** This review will contain spoilers! 
 I'm aware that I'm pretty late to the Shadowhunters world. There's been a movie and now also a Netflix show so I figured it's about time I dive into it. It was sunny outside and I was stacked up on Diet Coke so I figured I could easily start reading a 500 page book and make significant progress. 
 The first 100-so pages of the book were very easy to read, a lot of stuff is still exciting and needs explaining. However, as soon as the basics are explained, everything was predictable . 
 Okay, so the things that I called from the start were: 
 * Valentine being Clary's father. 
 * basically, anyone who was proclaimed 'dead' to be alive. 
 * Luke and the mom being part of the Shadowhunter world . 
 * Simon being crazy about Clary. Like seriously, EVERYONE FUCKING KNEW THAT! 
 * Jace would obviously be her love interest. At least, it was this way all up until the Star Wars-esque revelation. 
 Now, I am not a huge fantasy nerd. Frankly, I did not make it through the first HP novel (yeah, sue me). I have seen maybe 3 Star Wars movies. But even with my rudimentary knowledge of these two franchises, I knew that the whole Valentine/Jace/Clary thing was borrowed from SW. I should have seen the Jace/Valentine thing coming, too. 
 But Valentine was too much of a Voldemort to take it serious. I may not have my facts completely straight because of the aforementioned reason; but his motivations seemed very akin to Voldemort's motivations. 
 And HELLO, LUKE IS THE LUKE FROM GILMORE GIRLS AND THERE'S NO DISCUSSION ABOUT IT! . I knew it from the first mention of Luke. He reminded me too much of the Gilmore Girls Luke and that stayed with me throughout the entire god damn novel. It made it almost laughable. 
 To be fair, I was familiar with CC's affiliations with plagiarism. I just didn't know she'd plagiarize stuff for her official bookstore-novels too. But because of my prior knowledge of her predisposition to plagiarize, i saw through everything because i was probably paying more attention to it. regardless, most similarities were uncanny. People are saying that Clary was Ginny, however I have never really gotten to know Ginny, but it is probably true. 
 Plagiarism aside, let's look at the novel itself. 
 One thing that pissed me off so much was the inner dialogue of Jace where he is like 'oh my god Clary is soooo not aware of how pretty she is! That is SUCH a YA-cliche and a very bad one at that. Because of books/shows/movies treating basically every god damn female protagonist like some sort of goddess who's not aware of her own beauty, people are inclined to see confident women as bitches. Such as Isabelle. She was portrayed as a bitch and someone who carried her own beauty with confidence. There's nothing wrong with being aware of the effect you have on men; every woman should have that. That does not make them bitchy. Clary seemed jealous of Isabella and this enforces the whole 'good innocent humble girl vs confident bitch' bias. 
 It's just the own insecurity of these writers; they have probably never really been confident, or the belle of the ball and have to put down pretty confident girls to compensate for their own insecurity and honestly that's sad to me. 
 I would love to see a non-naive female protagonist who carries herself with dignity and self-awareness and actually fucking SEES WHEN A MAN IS INTO HER . Oh yeah, that's another Gilmore Girls reference: like how Lorelai does not see that Luke is into her; Clary does not see that Simon has been into her for 10 years . Yeah, fucking right. 
 The structure of the book was clear and understandable and every chapter is a new quest. Sometimes I wished they slowed it down with the quests and take it slow so we'd get to know more in a natural way instead of distracting them the whole book with silly quests and then infodumping. 
 The opening chapter was brilliant though, I loved it. It was so dynamic. 
 Overall, it wasn't the worst read ever, that's why I give it 2,5***. And maybe I am a little above the target audience . If someone could tell me that the plagiarizing stops, maybe I'd consider buying City of Ashes but I don't wanna read a HP/Star Wars crossover novel with a hint of Gilmore Girls romances.