Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Claire

Not spoilerific, but still slightly tinged with spoilers.
Sixteen-year-old Tessa Gray moves to London after the death of her Aunt so that she may live with her brother, Nathaniel. Problem is, when she gets to London she isn’t greeted by Nathaniel but is instead picked up by two women who call themselves the Dark Sisters. They force her to uncover her shape-shifting power, but soon after she is rescued by William Herondale, a Shadowhunter. She then learns of the world of the Nephilim and of Downworlders and her new place in it. This is all somehow tied to the disappearance of her brother, whom Tessa is now determined to rescue from whatever danger he may have been thrown in to.

First, and foremost, it must be said that Tessa and Will are basically Clary and Jace with different names and different clothes. Tessa is just as boring and obnoxious as Clary is and Will is just as much of an irritating jerk as Jace is in all the same ways that Jace is- actually, scratch that, he’s much worse than Jace is. There is nothing, nothing whatsoever that makes me feel like there’s any difference between Jace and Will specifically. You could take lines from one, give it to the other, and I would not be able to tell you that those lines did not belong to that character. They are exactly the same. You know what particularly sucks about that? I hated Jace in City of Bones, so naturally I’ve hated Will the entire time that I read Clockwork Angel. If I was at least re-reading a good and entertaining character, I may have been able to forgive Cassandra Claire, but alas, I cannot.

Secondly, yet again, Claire has managed to write pages and pages of filler nonsense that made this book way bigger than it needed to be in order to tell the full story. There were several instances in which I wondered why I should care that Charlotte had a hard time getting two carriages instead of just one from the Institute. What use is this kind of information in forwarding the plot? Why is almost half a page dedicated to this nonsense? Why do several pages of this book have this very same problem? If I had a red pen, I could’ve crossed out paragraphs of information and none of the story would have been lost.

I have to go back to the issue of Claire’s characters though. While I will not say that Jessamine is an exact copy of Isabel, I will say that she’s the same formula for a character. Jessamine has issues with being a Shadowhunter, while Isabel is comfortable with her life as one, but aside from this they serve the same purpose: they’re hot chicks with superficial personalities that exist to show you that even though Tessa (Clary) isn’t a drop-dead gorgeous babe, she is still way better than Jessamine and thus more desirable for male leads such as Will. She had interesting moments here and there, but in the end, she turned out to be pretty disappointing. I don’t enjoy books where the other girls that are around the same age as the protagonist are written off as bitches, I prefer it when the protagonist makes genuine relationships with other girls, because that’s something I can relate to, and even if I couldn’t, that’s still something I would want to relate to.

Speaking of relationships, you know what really annoys me? I’m supposed to have this understanding throughout the book that Will and Tessa are falling for each other, yet there’s nothing in the books that makes me feel like their should be a reason for their feelings. Why does Tessa feel anything for a guy that flips moods with her from one day to another, or a guy that has a sarcastic reply to anything and everything, or a guy that is outright snobbish and rude no matter who he’s talking to or what he’s talking about?

“Will cared for her, she was sure of it. Yes, he had been rude to her almost since he had met her, but then, that happened in novels all the time.” (p. 454)

I agree, Tessa, and I am deeply sick of it. The above quote is followed by a comparison to Darcy and Elizabeth’s relationship, and how he had been rude to her before he proposed. The difference here is that Darcy doesn’t try to be an ass on purpose, and once he realizes he’s been an ass, he tries to change his asshaterriness. Will is an ass entirely on purpose. The entire time, to everyone, and although part of the ending shows us he’s got this sweet, chocolate center to him, he still likes to put on the image of being a complete ass afterwards. It is not romantic, it is not sweet, it isn’t heartbreaking to think that he’s got ~deep secrets~ and an oh-so haunting past. I don’t care what the excuse for his behavior turns out to be (because it’s obvious Claire is setting us up for a moment of “Oh so that explains why he was always so mean! Well I can totally forgive him now!”) because the stuff he says and does is just too much for me.

The description of this book says, “Will, whose caustic wit and volatile moods keep everyone in his life at arm's length... everyone, that is, but Tessa.” Um.. last I checked, he kept her away as well, except that she wouldn’t stop badgering him with inappropriately personal questions because she found him so damn physically attractive and alluring. They share nothing throughout the book, not even their enjoyment of literature, because you can’t really enjoy literature with someone if they spend half their time trying not to show you how much they enjoy literature. They’re rude to each other, and Will especially said some horrible things throughout this book. If anything, they should be enemies by now. I just don’t understand why YA has developed this trend in which the male leads are complete jerks and the girls just can’t stay away from them. Give me Harry Potters, Ron Weasleys, Peeta Mellarks, Seths (from Wicked Lovely) but please, for the love of God, don’t give me any more William Herondales. Guys like him suck.

