This is a guest post by Chango (for contributing posts here have a look at this). The original version of these two book reviews, genre YA-fantasy, has been uploaded on Amazon Italy as a verified purchase. I’ve put them together since they refer to the same series, The Mortal Instruments, by Cassandra Clare, and I have translated them in English. I have also provided here some background to the series, to make to their context clearer. Mistakes are as usual all mine.
In City of Bones, a teenager named Clary, who lives in a scary place called Downworld, discovers she’s a Shadowhunter, and has to fight for herself and her friends in a scenario populated by werewolves, demons and fairies. Her adventures keep going on and on in City of Ashes, complicated by the fact she’s in love with somebody that is probably her own brother…
City of Bones (book one)
The author has certainly a lot of imagination. I have appreciated some original ideas and the dialogs are generally brilliant and enjoyable. Given this is the first book of the series, I am going to overlook a few inconsistencies, both logical and at a more superficial level of description (ie, naked feet that suddenly wear trainers). I will keep on reading the second instalment, to see how the whole story evolves and to better judge Clare’s narrative ability.
City of Ashes (book two)
Clare has a lot of ideas, but their implementation is not as good as it could be. As I have already realised reading the first book of this series, the initial originality often ends up in stereotypes and approximation. When reading the story I had more than once the impression of listening to an imprecise relate of a movie, and this is not what I look forward to in a good book. Overall, I would say that the narrative level has gone a level down in this instalment, and I am not sure I am going to read the following ones.
I have briefly searched on the web, and comments about this series are generally good. The books have been defined “gripping” and well written (see this review, just to pick one) and a TV series adaption has been planned.
A note for Italian readers: of the remaining book of the series, only the third one (City of Glass) has been translated into Italian, while the others are only available in English.