Tag: The Mortal Instruments

September Reading Roundup

Hello. It’s mid-October, fall is upon us and covid cases are on the rise again, but I’m here to tell you about all the books I read in September. I keep trying to jrite this post earlier in the month, but this time I don’t feel that bad, because I spent the first half of this month writing and editing a short story. I haven’t finished a short story in a couple years, because of law school and the bar and working on novels, but also because writing short stories is hard guys. So this feels like a big accomplishment and I don’t mind that other things took a back seat this month.

Collage of the books I read in September: City of Bones, City of Ashes, The Bands of Mourning, Showing Off, A Song Below Water, Rules for Thieves, The Arctic Incident, and The Kiss of DeceptionBut here I am now to talk about books again. I read eight books in September. Two of them were in Braille, bringing my total number of Braille books I’ve read this year up to ten, which means I’m ahead of the game for once. Three of the books I read this month, including the two Braille books, were rereads. I started a few new series and continued others I’ve been working on. No stand-alones this month.

Honestly, I was less happy with the books I read this month than I’ve been in the past few months. There were a few books that I really liked, of course, but there were also a few that were fine but ultimately just kind of so-so for me. Almost everything I read this month was some kind of fantasy. So let’s just dive right in.

First, I reread the first two Mortal Instruments books, City of Bones and City of Glass by Cassandra Clare. Just before she turns sixteen, Clary Fray discovers she is far from the ordinary teenager she thought she was when her mother is kidnapped by demons. Clary is a Shadowhunter, a demon slayer, and together with her new Shadowhunter friends and her barely discovered powers, she sets off to find and save her mother. I haven’t reread these books since before law school, and it was really great to pick them up again. No, they aren’t the most fabulous books in the world, but they are fast and fun and full of feelings, and right now that’s about all I need.

After that I got the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s second Mistborn trilogy, The Bands of Mourning. Wax and his team of trusty investigators are sent off to find the Lord Ruler’s metalminds, before the bad guys do, of course. I felt pretty much the same way about this book that I’ve felt about the first two books in the series. It was really slow for a long time and then it picked up and became really interesting, but unfortunately, I also just don’t feel as connected to these characters as I want to.

Then I read the third Upside-Down Magic book, Showing Off by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. In this book, Nory and her friends in the Upside-Down Magic class are faced with a whole new challenge: a school talent show ⋅ coneaen ieass has to compete. And Nory’s father is coming, so whatever they do, it can’t feature their Upside-Down Magic. Meanwhile, Pepper is finally getting a grip on her magic so she doesn’t always scare animals witless, and she and the other UDM kids want to show off their magic at the talent show. I continue to love the Upside-Down Magic Adventures. I especially love how much the characters grow in this book and learn about friendship and their own special power. And Nory’s father is the worst. I can’t wait to read more in this series.

I mentioned a few months ago that I was trying to read more books by authors of color, and this month I finally got A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow out of the library. Tavia is a black girl living in Portland, Oregon, where there aren’t that many other people of color and even fewer with magical powers. Tavia is also a siren, in a world where sirens are feared and persecuted. And her best friend, Effie, is, well, no one is sure but she’s definitely something. Everything is going just fine for them until a well-publicized trial of a man accused of killing his girlfriend begins, and the man claims his girlfriend was a siren as a defense. Then Tavia is pulled over by the police and accidentally uses her siren-call to get them to leave her alone, and Effie is blacking out and shedding skin and maybe turning people to stone. And suddenly staying silent is too much for Tavia. I really loved so much about this book. A lot happens, and there’s a lot of feelings, and it speaks to the current moment in our lives so well. I particularly loved Tavia’s and Effie’s friendship. On the other hand, I really struggled with the pacing in this book. Even while dealing with all this stuff, it still managed to be really slow for most of the book, and It switched from slow to fast and fast to slow so abruptly that it often threw me out of the story. So while I really did enjoy this book, it’s not one I would leap to first to recommend. On the other hand there’s a sequel or companion novel or something on the way, and I will most certainly read that.

