Teenagers and Demons, Oh My!

 

I read this so my teenage sister-in-law would have someone to talk to about it, and….meh?

There were some good things about it; there were even times when I laughed or had feelings for the characters, but that didn’t happen until around page 240…..Now, that doesn’t mean this book is bad. I’m just not the intended audience. It’s a YA, which I typically have issues with anyway, and its’ about hell-beasts, and demons, and teenagers with feels, and I’m a 30-year-old woman who doesn’t have time for that sh*t. I spent a decent part of the books wanting to smack any number of teenage characters across the face to deliver a semblance of common sense.

But YA unintended audience aside, my biggest issue with this book was its pacing. Clary Fray follows some strange kids in a nightclub into a backroom and stumbles her way into a dark world of demons and demon-hunters hidden from normal human eyes. She finds herself drawn to this world due to suppressed memories from her past, and when her mother turns up missing, she falls full-throttle into an inter-species war.

The problem for me was the speed in which Clary rockets through the regular world to make herself at home in the dark underworld of the shadow-hunters. Seriously, this book clocks in at almost 500 pages, and covers about a week’s worth of time. In that week, Clary goes from being a little no-nothing 15 year old who likes drawing and hanging out with her best friend, Simon, to fighting werewolves and vampires, becoming super adept at rune languages, and coming to a place of graceful acceptance that her whole childhood was a lie. In 7 days.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but I have issues accepting changes in the weather, never mind finding out everything my parents ever told me was a bunch of crap.

And then there was the ever-present, always ridiculous, teenage love triangle between Clary, Simon, and Jace…. Why do all YA’s with a female main character have to have a love triangle? Why? Why couldn’t Clary just have a really great guy-friend? Or why couldn’t Simon already have a girlfriend and just be Clary’s best bud? Why did Jace have to be this inhumanly beautiful human male that makes all girls in a mile’s vicinity lose their panties? Why couldn’t he just be some normal dude who happened to be good at killing demons? There were so many alternatives to the stupid, pointless, annoying, over-done love triangle.

To be honest, the book wasn’t terrible; the dialog was quippy, the characters were lovable for the most part, the bad guys were nuanced and well-rounded, and for all the plot zipped by at the speed of light, the world building was solid and interesting. Although, I was far more interested in the prequel events than what was actually happening on the page. I would have totally read the hell out of the adults’ stories from this series.

3 stars.