When fifteen-year-old Clary Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City, she hardly expects to witness a murder—much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. Then the body disappears into thin air. It’s hard to call the police when the murderers are invisible to everyone else and when there is nothing—not even a smear of blood—to show that a boy has died. Or was he a boy?

This is Clary’s first meeting with the Shadowhunters, warriors dedicated to ridding the earth of demons. It’s also her first encounter with Jace, a Shadowhunter who looks a little like an angel and acts a lot like a jerk. Within twenty-four hours Clary is pulled into Jace’s world with a vengeance, when her mother disappears and Clary herself is attacked by a demon. But why would demons be interested in ordinary mundanes like Clary and her mother? And how did Clary suddenly get the Sight? The Shadowhunters would like to know. . . .(Cover and synopsis from Goodreads)

Okay, so I’m probably going to get a lot of flak for this review because tons of my friends LOVE City of Bones and I wanted to throw it a lot of the time. But wait, first, before you start getting all worked up, let me just say that I really tried to go into this book as unbiased as possible.  I had heard the stories about Cassandra Clare’s fan fiction and supposed plagiarism and I won’t even go into that.  That, to me, is all hearsay.  I wasn’t there, I didn’t see it happen or know about it at the time, so I can not for sure say if it indeed happened or not.


HOWEVER, I did hear that the first three books in The Mortal Instruments series were A LOT like her fan fiction Draco Trilogy.  I myself never read that trilogy but I did read that people who read (and loved!) that trilogy read The Mortal Instruments and said that it was really the same story.  SO.  That being said, it does kind of back up my feelings on the story, but once again, I very much went into this story with as little bias as possible.  I wanted to like this series.  I wanted to love it!  I wanted to go with my friends to the movie on the opening weekend and get wrapped up in the world.  Alas, I didn’t even get through the whole book.


So, because I didn’t finish the book (I got to page 294–over half!), I won’t rate it.  I just don’t do that.  I feel like if I don’t finish a book, I can’t rate it. There are things that I didn’t read that might change that rating!  But with these DNF reviews I like to at least let you know why I didn’t finish the book. So here are some of those reasons:

• The writing style.  Too many similes.  I am not the most wonderful writer in the world but I’m a stickler for similes.  A well-crafted simile is hard and can be very beautiful, but most similes are dull to me.
• A lot of the story was pretty obvious.  There were “reveals” at the end of chapters that I saw coming from the get-go.
• I really just didn’t like a lot of the characters.  Clary was rude and quite dumb a lot of the time. (Hello! You go over to your mom’s best friend’s house to find out information about your missing mom, and you hear the friend and some guys talking about a woman with your mom’s name and you think, “Can they be talking about my mother?” YES. YES THEY ARE. Things like this happened A LOT.)  And Jace.  Oh, Jace.  Clary calls him “charming” but I just found him conceited and obnoxious.  I did like Simon, but he wasn’t in much of the half of the book that I read.
• There was a lot of repetition, redundancies, inconsistencies and contradictions.
• In a lot of the dire situations that they got themselves into in the parts that I read, Clary and Jace would kind of stop and have these little banter moments.  I’m like, “DUDE! Shut up and get the hell out of there!”