City of Bones Reading Response (spoilers)

Imagine leading an average life where nothing that surprising happens, but you’re pretty content with it. Suddenly, after one night, everything you’ve ever known is destroyed, and you don’t know who to trust. Not even your own mother. The book City of Bones by Cassandra Clare is about a girl named Clary Fray. One night, her mother is kidnapped by demons, and along with a mysterious group of teenagers who call themselves shadowhunters, Clary begins to learn the truth behind herself and the strange things that happened that night. Because of all of this, two of the most important themes in this story are identity and growing up.



Identity is a very prevalent theme in City of Bones. First, a big part of the story is about Clary learning more about her shadowhunter heritage. She is forced to choose whether she wants to stick to her mundane (human) lifestyle or learn shadowhunter ways, and also whether she wants to be with her old friend Simon, a human, or Jace, a shadowhunter. Consequently, she becomes unsure of who she should be. Parallel to this, page 436 of the story states “and in that moment Clary saw that this was no joke, that Jace was not just playing along for his own purposes. He really thought Valentine was his father returned to him.” Knowing that Valentine, the main antagonist, was his father, and not Michael Wayland lead to him feeling more insecure and abandoned. Both Clary and Jace are so controlled by their identity issues that it affects their relationships with other people. From this, the author wants us to know that identity can be a very troubling issue for people and it can spread to other issues as well.



Growing up is also one of the most significant themes in City of Bones. For example, when Clary’s mother is kidnapped, Clary is forced to deal with her new experiences with Simon being her only connection to her past. As a result of this, she ends up maturing much faster. Also, she has to live at the institute (a haven for shadowhunters) where she’s forced to find a way to fit in with the other shadowhunters. Clary begins to develop stronger opinions about certain things, which are different from the opinions she had in the protected environment that her mother provided for her. This is like what teenagers go through since they start to debate more strongly about things. This makes this theme important since teenagers need to know that their opinions can make a change, which Clary demonstrates.



To sum up, the characters of City of Bones go through a lot of change during the events of City of Bones, and many of their issues are related to identity and growing up. Nowadays, these can be some problems for teenagers and this book shows how Clary deals with them. Really, being a teenager is the gap between being a child and being an adult. To most people, identity means who you are. However, to the people who delve deeper into the meaning of identity and growing up, these words become complex topics that not only mean who you are and becoming older, but instead mean how you plan to show your place to the world.