I feel like right off the bat I'm going to come down pretty hard on these books, and I already feel bad about it. I feel like my issue with them was just of unmet expectations, but you know, whose fault is that? The silly YA book which never promised to be brilliant literature, or me who looked at this trilogy of which every book is decorated with a headless torso and a lot of glitter and said, "Aha, now THIS is going to be brilliant literature!"? See, yeah. My bad, you guys. Shut it down.
The basic premise is that our world is populated with demons, some of which are gross and oozy and others which can take on human form. Demons are bad. There are also vampires and werewolves and mages and witches running around, which are halfbloods--human/demon cocktails, as it were. And then there are Shadowhunters, who are this whole group of people who were set apart
by an Angel at some unspecified point in the past who are charged with killing demons and keeping the halfbloods in line, protecting humanity, etc.
The whole story centers on Clary, an unsuspecting regular human girl in New York who
suddenly finds out that all this demon stuff exists and gets drawn into it through meeting this dreamy Shadowhunter Jace and blah blah blah. The main players are these two kids and a few of their friends, which is where I find the problem with the whole series. Of course as the story progresses there are all kinds of big deal things going on threatening the Shadowhunters and humanity and the universe and whatever, but really everything just goes back to 4 or 5 teenagers who I personally found obnoxious as h-face. The way I'm diagnosing it now is that the author was more invested in the kids and their sordid love-type relationships than in actually backing up her story or making it feel meaningful, so essentially you're reading 541 pages to see if Jace will stop glowering and just freaking kiss her or if the other kid will get a life and stop mooning over lost love or if yet another guy will decide to come out to his parents or not--all of this, rather than thinking, oh wow, cool, demons among us etc. I think that I would have been okay even that far, except that I didn't even find the love complications co
mpelling really at all. All of the barriers to love working out seem like false dilemmas--most of the time the answers were so freaking obvious that you really couldn't respect or like characters who couldn't see what was riiiiiight in front of them. And then the one time there was an actually kind of tricky thing to overcome, it was like everyone and their mom would come up to them and say "Oh hey kids, the answer to your problem is,--" at which point the kids would either run away from them or watch them be ravaged by demons. I don't really think that counts as foreshadowing, is the thing.
See? That was me being more negative than I should, because regardless of all this, I still sat in my room and read each book in a day, and they are pretty long books is the thing. So, in the end, you should look at the glittering torsos on the book jackets and just know what you're getting into, and make peace with it.
You are so mean! You didn't take into accont Jace's allure.
ReplyDeleteOh man, I am so in love with Jace.
ReplyDeleteThat's all I really have to say about that.