Yeah, YA is definitely more of a marketing category than something that anything, but as it means that a lot more genre books get published (with young protagonists, but so what), I'm not going to complain. Though I do wish sometimes the cover design didn't follow quite so lurid a template, since I do most of my reading on public transit, and still in paper copy for the most part.
City of Bones was a travesty of a movie, IMO, but I think watching it on DVD is a good plan -- you can enjoy the things they got relatively right -- Jocelyn, Simon, Izzy -- and laugh at the missed marks.
My own relationship with these books is kind of complicated -- Cassie Cla(i)re was my introduction to LJ and her Draco Trilogy my introduction to HP fic and HP fandom, and while City of Bones could stand to be a good deal less derivative of her fic, it and the first couple of sequels were really fun books which I devoured in a day each or something like that. Somewhere around the end of the first trilogy I feel like this series crossed the line between telling a story that needed to be told and milking the franchise, but I do really love a number of these characters, Simon and Magnus and Alec and Isabelle, and, despite some authorial tics that do grate on me, Clare can suck you into the story really well, so I keep reading :) But regardless of what I may think of the later books, this movie in no way does justice to City of Bones!
I don't much like steampunk myself, but Westerfeld's blend of steampunk for the Clankers (the Central Alliance countries in WWI, more or less) and what I've been calling biopunk or genepunk but which is sort of applied evolution, if you will, for the Triple Entente really worked for me, mostly because I found the bioengineered critters and the way of employing them very interesting. So, I cannot much comment on the quality of the steampunk qua steampunk, but I really liked the series (and if you look them up, I hope you do too!)
City of Bones was a travesty of a movie, IMO, but I think watching it on DVD is a good plan -- you can enjoy the things they got relatively right -- Jocelyn, Simon, Izzy -- and laugh at the missed marks.
My own relationship with these books is kind of complicated -- Cassie Cla(i)re was my introduction to LJ and her Draco Trilogy my introduction to HP fic and HP fandom, and while City of Bones could stand to be a good deal less derivative of her fic, it and the first couple of sequels were really fun books which I devoured in a day each or something like that. Somewhere around the end of the first trilogy I feel like this series crossed the line between telling a story that needed to be told and milking the franchise, but I do really love a number of these characters, Simon and Magnus and Alec and Isabelle, and, despite some authorial tics that do grate on me, Clare can suck you into the story really well, so I keep reading :) But regardless of what I may think of the later books, this movie in no way does justice to City of Bones!
I don't much like steampunk myself, but Westerfeld's blend of steampunk for the Clankers (the Central Alliance countries in WWI, more or less) and what I've been calling biopunk or genepunk but which is sort of applied evolution, if you will, for the Triple Entente really worked for me, mostly because I found the bioengineered critters and the way of employing them very interesting. So, I cannot much comment on the quality of the steampunk qua steampunk, but I really liked the series (and if you look them up, I hope you do too!)
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