Today's book is City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare.
Clary thinks she is an ordinary girl until one night she witnesses a murder. The next thing she knows, her mother has been kidnapped, her adopted 'father' tells her never to speak to him again, and her house destroyed. The group of people who take her in to protect her are the very ones who did the murdering.And it gets worse. Clary finds out that she isn't ordinary after all. She is gifted, like those protecting her, with the power to fight demons.
With that gift, any pretense at normality is destroyed.
This is an excellent book. Clare pulled me, had me rooting for certain characters, and definitely swayed any conventional views by throwing a horrible twist into the love story. She took some liberties with the POV, which I found unnecessary: almost the entire book was told from Clary's POV, but we had about two pages (one page each) told from someone else's POV, one being a person who died two seconds later. Obviously, she's a bestseller and published books afterwards, so she's allowed to get away with it. Still, it felt contrived to me.
Secondly, she's huge on description. Great for world-building, but a bit boring. No problems. I skipped most of it, jumping to the next strand of dialogue, and read the book faster than most.
I give this book an B.
A = Buy this book NOW
B = Buy this when you can
C = Check it out from the library
D = Don't bother reading it
F = Burn it
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