Girl And a Mountain of Books
I ordered all six books of the Mortal Instruments series just because I saw at least five Booktube videos praising these to the moon and back. And now I have a situation. I was stupid enough not to read any other reviews before ordering these and when I started reading City of Bones, I had a funny feeling it reminded me of something - normal people are called mundanes. Hmm, it sounds awful lot like muggles. And there is this bad guy called Valentine who wants to purify earth with shadowhunters who can make spells. Hmmmm.. And there are things called the Mortal Instruments and few of them are missing. It kind of sounds like.. well, deadly hallows? After I found myself thinking more than three times that this reminds me of Harry Potter, I went online and found out that Clare actually was a fanfiction writer of Harry Potter. And after that it all made sense to me.
If there is someone wondering why these books aren't as wildly popular as for example Twilight or Hunger Games are, the answer is that these are way too geeky for an average person. This book is just like fanfictions often are, exaggerating certain parts of the original books and making it more one dimensional. This is full of weird Supernatural (which I love) meets Harry Potter (which I love) meets Twilight (which I don't hate as much as I did few years ago) stuff an altogether it's a super geeky mess. I have friends who think that Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Game of Thrones are too weird and they would die, if they had to read this book. It's just too heavy for them with all it's worldbuilding and different paranormal things mash-up.
Me, on the other hand, sort of like this and sort of didn't. Story moved on with a nice pace and I didn't find myself bored too often but then again, the plot was quite predictable and it lacked the originality. I felt just like reading a well-written fanfiction. it was nice. As for the characters, I hated that Clary was useless most of the time but I liked Jace and that he wasn't too likeable as a person. Simon was the typical third-wheel guy. Other characters were bland for me. I think this book revealed too much of Valentine and if all of these six books are going to be about the fight against him, I'm probably going to be bored because he is going to be a ranting lunatic with crazy ideas and there nothing else in him.
My biggest problem with this is that there happened too much stuff in this and I was introduced to too many new things and whole new world without any explanations. This just shoved one new thing after another on my face. I would have liked this better if it had more world-building in it and less new concepts in one book. I'm like a half geek on a geek scale and this was almost too much for me.
I think I should have read the Infernal Devices first since I'm not such a big geek. But this series certainly has some potential in it and lucky me, who bought all six of them (thank god paperbacks and not hardcovers), get to give this series five more chances. Yay. Let's just hope that these get more originality and their own character as a book.
