City of Ashes
- 512
- Pages
- about 9 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“City of Ashes” does its best work on the side: Alec and Simon grow into more interesting figures here. It picks up soon after the first book and keeps up the pace of an urban fantasy that fills New York with demons, vampires and werewolves. Some readers find the central pair, Jace and Clary, wearing, and some fans rank this as the low point of the series, a bridge worth crossing for what follows.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
City of Ashes is the second installment in The Mortal Instruments series, an urban fantasy series set in New York written by Cassandra Clare. The novel was one of YALSA's top ten teen books for 2009.
Reading order · The Mortal Instruments
Full order & progress →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.5 across 1,194 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 89% of the weight and the score stays at 7.6 — the Young adult average of 7.8 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Books | 9.0 | 13 | 1% |
| Hardcover | 7.5 | 1.2K | 99% |
Frequently asked
What age is City of Ashes for?
City of Ashes sits on the Young adult shelf in the sources we use, which by convention means roughly ages 13 and up. This is a guide from the book’s category, not a publisher’s age rating. It has 512 pages — shorter than 57% of the ranked books in Young adult.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Young adult — and a score of 7.6, the closest to this book.
