Maybelle Victor

It took time for me to work on this review and I have three reasons why:

(1) The book WOWed me.  I couldn’t find the right words to describe how I felt after reading the book and I don’t now what to expect of my review so I didn’t write one, until now.
(2) Another book got in the way.  Actually, it was a series, I read the vampire diaries and got into it too much I read it one after another.  Now, I’m stranded with more than 3 reviews to work on.
(3) Work got in the way.  Doesn’t it always?

It’s been a month or so and I had to read my reviews as regards the previous books to get me into the mood of writing the third of the Mortal Instruments: City of Glass. City of Glass ties Clary’s story into an interesting closing.  It was focused on finding the last of the mortal instruments so that Valentine can complete his dream: to eradicate the unworthy shadowhunters and create a new Clave.  In spite of the tight security that even Clary wasn’t able to “fully” break into, Valentine managed to bring in his demons and enter the glass city.  His main purpose was to find the mirror, which he shall use to summon Angel Raziel.  By tradition it was said that the person who summoned Angel Raziel will be granted one wish and this wish is what Valentine wants. There was war, truce attempts, revealing side stories and well, a mushy ending.  The book offers an adventure full of action and realistic fiction – if there’s such a word.

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This is becoming a trend – writing a book review with a negative note. But I can’t help it, it’s just the truth.

City of Ashes was a disappointment. After the first two chapters, I was skimming towards the end of the book. I could say it was full of action, more action than the first but the “revealing” parts of the story was just too common. Nothing was making its mark on me.

City of Ashes opened with a demon-summoning spell and behind it was none other than, Valentine. He summoned a higher demon through a young warlock who thought he can control Agramon (demon of fear). Of course he couldn’t and he died. He adhered to Valentine because he has the mortal cup and it was this demon that Valentine used to break into the silent city (City of Bones), murder all the brothers and take the sword – one of the mortal instruments Angel Raziel left the Shadowhunters. Valentine was going to use the sword, Maellartach – the sword that was used to drive Adam & Eve from paradise – to summon a demon army that shall assist him in destroying the Clave and re-establishing it as anew. To do that, he needs to reverse the power of the sword and make it demonic. The Ritual of Infernal Conversion requires the blood of downworlders (blood of a child of Lilith (warlock), child of the moon (werewolf), child of the night (vampire) and child of a faerie (fae)).

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I wasn’t as eager as I was when I finished City of Bones.  For one, the ending frustrates me and for another, it unsettles me.  I guess the only good the book brought me is re-awakening another form of writing I have tried to gear away from since I started doing reviews.  If you try to click through my journals and see how I usually write and compare that to how I write my reviews, you would understand.

But then I have to go on.

City of Bones is a story about Clarissa Fray’s past, present and future.  Starting off with a present situation where she was being grounded by her mother (Clary wasn’t exactly the obedient teenage daughter) and having to discuss moving to another place because her mom said so, her feet brought her to witnessing a murder and the Shadow World.  Two instances that would have marked her as crazy outright, because the murder she witnessed did not leave a trail of evidence and the perpetrators are only visible to her.

She would have brushed the idea off but a desperate phone call from her mother, her disappearance and her house in total chaos, not to add a demon attacking her, changed everything.  Incidentally, Jace, one of the perpetrators of the murder she witnessed, was with her when it happened, already offering an invitation to the Institute where he took her to cure her of the poison the demon gave her.

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Where there is feeling that is not requited, there is an imbalance of power.  It is an imbalance that is easy to exploit, but it is not a wise course.  Where there is love, there is often also hate.  They can exist side by side.

- Hodge, City of Bones -

“Once there was a boy,” said Jace.

Clary interrupted immediately.  “A Shadowhunter boy?”

“Of course.”  For a moment a bleak amusement colored his voice.  Then it was gone.  “When the boy was six years old, his father gave him a falcon to train.  Falcons are raptors – killing birds, his father told him, the Shadowhunters of the sky.

“The falcon didn’t like the boy, and the boy didn’t like it, either.  Its sharp beak made him nervous, and its bright eyes always seemed to be watching him.  It would slash at him with beak and talons when he came near: For weeks his wrists and hands were always bleeding.  He didn’t know it, but his father had selected a falcon that had lived in the wild for over a year, and thus was nearly impossible to tame.  But the boy tried, because his father told him to make the falcon obedient, and he wanted to please his father.

“He stayed with the falcon constantly, keeping it awake by talking to it and even playing music to it, because a tired bird was meant to be easier to tame.  He learned the equipment: the jesses, the hood, the brail, the leash that bound the bird to his wrist.  He was meant to keep the falcon blind, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it – instead he tried to sit where the bird could see him as he touched and stroked its wings, willing it to trust him.  Hee fed it from his hand, and at first it would not eat.  Later it ate so savagely that its beak cut the skin of his palm.  But the boy was glad, because it was progress, and because he wanted the bird to know him, even if the bird had to consume his blood to make that happen.

“He began to see that the falcon was beautiful, that its slim wings were built for the speed of flight, that it was strong and swift, fierce and gentle.  When it dived to the ground, it moved like likght.  When it learned to circle and come to his wrist, he neary shouted with delight  Sometimes the bird would hope to his shoulder and put its beak in his hair.  He knew his falcon loved him, and when he was certain it was not just tamed but perfectly tamed, he went to his father and showed him what he had done, expecting him to be proud.

“Instead his father took the bird, now tame and trusting, in his hands and broke its neck.  ‘I told you to make it obedient,’ his father said, and dropped the falcon’s lifeless body to the ground.  ‘Instead, you taught it to love you.  Falcons are not meant to be loving pets: They are fierce and wild, savage and cruel.  This bird was not tamed; it was broken.’

“Later, when his father left him, the boy cried over his pet, until eventually his father sent a servant to take the body of the bird away and bury it.  The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he’d learned: that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.”

- Jace, City of Bones -

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