The Mortal Instruments #1-3
Cassandra Clare
Clary’s seeing things that she knows shouldn’t exist, and interacting with demons that can’t be real. Or are they? Clary’s mom has disappeared and her mom’s best friend is acting strangely, and Clary can only think of the ShadowHunters as the enemy. Or maybe Jace could be more than a friend, if only he wasn’t so prickly?
Clary is a decent enough protagonist considering her background as a regular old mundie (mundane) means that she’s at a disadvantage most of the time. Honestly though, I feel like she just kept being told she was too weak and noone bothered to train her. Also, the thing with the stele – wouldn’t you be kind of bothered if you lost it as many times as she seems to? Wouldn’t you put an AirTag on it? I don’t know how well this story will age into the future, but it’s still pretty good (10 years on??).
I picked up books 1-3 and 5 from the opshop for a grand total of $10, thinking that they could be a good fit for the emerging teen reader in my life. I thought I’d better have a quick read of them first to make sure they were good though! I’d previously tried to get into this series by listening to an audiobook (why did things happen so slowly?!?) and testing the TV series (too disconnected and visually distracting). They are pretty dense books and the action is quite slow which is why it didn’t work for me in either of those two media. This time around I knew that I had the next couple of books waiting for me so I could just gobble them up.
I’m undecided about the ‘twists’ in this novel. Ok, so I’m probably weird, but I was totally ok with the fact that they might be siblings and attracted to each other. They were raised individually, so what do you expect?! Anyway, that conundrum is sorted out by the end of book 3, which is why I stopped reading at that point.
I’m giving this three stars – pretty compelling while I was reading it, and I felt quite driven to keep reading the next two inther series. But! Once I finished book 3, I was actually ok with just putting the series down again. What more could I want than darkness vanished?
Best Book Series Ever!!!!