Hello my pretties.
Guess what? School's out! Expect an increased volume of posts in the near future. In addition, I've started using my Goodreads account again. Goodreads is Facebook, but for books.
Though I don't write reviews on there, I do give every book I add to my shelves a rating. I can't imagine why anyone would be that devoted to my opinions, but if that tickles your fancy, you can find my account here.
It's faster to update than this blog, so I tend to fairly active. Feel free to verb me on there.
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A version of this review originally appeared in the June 2011 issue of the George C. Marshall high school newspaper Rank & File.
On the scale of modern fantasy romance, Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series falls somewhere between Holly Black’s Modern Tales of Faerie and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight in terms of both grittiness and quality. (With Twilight as the low end of the spectrum, obviously.)
City of Fallen Angels, Clare’s fourth book in the series, isn’t bad per se, but it feels formulaic. After three preceding books about “Shadowhunters” Jace and Clary, the plot structure “romantic tension becomes tangled with demon-fighting and the two problems resolve simultaneously” seems pretty familiar.
The unfortunate similarity between this novel and Clare’s previous works probably stems from the fact that this novel was spontaneously conceived. The Mortal Instruments was a closed and perfectly acceptable trilogy until Clare, in a spate of greed or generosity, conceptualized an additional three novels.
Breaking open a series you had written to remain closed is no mean feat—regardless of the wisdom of such a decision—so it’s understandable if Clare’s effort went into providing engaging material rather than worrying about overall plot structure. That said, even the best plot concepts in the world lose some of its luster when shoehorned into overused formats.
And that’s a shame, because the content of the plot is one of the strongest elements of the book. It’s not every day you read a book where the antagonists kill babies en masse and then have the protagonists come to face-to-face with baby corpses. Though Clare’s writing minimizes the character’s contemplation of said babies, her willingness to introduce such dark material to the plot all—without attaching some anvilicious commentary—is impressive. The gravity of the main conflict is part of what saves City of Fallen Angels from being Twilight WITH DEMONS.
The recurrence of older plot threads is also alleviated by secondary main character and teen-turned-vampire Simon. He bumbles about full of vampiric angst, unintentionally involving himself in the demon fighting and general chicanery. Simon’s guilt over his vampirism, which is actually very relevant to the plot, is not excessive.
Here we have the rarest of creatures, an angsty vampire who is not too angsty. Kudos to Clare on that front. As an unlucky everyman, connecting with Simon is far easier than relating to Jace and Clary’s author-enforced idiocy.
Indeed, beyond the homogeneity of the plot, the biggest issue with this book is that Jace and Clary—who displayed a fair amount of communication and intelligence in the previous books—suddenly cannot talk meaningfully to save their lives. The creation of romantic tension to drive the central conflict is dramatic at face value, but the drama is entirely undercut by the fact that the characters have suddenly become gibbering morons.
Thankfully, this only applies to Jace and Clary. The rest of the characters are as human as ever, particularly (ironically) Simon. The quality of his segments of the narrative and the way he interacts with the other characters is the second thing that saves this book from being Twilight WITH DEMONS.
All that said, the very existence of City of Fallen Angels feels unnecessary; especially when one considers the fact that the one thing that prompts the entire conflict is not explicitly or implicitly mentioned in any of the previous books.
Some things are better left untouched, and a conclusive trilogy is certainly one of them.
3.22/5 stars
