I read alot. Even before I decided to read 100 books in a year, I read all the time, and as such, it's gotten a little hard to surprise me with a book, especially with YA, which seems to generally revel in the limitations of it's age-group. Or maybe I just put up less with bad writing, since I know how it can be better now?
City of Bones surpised me. All the time, at every turn. When I wrote the notes yesterday, I was half way through; I read most of the rest before work yesterday, a little more at bedtime, and the rest these past three hours-- even for me, that's a fast read. It was because it was easy to read. It never lulled in pacing, it always took the unexpected path in plot, and it always came out differently then I thought it would, even if I'd taken the time to worry about which way it was going, which I generally didn't because it was moving so quickly and brilliantly that I wanted to keep reading, each chapter pulling me into the next one perfectly. I'm not surprpised that Cassie Claire can write well, having read alot of her fanfic, but I'm surpised that stories that feel so real and so fresh still exist in the world. It gives me faith that there's still space for me in the genre-- and this one, though classed as YA, stands well with the rest of the supernatural genre. It deals with the adult themes that kids of fifteen and seventeen have to face in a clean and honest way, it handles the weirdness of a parallel world view with grace and balance, it navigates the horror of finding out things aren't as you thought and that parents often mess things up in unexpected ways with a clarity that's refreshing, and it even manages to tacke the ideas of heaven and hell a little bit, and recast them in a postmodern framework that will make sense to kids as well as it makes sense to me. There's a little geekiness, and an in-joke or two, there's reality in the world and it's characters, and there's that juxtaposition of beauty and horror that these sorts of books need to master to really work, and that Claire has down pat. It's as bloody as a vampire novel, sweet as a coming of age book, and it's solid. It's something you could go to New York and trace the pathways of, even if the places named don't even exist-- it feels like they do. It never pulls punches; in fact, it revels in the fact that things are hard, confusing, unexpected and often unwanted and unfair, and people have to push through them, and it comes out the other side changed forever, but reassuringly intact, at least for now. It's a damned good read.
I'm starving for the next one, and I only just finished this one half an hour ago.
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