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Mortal Instruments is basically a G-rated (in comparison) version of Angel Sanctuary for the urban fantasy crowd. No, really. Somewhere in book three where people were going on about angel and demon blood and the Epic Lovers were reaching new heights of angst about their forbidden incestuous love and someone was wailing about Doomed To Be Evil From Birth, I decided that there was no way Clare hadn't read Angel Sanctuary.
About 10 pages later, a character was reading it. The character was a nine-year-old boy. I'm not sure about that one.
The setup is fairly basic: Normal Girl Clary and her normal BFF Simon (required Unrequited Crush present) stumble across the supernatural and hot monster hunters (called, creatively enough Shadowhunters: they have angel blood which gives them superpowers, and they regularly carve magic runes into their flesh before battle), at which point, Clary discovers that she is a monster hunter herself and falls for the hot badboy monster hunter.
And then she learns that her supposedly dead father is the supervillain, her mother the supposedly dead sorta-savior-of-the-world-from-way-back, her father figure is an alpha werewolf (with a habit of going out and taking over any nearby werewolf pack when muscle is needed-gotta admire initiative), and oh yes, Jace, the hot badboy, is actually her brother-but-maybe-they'll-luck-out-and-there-will-be-a-reveal. (At this point, I think Clary has had 3 last names and Jace 4. Maybe 5. I can't remember if he ever used Jocelyn's or not.)
Meanwhile, we have women not being punished or killed for being sexually assertive and/or choosing the wrong men, multiple LGBT characters not being dead, and people completely unselfconscious about physical scars. (And I mentioned the part about how everyone basically views her mother as The Hero right? Because that one is important to me.)
On the flipside, the narrative makes Jace more central to certain narrative aspects and plotpoints that I felt should have been focused on Clary (I like Jace and Clary/Jace, but I'm reading for Clary, Isabel and Jocelyn for the most part, and there were parts of the 3rd and 4th books that felt like "well, the guy/s is/are the natural focus...") and Clary herself is prone to bouts of internalized misogyny regarding relationships between other girls her age that I sometimes think is Clare commented on how girls are envouraged to see each other, but it more often feels like she thinks that's how girls have to see each other, even if the relationships between the 3 main teen girls are positive overall. And while I liked the first 3 books a lot, I liked the fourth significantly less, for reasons that can best be summed up as "too much bromance, not enough everything else," even if the everything else was still pretty good.
The infamous Harry Potter influence is...incredibly obvious in the first book, where every chapter or two you can go "I know what that started out..." but significantly less so after that. I'm not convinced it's really deserving of the hype and there's better gothic YA out there, but if you like gothic emo teen stuff and angels and demons and possible-incest-but-maybe-the-angel-and/or-demon-blood-made-them-do-it and legacies and multigenerational casts and tales, you might like these.
The books in the series are:
City of Bones
City of Ash
City of Glass
City of Fallen Angels
I have not read the start of the prequel series yet.
About 10 pages later, a character was reading it. The character was a nine-year-old boy. I'm not sure about that one.
The setup is fairly basic: Normal Girl Clary and her normal BFF Simon (required Unrequited Crush present) stumble across the supernatural and hot monster hunters (called, creatively enough Shadowhunters: they have angel blood which gives them superpowers, and they regularly carve magic runes into their flesh before battle), at which point, Clary discovers that she is a monster hunter herself and falls for the hot badboy monster hunter.
And then she learns that her supposedly dead father is the supervillain, her mother the supposedly dead sorta-savior-of-the-world-from-way-back, her father figure is an alpha werewolf (with a habit of going out and taking over any nearby werewolf pack when muscle is needed-gotta admire initiative), and oh yes, Jace, the hot badboy, is actually her brother-but-maybe-they'll-luck-out-and-there-will-be-a-reveal. (At this point, I think Clary has had 3 last names and Jace 4. Maybe 5. I can't remember if he ever used Jocelyn's or not.)
Meanwhile, we have women not being punished or killed for being sexually assertive and/or choosing the wrong men, multiple LGBT characters not being dead, and people completely unselfconscious about physical scars. (And I mentioned the part about how everyone basically views her mother as The Hero right? Because that one is important to me.)
On the flipside, the narrative makes Jace more central to certain narrative aspects and plotpoints that I felt should have been focused on Clary (I like Jace and Clary/Jace, but I'm reading for Clary, Isabel and Jocelyn for the most part, and there were parts of the 3rd and 4th books that felt like "well, the guy/s is/are the natural focus...") and Clary herself is prone to bouts of internalized misogyny regarding relationships between other girls her age that I sometimes think is Clare commented on how girls are envouraged to see each other, but it more often feels like she thinks that's how girls have to see each other, even if the relationships between the 3 main teen girls are positive overall. And while I liked the first 3 books a lot, I liked the fourth significantly less, for reasons that can best be summed up as "too much bromance, not enough everything else," even if the everything else was still pretty good.
The infamous Harry Potter influence is...incredibly obvious in the first book, where every chapter or two you can go "I know what that started out..." but significantly less so after that. I'm not convinced it's really deserving of the hype and there's better gothic YA out there, but if you like gothic emo teen stuff and angels and demons and possible-incest-but-maybe-the-angel-and/or-demon-blood-made-them-do-it and legacies and multigenerational casts and tales, you might like these.
The books in the series are:
City of Bones
City of Ash
City of Glass
City of Fallen Angels
I have not read the start of the prequel series yet.