The problem with this book is that is doesn't start at the beginning. 
 This book is not about Clarissa Fray and Jace Wayland. This book is about their parents. 
 I won't mention anything specific, but I will say that if we learnt of their parents' tales as entire novels instead of far too many exposition-filled chapters, then that would be a whole other story. Really. It would. 
 And honestly, I feel like it would be better on the whole. 
 The first thing that struck me on the very first page of the first chapter was the prose. To me, it read like fanfic - and I mean the bad kind, clunky similes and overuse of adverbs included. I couldn't get absorbed into the story initially because the writing style gave me a few issues. It honestly felt like the author just used the synonyms tool on Microsoft Word every other sentence. That, plus the unrealistic one-liner spouting every character seemed to do really bugged me. Clary didn't have much of a personality, and I don't feel like the third person narrative did anything in the book's favour; there's a chapter near the end (one which included a character's story I'd much rather read) written entirely in first person, so it clearly isn't as if Clare was incapable of writing in such a way. 
 Oh, and I am aware that Cassandra Clare was a prolific(ish) fanfiction writer back in the formative days of such things on the Internet (which might explain her writing style). I am also aware of the various plagiarisms she committed. That really does bug me, but when reading the book I did try to look past that. Honestly, I was so disinterested at some points that I sort of forgot about that entirely. I also didn't take in any of the story, either. 
 Whoops. 
 But what bothered me most about the style of prose was the fact there was absolutely nothing left to the imagination. 
 You know that rule of writing where a good writer shows, and does not tell? 
 Yeah. Clare tells everything. 
 There is not one ounce of subtlety in this book. Everything is explained to the very end. The things that are inferred are explained immediately afterwards, defeating the object entirely. Honestly, it's a little insulting to the reader; it's almost like Clare believed you wouldn't understand her genius if everything wasn't laid out plainly in front of you. One of the many examples is Hotel Dumort; this could have been a nice little extra for the readers who know a little bit of French, but nope. It had to be explained. That was totally necessary. 
 I know I have a nasty tendency to focus mostly on the negatives (a.k.a. I haven't written a single positive thing in this whole review) so I shall scrape the bottom of the metaphorical barrel and say I quite like the look of the new UK edition covers, the ones with the shiny things on the front I presume are supposed to be the runes I never quite understood. I feel like the lore would have been more comprehensible if this series was about the generation beforehand - the Circle, the Clave, the Downworlders and Shadowhunters, all the concepts I never got the gist of - but I guess then it wouldn't have been a Young Adult novel anymore, and that's the genre that was capitalising on the whole fantasy/dystopia thing (has that died down yet? I'm a little out of the loop, if you couldn't tell from the fact I only just finished one of the hottest YA books of 2008). 
 I'd give it around a 1 star; it ended up being quite the slog to get through. It was pretty average, nothing particularly special, and by the end I just kind of felt like it was a clusterfuck of fantasy tropes churned together with a tourist brochure about New York City. 
 I feel a little bad since a couple of my friends really loved this series, but I guess it just didn't jam with me.