The Mortal Instruments City of Bones: The Official Movie Companion Book Review

I promise, this blog won't become The Mortal Instruments Book Review Fansite. It's just that lately, I've been really excited for the movie to come out. So, many of these posts for the next month (be it cosplay, book reviews, or otherwise) will be about The Mortal Instruments. Now about a week ago, I went to my local Books A Million and picked up this bad boy: The Mortal Instruments City of Bones: The Official Movie Companion by Mimi O'Connor. (Woo! That was a mouthful!) While totally happy that this book is part of my collection, I was a bit upset with the companion as a whole. This isn't my first rodeo, and I have several official illustrated movie companions (*cough* entire Twilight Saga *cough* Hunger Games *cough*). This may skew my review into more of a comparison between this particular companion and all of the other ones I've read. To begin with, I immediately noticed that the font was laughably larger than, let's say, Twilight: The Official Movie Companion. By "laughably," I mean that the font looked a lot like my mother's large-print Bible for the visually impaired. While I scoffed at the ridiculous font, I still wanted to read the book. I wanted to know some of the on-set action and cast interviews; however, I hit another road block with the quotes. I have no problem quoting with an author quoting his/her own book, making the quote larger and placing it in the middle of the page so that when the reader skims through the book at their local bookstore, they notice these quotes and say, "I really want to know the context behind that! Take my money!" Now, this book takes a quote, makes it the exact same size font as the rest of the page (probably because any bigger would just be even more ridiculous), and places the colored block quote right beneath the passage it was taken from (sometimes in the middle of the sentence it was quoting). Now as you're reading the page, there is no noticeable difference (other than the colored block) to differentiate the passage. So you read the page thinking you have a bad case of déjà vu, when in reality, it's just bad editing. On a positive note, the pictures were very good! That's kind of important when dealing with an illustrated companion, and this doesn't disappoint (for the most part). I guess a part of me was wanting more new pictures than those that I had already seen on the internet or the any of the trailers. That may be my fault for pretty much stalking anything that is The Mortal Instruments. Lastly, I have to talk about the content of this book. Despite the horrible editing and lousy font choices, this companion has good content. I was really excited with the stuff that I had learned about it, but there seemed to be such a short supply of it. With the large font, I was expecting it to have at least the amount of pages my Twilight companion has since it is also two dollars more expensive, but it is about twenty pages short. Now I know that this is the first one movie adaption of The Mortal Instruments, but there has to be more behind the scenes information than that shown in this book. My final verdict on this companion is that while it has a few redeeming qualities, other illustrated movie companions seem to do it better. I would put this on "Buy If Your a Cosplayer or a Hardcore Fan" list. I give it 3 movie companions out of 5.

Thanks for reading, everyone! I promise a cosplay post is coming up soon. Up next, I will be reading City of Bones by Cassandra Clare for the premiere of the movie. If you have any suggestions on what to read next or have different opinion about the book above, let my know by commenting. If you have any other suggestions like if I should get a twitter for the blog or ideas for posts, let me know! I'll be open to all suggestions! I'll see you next time!