In City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1) the main character is Clary Fray, a teenage girl who lives with her mom in an apartment in New York City. Clary has never known her father and knows nothing of her mother’s past.

When Clary is going into a club that allows minors called the Pandemonium with her best friend Simon, she sees something that will change her life as she knows it. She sees a blue haired boy get murdered by three teenagers with some weird tattoos. Clary goes to looks for the body of the boy, but once she gets to the spot the body should be, she finds a pile of dust instead. Clary drags Simon home in hopes to never see those teenagers ever again. She ends up getting in a fight with her mom and decides to go to a poetry reading with Simon in an attempt to avoid her mom. During the reading, she sees one of the teenagers again. This time the teenager wants to speak with her.

His name is Jace Wayland and he is a shadowhunter. Shadowhunters are the warriors on earth of the angel Raziel. They control and preside over the demons and other supernatural creatures that reside on earth. To Clary’s knowledge she is the only one who can see them. Within 24 hours Clary is dragged into the world of Shadowhunters and discovers some secrets that have been hidden from her knowledge for a long time.

I highly recommend this book because it is still a fantasy book, without having any childish themes. This book has characters that you can basically fall in love with and get an emotional attachment to. The villians in the novel are so well written that you just love to hate them. There are even characters that are not major villains, but act of villains towards the main characters. This book is intense and packed full of emotion. If you enjoy action, fantasy, and romance than this book is a good choice for you. This book also has a lot of surprising plot twists that leave you wanting to know more. This book is a part of a six book series, so I would recommend that you enjoy being left on a little bit of a cliffhanger. When I finished this book I could not help but immediately reach for the second book because I was hooked on the plot and wanted to know what was going to happen next.