City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare (The Mortal Instruments #4)

As the synopsis also says, in the City of Fallen Angels, the latest installment of The Mortal Instruments series, the war is over, Jace is back from the dead, Clary’s mom is back too and everything returns to normal – maybe too normal for Clary who doesn’t simply want to live the life of a regular teenager. She is now a real shadowhunter who has more serious things to do than just be a teen.

She is now sulking a lot, Jace is acting out his teen age as well and things start to look like, well, normal. Clary is training with Jace at the Institute, so they have their extra time to make out. Of course she can’t spend the nights with Jace (yet), but during the day she’s always at the Institute with him, every moment of the day.

However Jace starts to act a bit strange, slowly distancing himself from Clary as we speak. Needless to say, Clare soon learns what it really means to be a teen, when the hormones are raging and you never know – from day to day – whether the guy you love really loves you back or he’s looking for an excuse to bolt. Coz the way Jace is acting lately by avoiding her it sure looks like a break-up attempt.

Now if you’ve read the previous books in the series, you realize they don’t break up and there’s something else (possibly sinister) going on there. Which is also revealed when we’re looking at Jace. Now in real life when we’re dreaming of doing something horrible to someone we love, as soon as we wake up we know that it was just a dream – a horrible nightmare and nothing else. No so Jace who is staying away from Clary to not hurt her. A bit strange, but there you have it. I won’t go more into details in this one, but yeah apparently there is a reason for his fear.

Off to other characters. By now it’s not a major surprise that Simon is a vampire. You should know this from a way earlier novel. He’s still adjusting to his vampirism and trying to behave normally – as much as possible. The fact that he is a ‘daylighter’ allows him to be awake during the day, which makes him at least resemble a normal guy. Until his mom…oh well, better read it yourself, but boy this part did remind me of an earlier episode of The Vampire Diaries when Caroline’s mom found out that she became a vampire.

Because Simon is a daylighter, everyone wants a piece of him and poor guy he’s torn beyond belief. He wants nothing more than keep the shadowhunters friends, but as he is constantly reminded by various powerful vampires, he is nothing like them and probably the shadowhunters don’t like him that much anyway. Plus let’s not forget, when all is said and done, centuries from now probably only him and Magnus will remain when everyone else is long ashes in the wind.

Which brings us to Magnus and Alec – who live in a blissful bubble of their own until they’re both summoned to come back to where the real action is. Alec is constantly jealous of this or that past boyfriend of Magnus and sometimes I kept rolling my eyes – literally – when reading some of the cheesy male love dialogues. Eventually it is revealed why Alec is feeling the way is feeling, but still, I have to say there is a lot of cheese in this novel. Much more so than in any of the previous ones in the original trilogy.

As to the action, there was some of it, but not as much as before. Sometimes I had a feeling that another author wrote this book just to keep it going. Don’t get me wrong, I still liked this 4th book, but not necessarily ‘loved’. Something was lost here and instead of devouring it like the previous 3, I found myself reading it along with 2 other books – needless to say it took me much longer to finish it than the previous ones.

I still have one more book to read and I will because I can’t let a series unfinished, and the fact that the book ended with a major cliffhanger makes it impossible to let it go until I find out just what happened with Jace, but my major enthusiasm has taken a small vacation. Hopefully it will be back with the last book, so I can again give it at least a 4 star rating. This 4th book gets now 3.5.

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