight into the genre, into that plot. Plenty of fantasy authors and science fiction authors do that. Cassandra Claire? Not so much.
[...] The passages are randomly inserted into the text, clearly designed to trick the reader into assuming that the passages are original to the book. They aren't changed substantially to give new insight into the characters, the scene, the authors mind. They add nothing to the book. But maybe this is really a game the author is playing with her fandom audience: Spot the quotes from her fan fiction.
Descriptions are problematic. You can read this whole book and not really know what Clary looks like. Her hair color is never really described. The length of her hair is only described compared to her mother's hair. The length of her mother's hair is not described accurately. It is only described as long. Clary's eye color is not described. There are other things which would help in developing a visual which the author fails to describe. As such, the reader is left with an unclear view of what is happening. Some one else said that it is likely the author had a picture of Clary in her mind and thought the reader did too. The writing reflects that.
The problems discussed above are why people should give City of Bones, Mortal Instruments a pass. Don't buy it.
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