City of Ashes — The Mortal Instruments, Book 2

Raising the Stakes

City of Ashes has a difficult task: it must follow a first novel whose central revelation — the true relationship between Clary and Jace — has permanently altered the reader’s relationship to the series’ central romance. Clare navigates this with reasonable skill, using the complication rather than trying to pretend it away.

Valentine, the novel’s villain and the Shadowhunter world’s most dangerous insurgent, is seeking the remaining Mortal Instruments to summon a demon army that will remake the balance of the Shadow World. Clary, Jace, and their companions must stop him while navigating the political fallout from the Clave’s suspicion of Jace in the wake of his heritage revelation.

Simon’s Transformation

The book’s most genuinely interesting development belongs to Simon, Clary’s mundane best friend. His experience in this volume — and what happens to him as a consequence of it — transforms him from comic relief to one of the series’ most complex figures. Clare is clearly invested in this character in a way that pays off significantly in later volumes.

The Shadowhunter Politics

City of Ashes introduces the Clave — the governing body of the Shadowhunter world — and begins developing the political dimensions of the mythology more fully. The tension between the Downworlders (vampires, werewolves, warlocks, faeries) and the Shadowhunters, and the question of what rights and protections the Accords actually provide, gives the series a more substantial thematic substrate.

Growing Into the Series

Clare’s confidence as a world-builder is visibly growing. The second volume knows what kind of series this is and commits to it without the first novel’s occasional uncertainty.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — A worthy second volume that deepens the mythology and proves the Shadowhunter world has room to grow.

Reading Guides

• Cassandra Clare Books in Order: Complete Shadowhunters Reading Guide (2026)

The Difficult Second Volume

City of Ashes faces a harder task than most second volumes in YA fantasy: it must follow a first novel whose central romantic relationship has been rendered structurally impossible by the revelation at City of Bones’ conclusion. The question of Clary and Jace’s true relationship hangs over the entire book, colouring every scene between them with an emotional discomfort that Clare uses productively rather than trying to resolve prematurely.

The tension is not merely romantic. Jace’s heritage — what Valentine did to him before his birth, and what that means for his capabilities and his moral status in the Shadowhunter world — is a source of institutional suspicion that the Clave acts on with the heavy-handedness that characterises much of their decision-making across the series. The injustice of treating Jace as suspect for circumstances entirely outside his control gives the book a strand of institutional critique that becomes one of the series’ recurring preoccupations.

Valentine’s Method

City of Ashes deepens the reader’s understanding of Valentine Morgenstern as an antagonist in ways the first book’s more action-driven plot did not have space for. His ideology — Shadowhunter supremacy over Downworlders, the purity of the Nephilim line, the necessity of sacrifice for the survival of the species — is rendered with enough internal coherence that it reads as genuinely believed rather than generically villainous. Valentine thinks he is right. The horror of the Mortal Instruments series is partly the horror of conviction: the most dangerous people are those who have constructed a framework in which everything they do is justified.

His use of the Mortal Sword in City of Ashes — its purpose, and what the Clave’s custody of it reveals about their own institutional willingness to use coercive power — ties the book’s external threat to its political commentary with notable economy.

The Downworlder Accords

City of Ashes introduces the political architecture of the Downworlder-Shadowhunter relationship more fully than City of Bones had space for. The Accords — the agreements that supposedly govern relations between Shadowhunters and the vampire, werewolf, warlock, and faerie communities — are revealed as protections that operate primarily when the Clave finds their enforcement convenient. The gap between what the Accords promise and what they deliver mirrors real-world legal structures that protect the powerful while offering conditional shelter to everyone else.

Luke Garroway’s position — as both Clary’s quasi-stepfather and a senior figure in New York’s werewolf pack — gives Clare a character who inhabits both worlds and can demonstrate from experience the specific frustrations of the relationship between Shadowhunter institutional power and the Downworlder communities it claims to protect.

Character Development Under Pressure

The cast Clare assembled in City of Bones deepens in City of Ashes through the specific pressures the plot exerts. Isabelle and Alec, who were types in the first book, begin to develop the interiority that will make them central to the later series. Magnus Bane — the High Warlock of Brooklyn — establishes the particular combination of wit, competence, and genuine feeling that will make him one of the series’ most beloved characters. And Simon, whose transformation this book initiates, begins the journey from supporting comic relief to one of the Mortal Instruments’ most interesting figures.

The second volume ends with enough unresolved threads and enough deepened mythology that the reader has no choice but to continue.

City of Ashes was published by Margaret K. McElderry Books in March 2008, less than a year after City of Bones. The tight publication schedule — three books in as many years for the original trilogy — was unusual even by YA market standards and reflected both publisher confidence in the series and Clare’s productivity as a writer. That pace of release helped maintain the series’ cultural momentum through what might otherwise have been a gap long enough to lose readers.