SFF Author: Cassandra Clare

City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare

When I finished City of Fallen Angels I was angry; not with Cassandra Clare, who created the Mortal Instruments series, but with the evil-doers who once again have come between Clary and her Shadowhunter boyfriend, Jace.

At the end of City of Glass, the Shadowhunters and the downworlders — vampires, faerie, and werewolves — banded together to stand against Clary’s arrogant and megalomaniacal Shadowhunter father Valentine in a cataclysmic battle. Clary used her newly discovered talent for the magical runes called Marks to defeat her father and bring Jace back from death.

City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare

THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS series started out as a trilogy, and should have stayed there. This fifth book in the series has devolved into nothing more but one incident of teenage groping and/or angst after another.

City of Lost Souls is very disappointing.

[Editor’s note: Terry, a perfectionist, didn’t want to post this short opinion as a review, but we thought you’d want to know, so we posted it anyway.]  

Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

And then comes the final test, the infallible touchstone of the seventh-rate: Ichor. It oozes out of severed tentacles, it beslimes tessellated pavements, bespatters bejeweled courtiers, and bores the bejesus out of everybody.
~Ursula K. Le Guin, From Elfland to Poughkeepsie

Cassandra Clare stumbles straight out of the gate in Clockwork Angel. In the opening sentence… “ichor,” one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s perfect tests for bad fantasy.