fantasy | Reading With Tea

City of Bones – Cassandra Clare – 4/10 (DNF)

““Can I help you with something?”
Clary turned instant traitor against her gender. “Those girls on the other side of the car are staring at you.”
Jace assumed an air of mellow gratification. “Of course they are,” he said, “I am stunningly attractive.””

In this first of the Mortal Instruments series, Clary Fray is happily going about her suburban New York life with her mother (squabbling) and her best friend Simon (not realising he loves her) when some demons turn up at her local nightclub. She receives a panicked call from her mother and goes into hiding with the local Shadowhunters, a group charged with killing evil daemons; but why did Clary have no idea about all of these magical groups if she is clearly a part of their world? But how can she see them if she’s not part of their world? Confusement.

Actually, as I write that synopsis I realised that Simon goes from not being able to see Shadowhunters and daemons at the start of the book, to being able to flirt/argue with them within thirty pages. So not sure what’s happened there.

I didn’t reject this quite as quickly as I gave up on Clockwork Angel, but I abandoned it for the same reasons: overdone romance and too foreign a fantastical world.

Within the first 169 pages (for thus far I did read), Clary has been totally oblivious to Simon’s enormous crush on her, found Jace both repellant and attractive, got jealous of Simon’s attentions to Isabella and defended him in a secret-crush-rather-than-old-friend way to Jace. We see the love square. OVER AND OVER AGAIN. WE GET IT. STOP HITTING ME WITH YOUR LOVE SQUARE OUCH OUCH OUCH!!!

Similarly, we’re in New York, in a club. But these kids are 16, please explain how they’re in a dodgy nightclub? Then there’s frantic running back to the apartment… But Clary stops at the red light? Really?

Oh and Clary thinks that Switzerland is between Germany and France. And no one, not even Shadowhunters FROM EUROPE, corrects her. Excuse me while I sob quietly in a corner.

I did keep reading it in little spurts after I’d given up on it but I thought I was just resuscitating a dead beast, so I gave up.

No thanks.

Additional information:

Copy borrowed from Mini-me.

Publisher: Walker, 485 pages (paperback)

Don’t order from Amazon, but if you must, I would appreciate it if you used the City of Bones (Mortal Instruments) link*

* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting costs.

Storm Front – Jim Butcher – 6/10

“My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. When things get strange, when what goes bump in the night flicks on the lights, when no one else can help you, give me a call. I’m in the book.”

Harry Dresden, wizard consultant to the Chicago P.D., magical private investigator, finds himself not only under the Doom of Damocles for killing his supervisor, but also frequently under suspicion from the mortal police. He is called in by his one policing ally, Lieutenant Murphy, to assist in the investigation of a double homicide, at the same time as being enlisted by an embarrassed housewife to track down her missing husband. Unfortunately, he seems to have incurred the wrath of one of Chicago’s best known mobsters.

This is the first of the Dresden Files series and comes heartily recommended by The Physicist. Butcher has a good knack with plot, keeping the action going (a little too urgently… I struggled to mark the passage of time in places) and mixing several strands skilfully. Harry is also a character with promise, not flawless, a little too fond of talking to himself motivationally, but generally a fine upstanding hero. Other developed characters are a bit thin on the ground, although Murphy is obviously going to be a recurring character.

Butcher’s fine touch here, and something I particularly admired in Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, is that he doesn’t overdo the magic. We are firmly anchored in 1990s/2000s Chicago, with elevators, phones, guns and bad street drugs, and Harry’s magic is a part of his daily life, but not so much so that it is impenetrable. He’s keen on asides to the reader to explain why something magical happens or doesn’t happen, which is quite helpful, if occasionally a little patronising.

The writing, unfortunately, is sub-par – Butcher seems to have happened onto a formula of starting several consecutive sentences in the same way: “I hated myself every step. I hated leaving… I hated that my apartment… I hated to close my eyes… I hated the sick twisting of fear…” and while the apparently intended emphasis is achieved, it grates somewhat.

However, I have been promised that the quality of the writing improves in later books, so I will be carrying on with this series.