I finished the 600+ page new installment in Cassandra Clare’s (neverending) Shadowhunter series earlier this week, and…
Cassandra Clare
Learning From The Masters: Setting the Scene
Another example of a good descriptive paragraph, this time from this awesome book which was one of the ones I couldn’t put down last year (though I gave the entire series mixed reviews…)
The Best Series of All Time (according to me)
Since getting embroiled in yet another series I love, I’ve been thinking about my favorite series (plural) of all time…
How To Choose a Point of View Character
I wrote about point-of-view earlier, but today I want to go a little deeper into that. More specifically:
How do you choose who your point-of-view character will be?
Learning from the Masters: Voice
So last week I said I wanted to talk about something super-important in novel-writing: voice. This week I’m talking about the same thing, and showing an example of a completely different kind of voice.
In YA, you can sometimes read several books in a row all with similar voices. That’s why I love The Spectacular Now–the voice is so unique–and that’s also one of the reasons I adore Cassandra Clare’s Infernal Devices trilogy.
Take this passage:
Book Review: The Infernal Devices
“Heroes endure because we need them. Not for their own sakes.”
I finished The Mortal Instruments series a couple of months ago, and while I most certainly enjoyed it, it definitely had its highs and lows, a mix of 3, 4, and 5-star moments. I put off reading The Infernal Devices because I thought my experience would be the same.
I was wrong.
MK’s Book Reviews: The Mortal Instruments
So I’ve finally finished The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare. (I say finally, but really it took me less than 2 months, with a couple other books in between. That’s not bad for six 500+ page books).
The Mortal Instruments is modern urban YA fantasy, about a teenage girl who discovers she’s actually a demon hunter, and is immediately drawn into a secret world of demons and angels and vampires and werewolves and magic. People draw a lot of parallels to Harry Potter, and I can see why (Clare actually started out as an internet-famous Harry Potter fanfic writer) but it’s definitely got a jibe all its own. It’s much more of a love story than HP ever was–the drawn-out sexual tension was one of the best things in the entire series–and it’s skewed to a slightly older audience. However, unlike Harry Potter, there were a jumble of things that weren’t particularly well-explained or well-plotted. Nevertheless, Clare is a beautiful writer, and this series was like crack to me–I could not stop reading.
This review covers all 6 books of The Mortal Instruments. I have NOT yet read the Infernal Devices (though I’m really looking forward to them!) so please don’t spoil anything for me in the comments I have read The Infernal Devices, and loved them even more; you can find my review of that series here.
Spoilers after the jump…
MK Pagano 