The Mortal Instruments — (2007-2012) Young adult. Publisher: Their hidden world is about to be revealed... When fifteen-year-old Clary Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City, she hardly expects to witness a murder — much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. Clary knows she should call the police, but it's hard to explain a murder when the body disappears into thin air and the murderers are invisible to everyone but Clary. Equally startled by her ability to see them, the murderers explain themselves as Shadowhunters: a secret tribe of warriors dedicated to ridding the earth of demons. Within twenty-four hours, Clary's mother disappears and Clary herself is almost killed by a grotesque demon. But why would demons be interested in ordinary mundanes like Clary and her mother? And how did Clary suddenly get the Sight? The Shadowhunters would like to know...
   
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 City of Bones
I’m a huge fan of books that don’t let me go until I’ve reached the last page. Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones, the first in her Mortal Instruments series, is that kind of book. Ostensibly written for young adults, this is a novel that adults will enjoy just as much as teenagers, for all that the protagonist and her friends are high-school aged.
Clary and her friend Simon — not boyfriend, much as he’d like to claim that title — visit the Pandemonium Club in Manhattan, a borough away from their homes in Brooklyn. A cute boy with blue hair and bright green eyes catches Clary’s eye, and she watches him until a beautiful girl in a long white dress beckons him into a room marked “No Admittance.” She watches long enough to see two other boys following them, one of whom pulls a knife just before entering the room. Startled and scared, Clary sends Simon off to get a security guard and, ignoring his instructions to stay put, heads off to rescue the blue-haired boy.
Clary gets quite a surprise when she enters the room, but she gives one as well. She shouldn’t be able to see any of the occupants of the room, they tell her. The blue-haired boy is a demon, while the other three are Shadowhunters. When Jace, one of the Shadowhunters, kills the blue-haired boy, the boy disappears, returning “to his home dimension,” Jace explains. Jace is immediately suspicious that Clary might be more than the “mundane” she seems to be, especially when Simon returns with a bouncer and proves unable to see the Shadowhunters, just as they know should be the case.
Something is definitely up, Clary quickly learns, because the next day her mother is suddenly insisting that they are “going on vacation” for the rest of the summer. Clary rebels at this news, as she had a season’s worth of plans, including art lessons she’s already paid for. She storms out of their home when Simon arrives, and the two of them head for a coffeehouse for a poetry slam. And who should be there but Jace? Just as Jace is explaining to Clary that she needs to come with him to “the Institute,” Clary’s mom calls and warns her, clearly in terror, not to come home. Clary hears the sound of falling, a buzz of static, and a harsh, slithering noise before the connection is severed. Clary rushes home, finds her mother comatose, and runs into a huge, malignant spider demon, a Ravener — and that’s when Clary knows her life has changed forever.
Clary’s discoveries follow fast and furious from that point. Most importantly, she learns that she is not who and what she thought she was, but comes from a lineage she shares in common with Jace, his adoptive sister Isabelle, and his adoptive brother, Alec. The three take her in and try to figure out why she has been raised as a mundane — and to give her shelter, as she cannot return to her home and her mother’s good friend, Luke, has harshly told Clary he isn’t her father and she should stay away from him.
Clary is quickly immersed in a world of demons, vampires, werewolves and mages that she never knew existed, learning how to deal with an entirely new level of reality even while she searches for a way to bring her mother out of her coma. She learns that her father may not have been a man who died before she was born, but someone altogether different — and evil. Soon it becomes clear that she has talents neither she nor anyone else suspected, and a fate awaiting her that has nothing to do with the gentle life of an artist she had anticipated.
The action is nonstop, with characters the reader quickly comes to love in nearly constant peril. It seems almost no one is who he or she purports to be. And the problems Clary faces go far beyond her mother’s unexplained coma; they encompass the future of humankind. You’ll want to read all of the nearly 500 pages in one sitting, if you can, and once you’ve turned the last page, you’ll want to reach immediately for the next book in the series.
