City of Lost Souls
by Cassandra Clare
Reviewed by Ruby
Jace has gone missing. Clary and her friends are beside themselves looking for him but they have nothing to go on. As the days stretch on, wards start to fall all over the world and the search for Jace has been deprioritized by the Clave to deal with this new threat. That doesn’t sit well with Clary and the Lightwood siblings and they recruit Simon and Magnus to search for him themselves. However, when they do come face to face finally, things aren’t as they expected them to be.
Faced with this horrible reality, Clary makes a rash decision (surprise!) that could not only get herself and Jace killed, but the entire Clave.
Oh my god, this book was, by far, the worst one in the entire series. The only saving grace is that it is much shorter than most of the other books. That and Alec got a lot more chapters. They weren’t the best of chapters and I knew as soon as I started reading them that bad things were going to happen. I was right and not happy about it one bit.
This book was a pain to read because it was basically all romantic angst. There was very little actual plot and most of it happened in that last few chapters. The majority of the time was spent following around Clary and Jace which was not interesting in the least because I still don’t care about them very much.
I basically had to force myself to finish this one. Grade: D Coral's Review
I agree with my sister that this is the worst book of the series so far as everyone continues to make stupid decisions.
Honestly, I thought Clary jumping through the portal into Alicante was the dumbest decision she could make but then she goes and finds a new level of dumb. And Simon’s decision to go along with her plan was equally as stupid and reckless.
I was happy we got more chapters from the point of view of people who weren’t Clary, but I wasn’t so happy with the result. Mainly that Alec gets to make his own stupid decision in this book. Maybe if the author had spent more time on Alec’s character or his relationship with Magnus, then this wouldn’t have felt so out of the blue. But as it is I felt there wasn’t enough motivation given for Alec’s decision to trust someone who was obviously untrustworthy to make any sense.
I hated that Maia and Jordan got back together here, because I think it sends the wrong kind of message.
I think my sister was too nice with her rating, because there wasn’t anything about this book that I enjoyed to save it from an F grade. Grade: F
