Mundie Moms

Monday, March 9, 2015

UK Edition High-Resoultion Covers for Cassandra Clare's THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS Series




A few days ago I shared some exciting news about the UK edition of Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments series. Walker Books UK has re-designed the entire series and revealed the covers. Today I've got the high-resolution covers to share with you! Check out these beautiful re-designed covers. Be sure to click on each individual image so you can enlarge it to see the beautiful artwork. 





Until now, I didn't realize that there was so much detail on each cover. Here's a close up of the winged artwork on the City of Bones cover. 


It looks like I'll be adding the UK edition of the series to my collection of Shadowhunter books. Luckily I've got a couple of months to save my pennies. Walker UK will be releasing the new covers in July of this year.

TMI T.V. Series: A Coming Of Age Story



Warning, I have rambled a lot in this post, but I hope I at least make sense in what I'm saying, because I feel so strongly that this T.V. series gets right, what they failed to get right in the movie. Most importantly, I really hope they understand the importance in keeping this story line one that is a coming of age story.

This past week the TMI T.V. series news lit up social media accounts. From the casting call post on Craigslist, to Don talking about the T.V. series being filmed in Toronto, to ABC Family being the network of choice for the series. Fans around the globe weighed in on their thoughts on the series. At the time of the news release, I was in Barcelona, Spain, and unable to post my thoughts on all this, specially the casting call. While I really hoped the T.V. series would pick up right where the movie left of, or would do better at telling the story than the movie, I'm a bit concerned with the aging up the characters.

Yes, I think it's great if they want to age up the characters a bit, but not to were they're not in their teens. According to the casting call, they are planning on aging up the characters to be between 18 years old, and into their early 20's. Let's be real for a moment. The Mortal Instruments series is a Young Adult book series. Not a New Adult or a Adult book series. The fan base is largely teens... or you know, teens at heart for us. Yes, there are a lot of adults who loves the series, however, series wise, the marketing is with teens. If you take a YA story, and make the characters older as in new adult or adult age, you lose everything that was important to the YA story. One of the most important parts of a YA story is the coming of age part of it.

One of the things that was is so crucial to The Mortal Instruments Series storyline, is Clary's coming of age story. Clary is key in saving the Shadowhunters. Her journey and self discovery is not an easy one, but it's one that is important to the story and series. When we first meet Clary, she's living with her Mom in NYC, and enjoys hanging out with her best friend, and only friend, Simon. She has no idea that she's not just an ordinary girl who loves art, hanging out with her best friend, enjoying all the unique things NYC has to offer. It's not until she sees Jace, Izzy, and Alec kill the demon at the Club, that her world literally gets turned upside down, and she's thrust into the unimaginable. It's also more than that.

We all know how the story goes. Clary doesn't have the closet relationship with her mom. When her mom goes missing, Clary is thrown into a world she knew nothing about. Not only that, Clary learns that things she was told about from her mom, were lies. Specially about her father and brother. Not only is Clary on a mission to save her mom, she now has to decephir what the truth is. In finding out the truth, and saving her mom, Clary not only discovers more about herself, she also learns a lot about the world she's now apart of. In the process, she learns to over come that feeling of betrayal and being lied to by her mom, even though in her mom's defense, she did what she did to keep Clary safe, and away from the Shadowhunter world.  Clary risks so much to uncover the truth, and save her mom. She also gains so much from all of this.

Clary learns so much more about herself. At first, Clary stands out like a sore thumb in the Shadowhunter world. She's an outsider who doesn't seem to belong, even though she does. She doesn't have the skill or knowledge about the history of what she's apart of. It's through her learning of the Shadowhunter world, that she discovers her own abilities, and what she has to offer. She proves that she is in her own right, a strong shadowhunter. It's in her journey of discovering her self as a shadowhunter that readers really get to know Clary more. We cheered her on, and understand the range of emotions she was feelings.

Clary is someone whom we see grow into an amazingly strong character. She becomes this courageous, loyal friend who will stop at nothing to save those she loves, even if that means losing herself. She's strong, and fierce, and is someone who even in the face of all that happens, pulls herself together, and keeps going. She jumps right into the crazy in order to save her Mom. She doesn't think twice when it comes to saving Jace, or helping Simon, or anyone else. In losing herself to save everyone else, Clary ultimately found herself. She discovers whom she really is both figuratively and literally. It's Clary's journey, and coming of age story through out each book that kept us reading. Maybe Jace kept us hooked to. As well as Simon, Magnus, and then there's Izzy, and Alec, and everyone else we meet.

