The Mortal Instruments - Cassandra Clare

I just finished reading the fifth book of 'The Mortal Instruments' and here are a few thoughts about them.

'The Mortal Instruments' is a fantasy book-series set in 'our world', but with a few twists. There are so called 'Shadowhunters', humans who have been infused the blood of an angel. They can boost themselves and their abilities by drawing (to be more accurate: burning) angelic runes on their skin. Their purpose is to protect humanity from demons, interdimensional beings which shove into our dimension to 'harvest' human energy and destroy humanity.

There are also the so called 'downworlders': Werewolves and Vampires (humans infected with a demonic disease), Warlocks (immortal offsprings of demons and humans) and Faeries (which have angelic and demonic blood in them). All of them have to answer to the shadowhunters and to follow rules called 'The Accords', protecting the unknowing humans (called 'mundanes'). The 'Mundanes' don't know anything about this shadowworld, Shadowhunters and downworlders alike use magic called 'glamour' to make themselves invisible or normal looking for mundanes.

The story follows 16 year old Clary Fray, a 'normal' teenager whose live suddenly falls apart when she meets three shadowhunters noone but her can see, in a club. Things escalate quickly, her mother disappeares, demons try to kill her and she has to face the bitter truth that apparently her mother lied to her about almost everything in her life...

I read the five books pretty fast, and i like them pretty much. They are easy to read and the story is interesting enough to read on and on. And interesting enough for me to be a little bit pissed that the 6th is published not until may. I also think about buying the 'prequel' series, set up in the same universe, but in victorian times.

But they are not 'great literature' and I don't think it's anything you HAVE to read. It's definitely a young adult novel, the story circles around typical topics for an young adult novel: Who am I? What defines who I am? Who do I want to be? Does he love me? etc.pp.
That's not really bad, but the book doesn't raise big questions like other young adult novels e.g. 'The Hunger Games' or 'The Maze Runner', so it's a quite nice read, but not much more. If you like young adult novels about growing up, discovering and defining who you are and where you belong, finding and losing
love, this is for you. If you demand more message and deeper story from a story, read 'The Hunger Games' or 'The Maze Runner' ;)

Noteworthy things:

• The fae are pretty cool
• There is a homosexual interracial lovestory between a shadowhunter and a warlock and a number of other homosexual relationships.
• The characters are not overly stereotypical, everyone has a 'twist' in their background.
• There is very little 'black' and 'white' in the storyline, although the discription of the world may lead to think there is. 
• The angelic runes are an interesting idea
• I like the idea of demons being parasites from another dimension 

(Some thoughts about the film: as a book adaption, the film does a very very VERY bad job. The story is completly mutilated, whole parts of the plot are twisted and torn out of context and replaced by parts that don't make sense at all. The casting is not very good (besides Jaces, he looks just like he crawled out of the book) and they changed the end of the book completely! I was flabbergasted after reading the first book, I really don't know how they are thinking to turn this around in the second movie, or whatever they thought by doing something like this. But I'm not sure I want to see the second movie...)