City of Bones

A bit of light-hearted teenage melodrama in an urban fantasy setting. ( )

I liked the world-building of this book. The terms were very creative. This book was very interesting and that's why I continued on with the series. I would recommend to those who like fantasy. ( )

It's been two months since I've read this, and I can't for the life of me understand how I rated this 4 stars. Thus, the new 3 star rating.

Review:
I liked it, but definitely didn't love it.

It wasn't a bad book, on the whole, but it could definitely have been better. I felt the main problem was the overload of world-building in the beginning. I mean, don't get me wrong, I hate it when there isn't enough world-building, but in this one I was very close to giving up because of the world-dumping.

Fortunately, this book got better around 35% in, and I was more or less enjoying it then. I was seriously irritated by the very forthcoming characters in this book. I mean, usually you have characters that don't give out enough information, and you slowly unveil that information about the world in general throughout the book. In this book however, we had a lot of very forthcoming characters; every single one of them had almost nothing to hide, they were just spilling out their guts to Clary.

I also found Clary very irritating, for being seriously whiny, and the other characters, for indulging her. Jace and Simon were kinda okay, but Jace was also very open about everything. I mean, these people are supposed to be a secret from the entire world, why are you giving out so many of your secrets to someone you have known for 2 seconds??!!?!? When it's also against the law?!?!!??!

I think my absolute main problem with this was that I expected this to be something like PJO, and I was seriously disappointed on that front.....the reason for this expectation was that I have seen these books along with the PJO books, and so this unreasonable expectation was completely my fault. But I was disappointed.

Now, another thing I hated why were Jace and Clary written in a romantic relationship kinda way when they were siblings?!?! It's not throwing you off, it's just plain weird. I feel that thye should not have been written like that if they were going to end up being siblings.

Also, almost all the big reveals were really underwhelming, because I had guessed most of them before they happened: Valentine's Joselyn's husband? Guessed it. Falcon's going to die? Guessed it. Lucien's a wolf? Guessed it. Valentine's her father? Guessed it. Valentine's his father? Guessed it. Jace is Jonathan? Guessed it. Jace's her brother? Guessed it.

I was just mostly irritated and underwhelmed by this book, and I'm not sure I want to read the next one. I will most likely read it, but not right now. ( )

I read this nearly 10 years ago when I was just an itty bitty 14year old year 9 student and I adored it.
I've re read it (listened to) the audiobook and I still loved it. Maybe not as much as my younger self did but it's still great.
I really wish you could erase your memory of a book because I saw all the twists and turns coming as I've already read it and it did take away from the experience but it is still so good I'm giving it 4 stars this re read! ( )

Other than the annoying yet predictable twist in the denoument, a fun, can't-put-it-down book. I stayed up much too late reading it. ( )