Books 26, 27, 34: The Secret Country Trilogy

So, reading City of Bones got me thinking about some old drama I read about on the internets back in my younger days concerning miss Cassandra Clare/Claire. It seems that she plagiarized - and not just a line or two, but whole pages verbatim - from Pamela Dean's Secret Country trilogy. She also pulled lines from Buffy and other popular TV shows, but those were supposed to be a bit more obvious; no one picked up on the Pamela Dean rip-off for quite a while, I believe.

Anyway, I liked the Draco Trilogy so much, I figured I should probably give these a go:





They were pretty good, especially if you like fantasy in the vein of children getting magically transported to another land, like the Narnia books. The children in these books are transported to a land of their own invention, or so they thought - it was their favorite game of make-believe come to life. They are thrust into roles of princes and princesses in a game that has already begun, and they must deal with the consequences of their scripted actions. It's a pretty good series, and would probably have absolutely thrilled me when I was younger. As it is, I intend to hold onto these books for my children someday, or a rainy day when I want to escape.

One word of caution - the characters speak ridiculously old-fashioned, with lots of thees and thous. It was a little hard to follow conversations at first, and when I say at first I mean for the first two books I was lost. Worth the effort in the end, though.

Book 25: City of Bones

I have a confession to make: I read Harry Potter fanfiction. Well, I USED to read a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction. My preferred pairing? Harry and Hermione. At some point, I came across fanfic writer Cassie Claire, even though she was mostly into Harry/Draco stuff. She's one of the very few people writing fanfic that actually get "discovered" and get their own book deals. I read her infamous fanfic trilogy (The Draco trilogy, which I believe has been pulled from the internet now that she's a published author), which was absolutely wonderful, so there wasn't really any question that I would at least give this book a shot.

It started out so bad I thought I must've made a mistake. Thankfully, it started to get a bit better, and now I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment in what will eventually be a trilogy. The story centers around a girl, Clary, that realizes there is much more to the world around her than she realizes, and it's her job to hunt evil thingummies. Sorry, it's been a while, I can't remember what they're called in this book - Shadowhunters, maybe? It was pretty decent, although some of it did, in fact, read like bad fanfic, and there were cliches everywhere. Still, though, it wasn't bad, and I did quite like it by the end. Definitely not a bad way to spend a weekend. It ended with a cliffhanger of epic proportions, so I'm a bit anxious about the sequels.

Book 24: Children of Men

I read this book, and then several months later saw the movie. Honestly, I'm such a lazy bum, it's been forever since I actually read this one. I can tell you that the book was pretty slow to start, but the second half was pretty good; there were several things in the book that only got passing mentions in the movie; and Clive Own is pretty. Also, in the movie, they smushed several characters together into Julianne Moore. The book is worth reading on its own, especially if you liked the movie, which I thought was... better than mediocre, but not much.