strange and random happenstance

The Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices Book 1) by Cassandra Clare
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry
Publication Date: August 31st, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 496 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

After her Aunt's death Tessa Gray has only one place to turn, her brother Nathaniel. Penniless in New York her brother sends her a lifeline in the form of a steamer ticket to join him in London. But things don't feel right when she arrives in England. Instead of finding her brother eagerly waiting on the docks she is met by the eerie Dark Sisters who show "proof" that her brother had indeed sent them. She soon begins to doubt this as she is imprisoned by the two sisters for weeks and forced to undergo horrific changes while they also claim to hold her brother captive. It turns out that Tessa has a gift. An unwanted gift. Given an object that belongs to someone she can turn into them. She can even get a glimpse of their mind. Or, as is often the case with the Dark Sisters choices, their last minutes on Earth. The change is horrific and just the fact that she can do it makes Tessa question all that she's ever known. She has spent her life living in books, is this someone else's story? Or is she trapped in her own nightmare where she will marry a mysterious figure called the Magister? Then one night an angel appears in the form of Will Herondale. Will and his compatriots rescue Tessa from the Dark Sisters. Realizing that it wasn't all a dream, Tessa must face this new shadow world.

The truth is that Will is literally an angel, one of the Nephilim, a Shadowhunter. He takes Tessa to the London Institute where she will be safe. The Institute is run by Charlotte Branwell and her husband Henry, with Will, Jem, and Jessamine as their wards. They explain the shadow world to Tessa and about it's inhabitants, the Downworlders, such as the Dark Sisters who are warlocks, and others, such as werewolves and vampires. The stuff of penny dreadfuls made real. They found Tessa while investigating a mysterious death of a mundane, what they call regular humans. The truth is they have no idea what Tessa is. Her powers have never been seen outside a warlock, yet she has no markings of one. They agree to offer her safe harbor and help her find her brother, because he wasn't being held in the Dark Sisters house like Tessa or they would have found him. Tessa, besides being shocked by all that she's learned, is almost more shocked by their generosity; she was sure she had just traded one prison for another. But once the investigation is underway things are more complicated than they could have imagined. Vampires breaking truces, automatons wreaking havoc, and who really is the mysterious Magister and why does he want Tessa?

After forcing myself to finish The Mortal Instruments series I honestly didn't know if I had it in me to ever pick up something written by Cassandra Clare again. I am seriously still in awe how anyone could have liked such a badly written series and I am continually surprised that it hasn't come up on charges of plagiarism. Seriously, Joss Whedon and J.K. Rowling's lawyers need to get on this eventually right? Please tell me Clare doesn't get away with it in the end! But here's the catch. Before I'd even started reading The Mortal Instruments I had already bought The Infernal Devices because of the Steampunk aspect. So this left me in a major quandary. I was stuck with this series of books I wanted to sell (in fact this one is a signed first edition!) BUT I have this serious problem wherein I can not sell a book I've bought without reading it. Yes, I knew the chances of it surprising me and actually being good were almost at zero. But the fact remained I own The Infernal Devices and therefore they MUST be read. And that's what Backlog Bonanza is all about! Not just posting reviews that have been left by the wayside, but getting to those books I have been putting off. Books like The Clockwork Angel.

So what can I say about The Clockwork Angel? Well, it seemed awfully familiar. It's been two years since I slogged my way through The Mortal Instruments so I had to do a bit of brushing up, thank you fan wikis, and I was right in the familiarity of the plot. The best thing I can say is that at least she's ripping off her own material now with a side of Rosemary's Baby... Pandemonium Club starts it all, check. Loved one kidnapped, check. Rescue from evil doers and brought to the Institute, check. Party where we meet Magnus Bane, check. Angsty pretty boys, check. It has all happened before and it will happen again. Especially in the world of Cassandra Clare. Just throw in a few, a very few, Victorian trappings and it's another bestseller. Apparently. I think I could have handled the familiarity, because as I said, at least she's ripping herself off, if it wasn't for the predictability. I mean, seriously people, a monkey with rudimentary crime fighting skills could have solved this in three seconds flat. In fact, I think that monkey might be far more entertaining. Each and every big reveal and plot twist was obvious hundreds of pages in advance. At times I almost started tuning out because it was just all so expected. Were there really supposed to be any surprises? Because seriously, no, there weren't. This is formulaic writing in a voice that is so flat it doesn't seem real, just words on a page.

