City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’m giving this two stars because it did have an interesting alternative world. I got about 2/3 or 3/4 through it and gave up when the girl kissed the bad boy. This is teen-girl-lit except I wouldn’t encourage any teen girl to read it. The descriptions of skin, jaws, eye-lashes, bred like maggots throughout the text.
And the similes! Who will save us from drowning in them? I can’t remember any thing or event in the book which wasn’t described as “like” “like” “like” x 50 billion something else. When I heard a sentence on how he or she “deflated like a balloon pricked with a pin,” I began striking my forehead with my fists, repeatedly, like a pinata with a layer of bone around the thick oozing candy.
And every single character who describes anything to anyone else also abounds in using the similes as well!
The combat scenes seemed bizarre because things that should have happened fast somehow allow for shouted warnings and elaborate evasions.
Hearing the story read put me in mind of Saturday morning cartoons like Super Friends. That struck me as an apt embodiment of the writing. Only with more boy crushes.
As a Christian, I didn’t approve of the pluralistic, agnostic stuff that coated the otherwise medieval urban fantasy. This did not offend me however since I didn’t expect anything else. I did not with satisfaction that for all the talk about how a mosque or synagogue would work just as well, readers got to tour a Roman Catholic Church to get weapons to fight against vampires.
By the way, vampires and werewolves as enemies is getting really old. And vampires are getting even older. I was glad that much of the story centered on demons rather than these other two.
To end this back on an positive note, I did think the actual story, as far as I got through it, was an interesting plotline.