Then I finally finished Rules for Thieves by Alexandra Ott. I’ve been trying to read this for almost six months. I read the first half of this book in Braille, but gave up because the copy I had on my BrailleNote had too many issues, so I switched to having it read to me by this app on my phone. When twelve-year-old Alli runs away from her orphanage, she gets blasted by a curse that will spread and eventually kill her. The cure, however, is super expensive. Her new friend Beck proposes she comes back to the thieves guild with him and joins, because the salary will cover the cost of the cure. This was a fun book about belonging and right and wrong, and on the whole I enjoyed it. I did feel like I had a hard time getting into it, probably because of the problems I was having in Braille and then listening to it being read to me by a robot voice. I also found I had a hard time connecting with A’li as a character. I felt like I never understood why she wanted to run away from the orphanage so badly, especially because she was going to be released in a few months anyway. And this made it hard for me to grasp the rest of the world and the stakes and everything. And while she clearly thought of herself as sassy, she came across as more annoying and whiny to me. There is a sequel to this book, but I’m not sure I’m going to read it.

Next, I read The Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer, the second Artemis Fowl book. In this book, Artemis is trying to find his father, and Holly and the fairy police are trying to deal with a goblin rebellion. Holly and Artemis make a deal to exchange hlp and team up, and it’s really great. I just love the adventures and the teamwork and the character development we get in this book. An excellent second book to this series.

And I finished off September with The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, the first book in The Remnant Chronicles. I read this series last year, and I believe I told you I had a full post on this book on the way. Well a year later I finally finished writing that post and will post it by the end of this week, so I’m not going to say much more than I continue to love this book and this series.

And that’s it for September. As usual, let me know if you’ve read any of these books and what you thought of them. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy, and if you haven’t already, be sure to vote by November 3.

Kill Your Darlings

Have you ever been reading a book, and a character dies, and you’re completely thrown out of the story? It’s happened to me more times than I can count, and it is the worst.

 

If you haven’t guessed by this point, this post is not about the old adage to trim down your novel by cutting words, characters, scenes, subplots, etc, though incidentally I’ve gotten pretty good at that. After talking about creating and developing strong characters, this post is about killing them. If you’ve missed any of the posts in this series on writing characters, you can go read about creating strong protagonists, antagonists, and side characters and about character development in general.

 

Fair warning, I will be using lots of examples in this post, so there will be some spoilers ahead, specifically from the Harry Potter books, the Hunger Games, the Lunar Chronicles, The Book Thief, Tamora Pierce’s Trickster books, and the Mortal Instruments. I will try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, where possible, but you have been warned, so read on at your own peril (but honestly, if you don’t know who dies in Harry Potter by this point, you deserve to be spoiled).

 

So let’s start with looking at some character deaths that drove me nuts.

 

First, Lupin, Tonks, and Colin Creevey. The climactic sequence of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a huge battle, so naturally people are going to die. Lots of people are going to die. I accept that. Among my writing buddies, I am personally known for killing whole bunches of characters ruthlessly. That is not my problem with some of the deaths at the end of Harry Potter. We’ve already lost Hedwig, Dobby, and Fred in this book alone. Oh, and by the way, Harry’s about to go sacrifice his own life. And then we find out, just by seeing their bodies, that Lupin, Tonks, and Colin Creevey are dead. I get that this is the cost of war. But we don’t see them die, and then their deaths pale in comparison to the idea of Harry’s sacrifice. Personally, this combination doesn’t work for me.

 

To give one more example of a death that doesn’t work for me, let’s look at the end of Mockingjay, when out of nowhere, Prim is in the middle of a war zone and gets blown up. I will admit that the movie did a much better job with this and cleared up a lot of the confusion about what happened (in the movie, it may in fact be something I accept), but in the book, it was not okay. First of all, Katniss volunteered for the Hunger Games in the first book in order to save Prim, and by killing Prim, it really makes you wonder, well what was the point of all of this? Furthermore, in the books, Prim is never developed as a character—she is always just an object for Katniss to protect. We are sad when she dies because Katniss is sad, but we are not forced to mourn her in her own right. Finally, though again I think the movie clears this up nicely, there is nothing gained by Prim’s death. She doesn’t save anyone or accomplish anything by dying, and we already very clearly have seen the cost of war *takes a minute to wail “Finnick!”*. And then Katniss votes for one more Hunger Games, for Prim, which invalidates everything even more.