Along the way it's not just Clary who finds herself, but her friends do as well. Look at Simon for example. He literally changed physically, but he also changed emotionally, and mentally. He's a character who changed a lot. He went from being a character who to me followed Clary around like a lost puppy dog, to realizing that what he and Clary had was a strong friendship bond, but it would never work out otherwise. He had to learn to over come that. In the process he gained an inner strength, his and Clary's friendship grew stronger, and he learned move on, and found love himself. His experiences made him a strong character in his own right, and aside from Clary, I loved watching Simon's transformation. Though I didn't like his character at first, I ended up loving Simon.

Every character through out the series comes of age in some way, and it's seeing their journeys, and watching them grow and change over the course of the series that kept fans reading. We became so invested into these characters and their lives, and all that was happening to them. We laughed with them, cried with them, and cheered them on. We watched them fall apart, make sacrifices, lose someone they love, find hope, and over all we watched them become stronger, as they find the will to keep going. We watched them fall in love. We watched them find their own pathways in the life of the Shadowhunter world.

Love and romance are very much apart of this series's coming of age story. As we saw over the course of the series, love is both a powerful thing, and a dangerous thing. It can be used for both good and bad. With love comes sorrow, and heart break. Love also brings hope, and comfort. Friendship, and a bond that is unbreakable. As readers, many of us have experienced the same things the characters have, or we were going through these things. For some of the characters there was a first time for falling in love, a first time for them to have their heart broken and feel like it's the end of the world. There's a first time for discovering who the characters really are, and where some of their interests in sexuality are. There's overcoming heartbreak. Over coming shame, and brokenness. There's finding courage, and being honest, and coming out. There's acceptance, and forgiveness. There's learning to let others in, and not be scared to share your heart with someone else. There's redemption and hope. There's faith, and mercy. There's friendship, true love, and a love so strong that nothing can break it.

When you age up characters so much to were you remove the coming of age story, you take away from the very heart of The Mortal Instruments series. You take away from the characters experiences. You take away from fans being able to connect with a character on their journey. It ruins the opportunity for fans to see them grow, and become these incredibly amazing, yet very flawed characters who we emotionally connect with on some level. Aging younger teenage characters up a year or two, or maybe three is fine, but aging up any more than that to were you make them so old that you take away their coming age story, and ruins the whole story. Movies and T.V. series get ruined when the characters are changed so much. It's not only unnecessary, but in order to keep with a storyline that fans are eager to see done right, and already love, you have to stay true to the characters over all.

Case in point, the ruining of book Valentine in the TMI movie. Worst mistake they could have ever done. Not only was movie Valentine comical, they took away every thing that was curial to the history of his character. If they had kept with the book Valentine, they would have make him much more believable, and a feared character then they would have half naked, and crazy looking movie Valentine. When based off a book series, you can not go into making a movie or T.V. series, and change everything that the characters stand for, and who they are. Fans already have the connection with those characters. You can't change the characters so much that no one knows who they are any more. Most importantly, you can not take a way or ruin the coming of age story, which is what allows fans to connect to the characters in the first place. While the T.V. series will have a fan base, it will never be what the TMI fanbase already is.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. What do you think about the TMI characters being aged up to 18 yrs and older?

The Whitechapel Fiend Snippet; Mundane Monday #236


Happy Mundane Monday Shadowhunters! This weekend Cassandra Clare treated her fans to a fabulous snippet from the Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy. The Whitechapel Fiend Snippet features some of my favorite TID characters, Will and Tessa as well as Gabriel. Originally posted here via Cassie's Tumblr page, you can read the full snippet below:

*click to enlarge the image*

Just in case the snippet image doesn't show up, as I was having some difficulty uploading it, the snippet reads:

Will stopped glaring at Gabriel, and turned to Tessa. He looked at her and his face softened: the traces of the wild broken boy he had been vanished, replaced with the expression often worn by the man he was now, who knew what it was to love and be loved. 'Dear heart,' he said. He took her hand and kissed it. 'Who knows your courage better than I?"

Can I please have more of this snippet? I love the TID series, and I seriously need to go re-read those books for who knows what number of time. You can never re-read this series too many times.

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