Friday, April 15, 2011

Thoughts on “The City of Bones”

This week, I read the first book in The Mortal Instruments Series by Cassandra Clare.  In The City of Bones Cassandra Clare has created a truly fascinating world.  To be honest, I love books that involve more than one supernatural.  The cast of characters includes: vampires, werewolves, warlocks, demons, fae (who we have yet to meet) and nephlim called shadow warriors)  It seems that these shadow warriors  police the other super natural beings but one whose name is Valentine wants more.  He wants to eliminate everyone who who isn’t human or a shadow warrior from the earth.

Some of the elements of the story are extremely predictable, and this is a shame, because  even as the book is building to a crescendo, the reader is well aware of what is going to happen.  The writing itself is at times repetitive and overly descriptive.  I quite sure she could have shaved a few pages off of this book, just by elimination of the redundancy. There is also a bit of teen angst, but I can honestly say that it is much less than other teen based urban fantasy that I have read in the past (TWILIGHT) and so it never does rise to the level of irritation.

This is once again an all White world which is ridiculous, because it is set in New York city, one of the most multi-cultural places on the planet.  I don’t know how the author justifies this complete erasure of people of colour.  We know that that people of colour exist, because Lucien hides out is in China Town, and they occasionally deliver Chinese food to people (Anyone see a problem with that?).  So I suppose there are at least Asians in Clare’s New York City, but they apparently don’t count enough to be a character.  We also learn in the book that everything that we have been told is true, and this for instance means that the Hindu Gods do indeed exist, as well as several folklore tales from countries of colour, but once again, Clare couldn’t not be arsed to weave them into her story.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Fangs for the Fantasy Podcast - Episode 10

This week we discuss the never-ending Vampire Diaries, the US version of Being Human, Marjorie Liu's Dirke & Steele, Anya Bast's Elemental Witches, Nalini Singh's Psy/changeling series and Tony Hillerman