{"id":601,"date":"2009-10-14T22:07:15","date_gmt":"2009-10-15T02:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/?p=601"},"modified":"2010-12-10T19:43:09","modified_gmt":"2010-12-10T23:43:09","slug":"mortal-instruments-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/mortal-instruments-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Mortal Instruments series"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, way too late, I finished up the final book in the Mortal Instruments trilogy, City of Glass<\/em> by Cassandra Clare.\u00a0 And I went to bed feeling disappointed and a little grumpy that I’d stayed up late to finish a book that left me disappointed.<\/p>\n

I loved the pace and feel of the first book, City of Bones.\u00a0 <\/em>In this first book, Clare does a great job establishing her characters and creating the urban fantasy world of Shadowhunters, demons, and Downworlders.\u00a0 Reading the first book was like eating a perfectly sized slice of rich dark chocolate cake: not something I like to do every day, but a great treat.\u00a0 But of course finishing the first book left me wanting to read the second, City of Ashes<\/em>, which I promptly took out of the library and devoured in a couple of sittings.\u00a0 And by the end of City of Ashes <\/em>I felt like I’d had a piece of slightly stale supermarket birthday cake with super sweet frosting.\u00a0 City of Ashes<\/em>\u00a0isn’t nearly as creative or engrossing as its predecessor, and (like my friend Lisa) I found the brother-sister plotline to be an annoying and gross plot manipulation.\u00a0 But, of course, I still needed to know what happened next, so I requested City of Glass <\/em>from the library network and eagerly sat down to read it through as soon as it arrived.\u00a0 My bakery analogy for City of Glass<\/em>?\u00a0 A bit like an overcooked,\u00a0lardy brownie that kind of cracks your teeth and sits like lead in your stomach.<\/p>\n

Here’s why I think City of Glass <\/em>doesn’t work:\u00a0 the whole book takes place in the land of Idris, not New York City, removing the urban fantasy setting that made the first book so fresh and hip.\u00a0 No more punk nightclubs for Clary; no more rundown urban hotels that are infested with vampires.\u00a0 Just the boring bucolic Shadowhunter country setting.<\/p>\n

But it’s more than the lack of urban grit.\u00a0 Clare’s plot mapping feels too obvious in City of Glass<\/em>.\u00a0 While reading, I knew that she needed to take her characters from point A through point B in order for them to end up at point C, the end of the book.\u00a0 And some things were too obvious to work [plot spoiler here, sorry]: I knew back at the end of the first book that Jace wasn’t Clary’s brother, and frankly it pissed me off that it took the author 1,470 pages to resolve the seemingly incestuous romantic conflict between them.\u00a0 It would have been better if she had given her audience a little more credit for brains and fixed the brother-sister problem several hundred pages sooner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I could go on with small gripes about plotting and lack of character development in City of Glass<\/em>, but it’s not necessary.\u00a0 These books are decent young adult fantasy, definitely higher quality than Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight <\/em>series, and I did enjoy reading them.\u00a0 I just wish that the last two books of the trilogy didn’t feel as if they were written in a rush, but I suppose that’s more a product of the publishing industry today (churn out the sequels quick while the first one’s hot) than of the author’s inability to complete the series in a way that respects what she accomplished in the first book.\u00a0 It makes me feel for authors who are put under that kind of pressure and who must surely sacrifice some of their artistic vision while bowing to that pressure.\u00a0 Ah, if only we could\u00a0move away from the desperate need\u00a0for lengthy trilogies, and back\u00a0to the good ol’ days of stand-alone works of fiction…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, way too late, I finished up the final book in the Mortal Instruments trilogy, City of Glass by Cassandra Clare.\u00a0 And I went to bed feeling disappointed and a little grumpy that I’d stayed up late to finish a book that left me disappointed. I loved the pace and feel of the first … Continue reading Mortal Instruments series<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adult-book-review","category-young-adult-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":887,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions\/887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}