City of Bones - Cassandra Clare
City of Bones - Cassandra Clare
City of Bones is the first instalment in the highly successful Mortal Instruments Trilogy. Set in New York City, it is a modern-day tale of faeries, vampires and demons. The main character is Clary Fray, a fifteen-year-old girl who suddenly finds herself able to see things that other people can’t. When her mother is kidnapped, she ends up in the company of group of Shadowhunters, people whose job it is to kill demons. What follows is an action-packed rollercoaster ride across New York as Clary, her friend Simon, and the Shadowhunters Jace, Isabelle and Alec attempt to uncover the truth about Clary’s past in order to find out why her mother was attacked. The plot is full of revelations, twists and turns as all the secrets and deceptions are made clear one by one.
Clary is a good artist, like her mother. She is clever, independent and feisty, but a normal enough teenager to make her easy for readers to relate to. She often thinks about her need for a shower, or how the clothes she has borrowed don’t fit, which add a nice realistic touch to the story. Her best friend Simon is a fairly typical teenage boy on the surface; a bit of an idiot, dorky, obsessed with comic books and Star Wars. However, he more than proves his worth later on in the story, despite the disadvantage of being a ‘mundie’ – a normal human with no special powers. Jace, the most skilled of the Shadowhunters, is vain, conceited and reckless, but Clary finds him irresistible. He teaches Clary a lot about Shadowhunters, Downworlders and demons, while demonstrating his great wit and charm, but a tragedy in his past makes him a deep character with a lot of inner conflict.
The story is set in a kind of underworld New York, where vampires attend nightclubs and faeries meet in Central Park, where abandoned ruins conceal Shadowhunter headquarters and where horse-drawn carriages move along the streets, invisible to human eyes. The way in which ordinary locations conceal extraordinary things makes the story seem far more real and close to home than stories of strange things happening in other worlds. The reader can look at a familiar settings with new eyes, and see enchantment and mystery around every corner. The author draws on many classic myths about fantastical creatures and weaves them together in one story, while adding little twists of her own. The vampires drink blood, fly and come out only at night, as in traditional myths, but they also ride flying motorbikes that run on demon energies.
City of Bones is also riddled with teenage angst. As Clary’s feelings for Jace grow, they are both blind to how others feel about them. Love, friendship and loyalty, and the difference between them, are strong themes, but it sometimes seems as though the author is trying to cram them in alongside all the action, description and information already in the story. The style of writing can seem a little basic at times; the prose doesn’t flow as well as it could, but the thrilling plotline more than makes up for that.
Overall, City of Bones is an exciting story of modern-day myth, enchantment and relationships. It is an intelligent read with some great humour and lots of interesting, memorable characters. A good book for older teens, especially fans of Holly Black and Stephenie Meyer.
Kitty
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