I mean, literally almost nothing happens. Hundreds of pages of words and more words. Oh, and the poetry quotes before chapters? What. The. Hell. OK, so, thing about me, I'm not the biggest fan of poetry quote before chapters. At the beginning of books they're OK, but there's something about them being at the start of chapters that gets under my skin. Unless they really perfectly resonate with what is going on it that chapter they just come off as pretentious. Here, given the writing style; the lack of voice coupled with the fact that Clare can barely form a grammatically correct sentence the pretension is oozing off the page. With Tessa's love and continuous mentioning of Dickens, I mean it's seriously like beating a dead horse here, I started to wonder... how deep does Clare's pretensions go? Does she actually think of herself as a modern day Dickens? Does she think that her books will stand the test of time? Stephen King has admitted that he knows his books won't be remembered, so how exactly will Clare's? I mean, the minimal plot and lots of padding out the pages is Dickensian. But the thing about Dickens that I don't think Clare gets is that he could really write. I mean REALLY write. Perhaps I should add delusional to her pretensions?

Going back to the whole this is just City of Bones with a Victorian veneer, it's not even a very good veneer. Here's some fog, here's some old streets, here's some outmoded ways of thinking, that's all you're getting. In fact, it seemed that it fell to Tessa and to an extent Jessamine to keep reminding us we where in Victorian England, not "Modern Day" New York. It was almost laughable the cliches coming out of Tessa, "Women can't wear pants!" "Women don't do that!" "What do you mean Charlotte runs the institute? She's a woman!" Seriously!?! How about working this into the plot in some way versus just blurting these weird retro and sexist phrases randomly. Oh wait, that would mean the book has to have a plot... doh. It seriously scares me to think that there are perhaps millennials out there at this minute who think that this is what Victorian England was like. It's almost as fantastical as a world with Shadowhunters! As for the "Steampunk" aspect of this book. Adding a few automatons doesn't allow you the Steampunk designation. Cause here's the thing, Steapmunk is about worldbuilding and alternate history and getting lost in "what ifs." Sure, people latch onto the gadgetry, but it's about the story in the end. Something Clare clearly can not comprehend. On may levels.

So, of course, to entertain myself I started thinking about what this book could have been versus what it was. Tessa barely touches on the idea of if she can turn into anyone then who exactly is she. It's mentioned in passing but that's about it. Yet here is the one flash of light that could have grown into a book about identity and who we are inside. That who we are outside isn't who we really are. Tessa has been thrown into this shadow world and everything has been thrown into question. Is she really human? Did she really know the world before? Does her brother really love her? Who are her friends? Who is she? All these questions need answering and yet... These are all questions we have to answer for ourselves in life and the target audience of young adults is when we really start to think about them. This book could have been so much more. It could have been a journey about finding yourself in a world that is strange and disconcerting. Instead it was a badly plotted generic book that was more interested in making eyes at the cute yet troubled boy than exploring the depths of the girl who was making the eyes. I hope that perhaps the next book in the series which I will be forcing myself to read will answer these questions, but I now have a lot of experience with Clare and my guess is that it will not.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Backlog Bonanza, Cassandra Clare, Charles Dickens, J.K. Rowling, Joss Whedon, Magnus Bane, Rosemary's Baby, Shadowhunter, Steampunk, Stephen King, The Clockwork Angel, The Infernal Devices, Victorian

City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments Book 1) by Cassandra Clare
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry
Publication Date: March 27th, 2007
Format: Hardcover, 496 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Clary's life has been turned upside down. One night her and her best friend Simon are at a club when she sees something no one else can. There's apparently a shadow world in New York and for some reason Clary is starting to see it. After this shocking discovery Clary's mom Jocelyn is kidnapped and this new world of demons and angels and vampires and werewolves holds the key. There is a group of humans known as the Shadowhunters, and they protect the world from the demons from the downworlds. They keep all of humanity safe and ignorant. Clary has spent her life safe and ignorant, but only at her mother's behest. Jocelyn was once a Shadowhunter, part of the elite Circle lead by her husband Valentine to overthrow the Clave, the organizing body of the Shadowhunters. Jocelyn came to hate the purity of blood the Circle demanded and fled her husband and that world to raise her daughter as a mundane, safe from the dangers of this shadow world. But everyone's past comes back to haunt them. Valentine isn't as dead as everyone hoped and his ideals haven't changed in the fifteen years he has been in hiding. Can Clary, a girl just thrust into this other world, be able to help stop history repeating itself?