Moving on.

Name-dropping classic book titles does not warm me up to your characters. No matter how many times you do it. It does not give them personalities to have them quote A Tale of Two Cities, so stop it. Please find better ways of developing personalities.

The dialogue. Oh God the dialogue! In this book and in her first book all of her dialogue was awkward and contrived. You could start a new scene, and it would be as though nothing happened while you, the reader, were gone because the dialogue would soon give you an unnatural summary of recent events. Nothing felt natural, no one said things that I felt someone in real life would naturally say. People still kept setting each other up for one-liners. Awkward statements were made with no indication that the author had made it awkward on purpose. Everyone always feels the need to stop in the middle of an action scene, or a suspenseful scene, and say something witty. Example:

“She’s dead,” said Jem.
“Are you certain?” Will could not take his eyes off the woman’s face. She was pale, but not with a corpse’s pallor, and her hands lay folded in her lap, the fingers softly curved, not stiff with the rigor of death. He moved closer to her and placed a hand on her arm. It was rigid and cold beneath his fingers. “Well, she’s not responding to my advances,” he observed more brightly than he felt, “so she must be dead.”
“Or she’s a woman of good taste and sense.” (p. 130)

Yeah, so you find what you think to be a dead body, so what’s the natural reaction to that? Why, talking about women’s tastes in relation to your good looks, of course! What other reaction could there be to a dead body?

People also often tell me that they enjoy Claire’s world-building, but I have to disagree, because her dialogue is another reason why I can’t feel like she builds her world well at all. Prepare for a bit of more nitpicking. Example:

Will leaned back against the wall. “Did that order of misericord blades come in, Thomas? I’ve been running into a certain amount of Shax demons lately, and I need something narrow that can pierce armored carapaces.”

Will is asking Thomas, a man who presumably has trained and lived with them for a long time, about misericord as though Thomas would not naturally understand why he would need them. Normal dialogue between people doesn’t require explanations like this. If he were explaining to a curious Tessa, then that might work, but that wasn‘t what he was doing. If he said, “Did that order of misericord come in Thomas?” and Thomas said, “No, it did not- why did you order those anyway?” then Will could say, “I’ve been running into a certain amount of Shax demons lately.” Thomas should, having lived in their world for a while now, understand what a Shax demon is and therefore require no further explanation about armored carapaces. A chef would not say to another chef, “Did the order of large kitchen knives come in yet? I’ve had large pieces of meat to work with lately and I need something that can cut through all that thick meat and bone.” It is unnecessary because people who know each other and live in the same environment don’t need to go through these extra explanations, unless someone asks. There should be a mutual understanding as there would be in real life. This is why I can’t be like, “Oh this is great world-building!” because at the time I’m thinking, “People don’t talk like that!” And perhaps if this had only been one instance of awkward dialogue I might’ve been able to forgive Claire, but it isn’t. I’m not, however, going to bore you by bringing up examples of all the other instances in which dialogue is just wrong, because that would take forever and probably wouldn’t be much fun for me.

Then there’s the issue of Shadowhunters and the villains. The Shadowhunters, as usual, have too many runes that easily allow them to deal with problems throughout their missions.

They seemed to thread with the pattern of his veins, as if his blood ran through the Marks, too. “For swiftness, night vision, angelic power, to heal quickly,” he read out loud. (p. 105)

Newsflash, Claire, if your heroes have an unnecessary amount of helpful tools on their side, then it makes it very hard for me to believe that they’re ever really in danger. Also, it’s hard to believe that old, “powerful” vampires like de Quincey are much of a threat if a seventeen year-old Shadowhunter can put up a decent fight. As for your other villain, why is it that I so easily guessed he was going to disappear at the last minute? How did I know he was going to make an easy escape? Was it because you did just about the exact same thing in City of Bones?

Finally, I dislike books that are so very obviously trying to set up a sequel. It’s bad enough that I think this novel was filled with paragraphs and paragraphs of pointless information, it only makes it worse to leave so many questions unanswered. Not that I’m dying to know the answers now, I just think it’s bad form. If she had let this book stand on its own, maybe, just maybe I would have liked it a bit more. Unfortunately, that’s just not what happened.