Review: City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare

After their deadly adventures in Idris, Clary, Jace and their many friends have returned to New York. Clary has started training so that she may work as a Shadowhunter, Jace is scarred from his experiences and has become somewhat broody, Luke and Joycelyn are planning their wedding, Alec is on holiday with Magnus and Simon ... Well, Simon Lewis is living it up as a rock star vampire who has two girlfriends and neither knows about the other. Except that readers should probably keep in mind that this is still Simon we are talking about, and his band is as shitty as ever and the girls are Isabelle and Maia. An ancient vampire is taking a keen interest in Simon, people keep trying to kill him and a dead demon baby turns up somewhere along the way. All of which makes this novel amusing, but it really does feel like a slightly farcical made-for-television sequel.

This one was entertaining enough, though the twist at the end was predictable enough--I guess something had to lead in to the final two books of the series. There were a number of references to characters from The Infernal Devices, another Shadowhunters series, which is unsurprising given that the author worked on the final three books in The Mortal Instruments series concurrently with the three books in The Infernal Devices series over the space of about four years. The best thing about this book, though, was how much it made me appreciate Simon as a character in his own right, rather than simply being fodder for Clary.

Recommended to anyone who can't get enough of the Shadowhunter universe. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more