Cassandra Clare knows how to hold a reader’s attention, no matter the reader’s age. The themes are appropriate for teens, with most of the violence occurring offstage, except for the killing of demons, who are the baddest of bad guys. Clare manages to avoid profane language and yet still have her teenagers sound like teenagers, and while there are plenty of intimations of sexual attraction, there are no X or even R-rated scenes. I think my nearly 12-year-old nephew would call this book “Awesome!” — and I think I know what he’s getting for his birthday. —Terry Weyna
 City of Fallen Angels
When I finished City of Fallen Angels I was angry; not with Cassandra Clare, who created the Mortal Instruments series, but with the evil-doers who once again have come between Clary and her Shadowhunter boyfriend, Jace.
At the end of City of Glass, the Shadowhunters and the downworlders — vampires, faerie, and werewolves — banded together to stand against Clary’s arrogant and megalomaniacal Shadowhunter father Valentine in a cataclysmic battle. Clary used her newly discovered talent for the magical runes called Marks to defeat her father and bring Jace back from death. Her once-human friend Simon, who became a vampire while trying to help her, was safe, and Shadowhunters and downworlders were drawing up an Accord so that they could live together in peace and equality.
It seems that the war is not over after all.
City of Fallen Angels begins not with Clary and Jace, but with Simon, back in mundane New York City, trying to figure out how to live as a Daywalker (a vampire who can survive sunlight) and one with the Mark of Cain on his forehead, a curse that, paradoxically, protects Simon from everyone except God. Simon is soon approached by Camille, an ancient vampire who offers him a bargain. Simon is suspicious. He stalls Camille. His more immediate problem is how to break the news to his mother that he is a vampire. Simon has not fed on a live human being yet; he is subsisting on animal blood he is hiding in his closet, an inadequate solution. As if that weren’t enough, Simon is juggling two supernatural girlfriends; Isabelle, a Shadowhunter, and Maia, a werewolf. Clary, meanwhile, is helping prepare for her mother’s wedding, while the Shadowhunter Conclave is trying to determine who is murdering the rogue Shadowhunters who had joined Valentine’s Circle and leaving the bodies in areas meant to throw suspicion on downworlders.
Clare does a fine job of bringing new characters, such as Kyle and Camille, into the story, and she has cleverly knit in bits from The Clockwork Angel, in which Camille was introduced. The plot is formulaic at times, but Clare handles the formula well. One of the refreshing things about this series is that it has, in some respects, an ensemble cast. The book is as much Simon’s story as it is Jace and Clary’s. This allows Clare to cut away from Jace and Clary, which is good because Jace’s perpetual angst can get wearing, even though in this book the cause is not his own internal obsessing but an integral part of the plot.
By starting with Simon and his real-world difficulties, Clare also gives the book momentum. This doesn’t feel like a new start on a new trilogy; it is plausible that, even though our heroes have won a great victory, there would still be problems ahead.
The villain in this book is convincing, as Valentine was in the previous three, and the plot springs credibly from events in the earlier books. Clare does not paint the Shadowhunters as perfect, and when villains tell Simon that no matter how he helps the Shadowhunters they will never accept him, this is powerful because it is true. We see the casual bigotry of the demon fighters throughout these books, and we watch some of them wrestle with the meaning of power. This makes the struggles throughout the series more believable.
On a more superficial level, Clare has perfected post-modernist bantering, and her young characters never miss a good come-back line, a quip or a witty retort. This makes for enjoyable reading.
Structurally, Clare has a habit of telling the reader a bit too much sometimes, so that the other characters, who don’t know what we know, look a bit stupid. I think she does this to increase the suspense. Instead, it undercuts her characters. The ending of the book is also predictable, although I wasn’t particularly bothered by that. Perhaps the word I want is not “predictable” but “inevitable”; or perhaps I’m letting Clare off easy because I think she has left us with a great cliffhanger and set up all kinds of trouble for the future. Drama and mechanics only count for so much. The heart of any book, for me, is character. I like Simon and I want him to be happy. I care about Clary and Jace, and their problems have me worrying and waiting for the next volume. —Marion Deeds
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Clockwork Angel
Clockwork Prince
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