 

These are just some examples of how a character death can fail. In these cases, and I’ve found in almost all cases when I’m annoyed by a character death, it’s because either the character wasn’t sufficiently developed (Prim) or because the character’s death was not given enough attention in the book (Lupin, Tonks, and Colin Creevey). For the record, I’d also like to say that I really don’t like it when the book ends with the main character dying, even if it’s a noble self-sacrifice. It is never okay with me.

 

There are plenty of examples of character deaths that work well for me, though, and I’d like to talk about why. First, look at Dumbledore. He is Harry’s mentor, so it’s kind of a given that he has to die at some point. In order for the hero to go off and kick butt, or at least to go camping for a year in search of butt to kick (I say this with love because I actually have no issues with the camping trip that is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), the mentor needs to get out of the way. Yet Dumbledore’s death works well because it is the culmination of a really dramatic scene. Harry and Dumbledore have stolen the Horcrux and made it back to Hogwarts. Dumbledore is sick, but Harry is confident he’ll be all right once he gets help. But then Snape, you awful person you, and oh yeah the Horcrux isn’t real. Plus, let’s not forget that there’s nothing like the drama of Dumbledore being blasted off the tallest tower. Finally, though we feel like we know enough about Dumbledore to mourn his death, there are also mysteries surrounding his death and also what he didn’t tell Harry in his life.

 

Next, think about one of the first deaths in The Lunar Chronicles series, Cinder’s younger stepsister Peony, who dies from the plague Cinder has discovered she is immune to. Peony isn’t Cinder’s mentor in any way, but she is the one person tying Cinder to her step-family. Though we haven’t spent much time with these characters yet, we already love Peony, not just because Cinder loves Peony but because we’ve gotten to know her ourselves. Finally, the sheer tragedy of it is just beautiful. Cinder is so, so close to saving her life, but she is just moments too late. I love it.

 

For similar reasons, I think all the deaths in Tamora Pierce’s books Trickster’s Choice and Trickster’s Queen work really well. We know the characters and we love the characters, their deaths push the plot and other characters forward, and with one exception, we see it all. Even the important death we don’t see on-screen is done really well, because we have to witness the other characters’ anxiety and grief while they wait for news. I also have no problem with everybody dying at the end of The Book Thief, though I know people who do, and in other World War II books with similar endings, I have been annoyed at the mass slaughter committed by the author to illustrate the tragedy of war.

 

I think how readers feel about character death can be so subjective. It depends on the reader and the book. Some of the situations that I described as not working for me might work for someone else, or might work better in a different book or different context. I prefer happy endings to tragic ones, or at least endings on the positive spectrum as far as endings go, but I recognize that not everyone shares this preference, and I have certainly been won over by books that don’t have happy endings. I’m not sure there are any hard and fast rules on how to effectively write a character death. I’ve killed a hundred characters in one move, and I’ve also killed an important character off-screen, though I can’t objectively say if any of those deaths work. There are all kinds of reasons for and ways to kill characters, whether because the character is a mentor or someone tying the protagonist down, or because the character’s life is part of the cost of war. Honestly, when I’m going into the last book in a series, I feel this awful and wonderful trepidation knowing that in some way, for the story to be significant, someone important has to die, but at the same time I don’t want anyone to die because I love them all so much. Of course, if it’s a long series, people have probably already died, so I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary for someone to die in the last book. Also, I’m definitely a fan of fates worse than death, such as Simon’s choice at the end of the Mortal Instruments series.

 

But while I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules on what makes a character death effective, I will say that for me it’s important that the character is sufficiently developed, that their death is given enough attention in the book, and that it is significant in some way to moving the plot and characters forward. I feel like it’s very similar to what I said a few days ago about developing your characters in general: people want to read about other people. Your characters lives should feel so real that your readers love them, cheer for them, and weep for them, and so should their deaths.