Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, Book 1)

Clockwork Angel - Cassandra Clare Could there be out there, in this world filled with stories, a bigger cliché than what this book speaks about? Let's talk recipes, shall we? Add one teenage girl, pretty with tendencies towards beautiful, with a bit of brains and a natural curiosity. Adorne her with powers no one else has. That way you make sure she's the diamond of the Crown. Next, mix in there an egocetric, self-loathing but extremelly handsome man. Stirr well so they bump into each other every time. Then add the secret ingredient: the second boy. Make him.. sweet, thoughtfull, caring. Lovable, some may say. While we're here, it doesn't do much harm if this thoughtfull, caring and lovable guy would be slowly dying. Just makes things more dramatic. Make sure you remember that each of the two boys has special powers and they fight death every other day, so the girl gets to see their courageos selfs. Now that you have these things in the bowl, stirr powerfully until you come up with a mixture of teenage lust, foolish acts and of course, some philosophy along the way, for the pickier eaters. Voila! You have made your own “Clockworck Angel!”

Hey guys. I haven't done a review in a while and I really felt bad about it so I decided the next book I'm going to finish will get one. Of course, I didn't expect it to be Clockwork Angel, but a promise is a promise. Ugh.

I found this book really annoying. I can't say that I hated it, though. This gets 2.5 stars easily, because the story itself is pretty entertaining and it does take your mind off other problems you may have.

Before I started reading this, I didn't even hear about Cassandra Clare or how much of a big hit she was, because this YA thing doesn't appeal to me and I stay away from the literary circles that read this kind of literature. Of course, for others this may be their favourite kind of writing but I find it annoying, childish and simply put, not complex enough. I've read my share of YA, though, just to be sure I didn't miss anything, and I found out, with a bit of a surprise, that some of the books that were written in this genre I actually enjoyed. Naturally, they all seem to be the same thing, for me. Creatures that want good people dead, some folks with supernatural powers, a vampire here, a lycanthrope there and you end up with … well, almost everything that's in the bookstores today, since 2000 until now. There seems to be a demand for such stories and of course, when the public wants something.. you know the drill, you give it to them.

So, not hearing about Cassandra Clare and her smashing hits, I was baffled when I seemed to start stumbling upon her books on Goodreads, on and on and on. And each time one of her works would appear on my radar, it would be with a 4 or 5 star rating and a reaction kinda like “OMG BEST BOOK EVER”. One would say that when her or his friends, lots of her or his friends liked a book, she would be elligible for liking it also. One would say that when people that have read so many books that you can't even count them and know the literary world say that Cassandra Clare knew what she was doing, they meant exactly that.

Well let me tell you something. As much as I appreaciate other people's opinions, I think they're wrong. This is not a good book. It's an interesting story with some nice developments, but the book itself cannot be made just of that. It has to have a certain style, it has to come with a certain writing, the author must pay attention to details, blah blah, we all know that. So how come the only thing good about this book was the storyline itself? Maybe Clare was just lazy. She had a good thing in her hands, she could've made more of it. She could've made it better. Instead she chose to mix a bunch of things together and see what comes out.

Let's first talk about what I liked in this book.

1. The idea. I must admit I didn't meet this before, and whenever I didn't meet a story before my eyes gleam and I pay attention to it because I love detail working when an author manages to take a super known theme and turn it upside down. Well, I'll give Cassandra Clare that: she took some super known themes and TRIED to turn them around. Unfortunatelly, she didn't succeed all the way.

2. Yeah, that's about it, really. The rest I found dull, despite reading the book so fast. I have come to realise that there's no relation between how fast I can read a book and how much I like it. I've had books that I read in two months and I loved, I've had some that I read in less than a day and loved, and then I had books that I read in a day, a month or a year that I hated. Same thing happened here. I didn't hate it, and I don't consider it to have been a waste of my time, but it's not a thing I recommend.

The things I didn't like...

1. The try to set it in London of 1870s. Didn't work. I constantly had the impression it was either a parallel world or a contemporary scene. Sorry, I just didn'g get a feel for it.

2. The love triangle. I hate love triangles. I know where this is going. No matter how Clare intended to end this book, no matter what she's going to do with Will, Tess and Jem, I already know where she's going. There's only so many choices that she can pick! I can think of at least 5, 6, oh wait, 7 endings to this love triangle, and none of them appeals to me because this, the whole of this, shouldn't have happened in the first place! Is there something wrong with YA readers that they keep wanting these 1 girl 2 guys scenes come up? When will someone come with the 2 girls, 1 guy scene? Or with the 3 girls scene? Or 3 guys? Those would be nice turns because everything is dull when you get back to the same fucking idea that the girl has to chose, the blah blah, one guy is bad, one guy is good, blah blah.

Also, throughout the book, I tried to keep some of my nastier ideas on my phone, whenever I bumped into something that I found stupid/amusing or whatever:

1. ”he gave a smile such as Lucifer migh have given before falling from heaven” no. no. lady, you're not going the right way. You must've missed the “I can't stand no bullshit wanna be smart ” lines in the middle of my literary world.
2. Apparently Aunt Harriet is some kind of a genius. Her advices seems familiar.. hm..where have I seen them? “you know a man by how he acts, not speaks”. Yeah, haven't heard that before from a well known author?

3. Tessa reminds me of a lesser human being, known by her much hated name, Anastasia Steele. She seems to discover the obvious only after repeteadly bumping into it.
4. Five minutes after finding out what she is, she starts calling the others “humans”. Oh, Tessie, don't be such bitch!

5. “she had never thought about her name before, but when he said it, it was as if she was hearing it for the first time – the hard T, the caress of the double S, the way it seemed to end on a breath. Her own breath was very short when she said, soflty, “Will”. ” Oh, puh-lease, get a room, you two, I feel nasty. UPDATE: I bet Clare would have made any name sound sexy. What if it wasn't Will, but Mobutu Sese Seko? There's T's and double S's there too!
6. Round two of nastiness: “his gaze pased over her face, down her throat, to her waist, before rising back up to her face, where it lingered on her mouth” - of course, how could we forget about the mouth? ??
7. Seriously? Vampires can't say God? What next, a whore can't say penis?
8. *when she offers to be taken and stop all the fighting* maybe you should just let him have me. Do I smell brains? *sniff sniff* No, wait, I was wrong.

So, in the end, this was just another book in my path. I don't know for sure if I'm going to read the next installments, but I'm baffled at how many people consider this a really good book and I'm trying to understand what's so OMG about it. I'll probably never find out, even if I do read them.

For the time being, I'm going back to some good fantasy and a touch of horror, to clear my mind of all this mess.