City of Fallen Angels - Cassandra Clare

The fourth book in The Mortal Instruments series follows on the storyline from the original three books once our characters have returned from the Shadowhunter home country of Idris having defeated the evil Valentine. While I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that are stoked there are more books being written in this world that Cassandra Clare has created, I am not one of those super psyched people. Don't get me wrong I did thoroughly enjoy the trilogy that came before this book, but I felt that the story was done and I have happy to leave it there. This new extension and angle have put a twist on it all to keep it fresh but still lack a little for me.

Again having listened to this on audiobook I was truly disappointed by the two narrators, Ed Westwick and Molly C Quinn. The surprising thing, even to myself, is that I love Ed Westwick. I think he is amazingly talented and as soon as I heard him speak I was in a whirlwind trying to pin point where exactly I knew the voice from and when it clicked who it was I was so happy. However the excitement didn't last very long. I found that both narrators seemed to miss the beat and emotion of the text they were reading and their different pronunciation of names and places from all the previous books made me so furious that I found myself correcting them every single time throughout the entirety of the book. For me, this put such a downer on my listening experience, that I fear it has even dampened my feelings for the story itself.

This story took a long time to get anywhere and was mainly focused on the character Simon, who I thought was a little boring even if he is a downworlder now. Then once it did start to flow at a decent pace it felt to me like it was rushed with a few story lines being avoided so that there could be yet another book to conclude everything. The final few minutes of this story were so infuriating that it has made me seriously question whether or not I want to listen to the last book in the series.

There are good fun characters in this story, why didn't Clare follow them instead of making them bit characters who only appear when the main boring characters we follow need something from them. That especially would have made this post trilogy storyline a little more exciting and enticing. More Issy and Magnus to spice things up in the final instalment please.