City of Bones: Unveiling Skeletons in the Closet

First, the obligatory disclaimer: I am not a good writer as evidently presented by my prose herein. However, I've read enough books to distinguish one writing style from another. There's also the fact that the following paragraphs are plainly my opinion.

While searching for a new book obsession, I came across this series from Goodreads. The title was inviting and it was on the popular section together with Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and freaking Twilight. It's called the Mortal Instruments. I got a copy of the second until the fourth instalments but not the first. Unbelievable, isn't it? I had almost forgotten about the series until I visited my phone's E-books folder. To keep the story short, I had just recently got a copy of the first book- the City of Bones.

The Book Cover. Taken from Wikipedia.

I read it with excitement. Here's another new world I'm entering! My impression was that the narration was not clear enough since I had to read the sentences twice to understand what was happening. But it was okay, I told myself, I just had to get used to the writing for a smooth flow and believable images in my head (Seriously, the book suggested rough images and metaphors and similes but you get used to it in time.)

Reading on, I started to hate the descriptions about unnecessary things. Clare, did you have to tell me this? Then stuff started heating up so I reminded my nosy self to go on. I couldn't help but think of Harry Potter, Twilight, and later on, Star Wars as I moved forward the storyline. On one hand, even though I hated Twilight I remembered not taking my eyes off its pages until I smelled, not unlike the way I read Harry Potter and Sophie Kinsella's chick lit. City of Bones in contrast, was tiring that I had to amuse myself with a movie about magic and dream on about the future before getting on the TASK to figure what happened next (Note: Reading becomes tiring when you begin to classify it as a task and not a pastime).

But it was forgivable enough. By the middle I started to read on continuously that I finished the City of Bones in two days. It made me laugh although everything about it was predictable. It made me tear up as Clary (protagonist) remembered Luke's (protagonist's father figure) part in her life. The rest was, EH.

I wasn't sure what to think of the book. It was average: as earlier implied, something I just had to finish. The world of Shadowhunters, demons, mundanes, werewolves, and vampires altogether could've been more exciting but the writer failed to present it to me in awesome ways as J.K. Rowling did. I researched on how people saw it and boy, those reviews made me laugh.

Research revealed that HP and City of Bones seem similar because it was originally a fan fiction by Cassandra Clare to the former. Some reviews listed the City of Bones characters paralleled with those from HP. They also saw it as combination of a variety of other movies and books weaved poorly by clumsy narratives and 'infodump.' Infodump is the term for when the writer becomes so excited to tell you of this fantasy world s/he invented and tells every information in the most inconvenient ways (Seriously, why did Jace define what demons are in front of a demon? Imagine yourself being robbed and the robber tells you, 'You! You're human, a four-legged mammal with brains and I am going to steal from you. Muhahaha!')

What is more disturbing is the fact that as Clare wrote her fan fiction for HP, she actually plagiarized a lot! She took four or five paragraphs from a book in 2001, only to have a disclaimer that practically says 'I was inspired by Wrong Novel Title written by Somebody Unimportant I don't Remember Her Name.' Here's the catch: As someone had argued, for her to have written word per word of the paragraphs she must've had the printed copy of the book herself as she wrote the HP fan fiction. So much for a journalist's professionalism. (Link here to the informative post about Clare's fan fiction plagiarism.)

I read more reviews of the book and the movie (Did I mention there was a movie? Yeah. There was a movie released last August this year.) than the links posted but who cares.

The movie poster. Taken from MRQE.

Here are the links to the reviews:

Movie Review
A review about the similarities of the fanfiction and City of Bones she didn't bother finishing it.
This review has awesome introduction. Seriously.

I saw the film. Honestly, I found it more entertaining than the book. It didn't religiously follow the sequence which pissed a lot of fans. It also had spoilers like Clary's powers and the potion Jocelyn, her mother, drank. Honestly, without those additional information I wouldn't be so interested to watch the sequel much more read the second installment.

It's amazing how I was more interested about the background of City of Bones than the story itself. The writer had some skeletons in her closet and it was presented in more colors than she did in her book but that's just my opinion.