The concept of plagiarism is horrifying to me, yet in our society it is oddly pervasive and somewhat accepted. As a creative person who has artistic output the thought that someone would take my work, my blood, sweat, and tears, and claim it as their own, it makes my blood boil. I am so wary of the taint of plagiarism that I have this obsessive self-policing instinct that recoils at the thought that I would cut corners to get a faster or better end result even using just the bones of another person's idea. Plagiarism in any form is abhorrent to me. Yet there were many instances at school where students would get caught showing the work of others as their own. They would lift artwork straight off of deviantART and an observant student or teacher would call them out. Why you might be wondering am I ruminating on artistic copyrights? Well, even if you've only been half aware of the controversy, Cassandra Clare is an author who has, apparently, been rightly tarred as a plagiarist. She is an author who, while the taint has stuck, has also been accepted by the YA community and become very successful. An odd conundrum of our times where theft and unoriginality are king.

While the roots of the story start in fanfic, I want to make it clear that this is just one cast against one person and that fanfic is a thriving and interesting genre that uses pre-existing characters in new ways and isn't being denigrated by me. The bones (haha) of the case against Cassie is that in her fanfic trilogy devoted to Draco Malfoy she basically was ripping off not just witty dialogue from Buffy to Pratchett to Red Dwarf (classified by her as "an obscure British sitcom" and yes, in my mind she should go to hell for saying that) but full scenes and settings from other authors. She was called out, her work was categorized as plagiarized and was pulled from the site it was on. Yes, there was also a lot of name calling, Cyberbullying, and other horrid stuff you can read all about elsewhere, but the fact is she got a book deal from this. This alone disgusts me. But with the eyes of the world on her she wasn't able to rely on the witticisms of Joss Whedon anymore, she took her plot structure from her fanfic trilogy, stripped it down, rebuilt it, and what is left is boring. Even if you were unaware of all this controversy swirling around her you could not help but notice that this book lacks originality, it lacks that spark that's needed to make it more then just a mish-mash of other tropes and plot devices as old as the written word. Cassandra Clare, in my opinion, is a bad writer, not to mention morally corrupt and a bad human. She used the reflective glory of other "true" writers to give her work a shiny allure, that while tarnished, is still there.

But I can't ignore the fanfic roots of City of Bones mainly because this is so obviously Harry Potter from Draco's point of view. And even if I didn't know about the Draco Trilogy, once a flying motorcycle shows up, there's no doubt it's Harry Potter. This book is giving us front row seats to life with the Death Eaters, with a little more Nazism thrown in, sieg heil! In fact it's just too much of everything thrown in, too much borrowed and re-interpreted in a flat way. Here's some Harry Potter (a stele is so a wand no matter what Clare says), add some Rick Riordan, a little Piers Anthony/Bill Willingham (mundies, really, Fables much?), an aroma of Celtic mythology, a dash of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, just have at it. But never once does all this thisness convert into something it's own, something cohesive and original. All this translates into major worldbuilding issues. I'm ok with a magical world coexisting alongside a mundane world, as long as it makes sense. Whether it's willful ignorance on the part of the mundanes, or spells and wards keeping them away, something has to be explained as to how this ignorant coexistence works. Having carriages going over cars and slipping in and out of traffic with not an eyelid batted, please.

The laziness in the worldbuilding though is never so obvious as in the characters that inhabit this world. City of Bones has this feeling of one epically long night of party crashing, much like the aforementioned Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, a book and movie I detest. When you go to these parties you meet people, you get vague impressions, and then they're out of your life forever. That's how I felt about all the characters. They are flat two-dimensional people who will maybe have a defining characteristic, but overall, they are forgettable. After almost five hundred pages with Clary all I know about her is she's a short red-head who draws. Seriously, this is ALL I KNOW about the protagonist of this book? Um... major flaw here. While I know people will jump down my neck for this, but I actually think Bella Swan has more of a personality then Clary. There, I said it. I do think that this issue would have been fixable it there was some buildup before throwing us into the action of the book. How about a few days spent with Clary living her normal life? Some way for us to identify with her and the world she's about to lose. A way for the reader to forge a connection, because without this bond I have no conduit to help me in this book's world, and it makes me care about nothing. Valentine could kill them all for how much I care about them and perhaps I would help him, especially with Jace.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Cassandra Clare, City of Bones, Clary, Draco Malfoy, Fables, Fan Fic, Harry Potter, Jace, Joss Whedon, Mortal Instruments, Nick and Nora, Plagiarism, Shadowhunter, Vampires, Werewolves