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City of Bones: Chapter Eight - Weapon of Choice

The Portal spits Clary out midair. She almost hits a tree. I’m not going to pass judgment quite yet as we don’t know how the door Clary went through works — maybe it sends you to a set location, maybe not — but if it is a set location, that’s a terrible location. Jace goes flying out after her, having followed her in order to keep her safe in case of danger. He lands on top of her, actually, so it takes a minute for Clary to get up, get her bearings, and realize that she’s near Luke’s house.

Obligatory location description: Williamsburg waterfront, right near the Williamsburg Bridge. Luke’s house is in back of a bookstore (Garroway Books: Fine Used, New, and Out-of-Print). Now you know.

Jace tells Clary that the Portal takes the user to whatever place they’re thinking of. Clary objects that she wasn’t thinking about Luke’s house, or, indeed, about anywhere in particular, but Jace just drops the subject. Well, I’m not gonna. Not that easy.

Okay, maybe Clary subconsciously thought of Luke’s house. Maybe she was trying to think of where her mom might have wanted to take the Portal to, in which case Luke’s house is probably a location that makes sense. But why did it spit her out midair? If you don’t have a very specific location in mind, is that what the Portal does? Because I’d be willing to accept that, but I just wanna know how the fuck this works. I shouldn’t have to spend the whole story guessing as to why things happened the way they did, and so far in this book there has been an awful lot of that.

Clary says they should probably leave, as Luke told her back in chapter whatever that he didn’t want her there. Jace says they should investigate and asks if Clary has keys to the house; Clary says no, but that sometimes Luke leaves the back door unlocked. They decide that Luke probably isn’t home, since his truck’s not there and the lights are all off, and then they… climb the fence in preparation to sneak into Luke’s house? Wait, stop.

Clary’s known this guy all her life, right? He’s an honorary uncle to her? And she’s going to sneak into his home on the suggestion of a guy she’s only known for a couple days?

Could she be any more of a doormat? Moving on.

As soon as Jace makes it over the fence, he falls right on top of something; Clary first assumes it’s a stray cat from the yowl the thing makes, but she quickly sees it’s much too big to be a cat. In fact, it’s actually Simon. Why Clary didn’t recognize her best friend sooner, or at least recognize that he was a person and not a large animal — this took her several paragraphs — I have no idea.

Simon, naturally, has been worried sick about Clary in her absence, and was hanging around Luke’s house trying to see if he could learn what happened to her when he spotted Luke stuffing a duffel bag full of weapons, some of which were glowing. We get a scene break — I should mention there was also a scene break right after Jace landed on Simon — during which Clary explains the events of the past few days to Simon. Simon declares the whole thing to be awesome, and compares it to Dungeons and Dragons. (Is it really? I mean, my D&D knowledge is minimal, but wouldn’t Simon be more likely to exclaim “Wow, this is like every shitty urban fantasy story I’ve ever read!”?) They have some uninteresting banter stemming from the fact that Jace has never heard of D&D. During this, Simon asks if there are any hot vampire babes — seriously. The whole scene is awkward and unfunny and I don’t know what the fuck to make of it. Moving on.

The three kids decide to break into Luke’s house. The door is locked after all, but Jace uses his stele to draw a Mark on the door that lets them in. Again, remember that in this universe humans apparently cannot do magic. Seriously, what do the Marks qualify as?

The space inside is dark, filled with stacks of books. Simon points out a pair of manacles on the wall, and almost makes a “that’s kinky” comment before Clary stops him. Jace takes a closer looks and notices dried blood on the manacles, and evidence that someone tried to yank the chains right out of the wall. Damn, Luke must know how to have fun.

They head into Luke’s living room, which is almost as filled with books as the bookstore itself. Clary recalls curling up in this room reading The Chronicles of Prydain when she was younger; I wanna note this because this book so far has given Clary very little in the way of personality, hobbies, or interests, and reading fantasy novels counts, right? Even though it’s almost a given for an urban fantasy protagonist to enjoy fantasy novels?

Simon notices the percolator is on and there’s hot coffee in the kitchenette. He figures from this that Luke must be still around, so instead of… I don’t know, keeping quiet? hiding? he yells to the others that he thinks Luke is still around. Nothing happens, of course.

Clary has a look around. Everything seems to be as it should be, but no sign of Luke. She goes into the guest bedroom, where she stayed often while her mother was out of town on business — hang on a minute, what business? Her mom is an artist, right? Is she traveling around doing gallery openings? Is this actually Shadowhunter business she was going on? Are we ever gonna get an explanation?

Under the bed in the guest bedroom is a backpack belonging to Clary, containing some of her clothes and toiletries (she keeps it there for when she stays at Luke’s). The backpack has some buttons on it that Simon gave her — they say stuff like “GAMERS DO IT BETTER” and “OTAKU WENCH” and I’m not sure whether that says more about Clary or Simon, since we’ve had basically no hint of Clary being either a gamer or a weeaboo while I can totally see Simon being both those things. Clary changes quickly, tosses Isabelle’s clothes in the backpack, and, taking it with her, exits the room.

(I’m excusing the above scene because it was short and because, while Clary does have horrible priorities in general, taking a couple minutes to get cleaned up when it looks like the coast is clear seems fairly reasonable.)

Jace, meanwhile, has found the duffel bag full of weapons that Simon described seeing earlier. This is where I’m starting to wonder — why so many weapons? Are demons just really, really hard to kill, or does the manner in which they can be killed vary so greatly that you need a ton of different weapons to do the trick? This doesn’t seem consistent with their depiction thus far — Clary killed one by accident, remember. Why wouldn’t something like a traditional gun work? What is the advantage to all this fancy magic stuff, especially since, from the looks of it, it’s all very difficult to master, requiring years of training and special Marks to help the user wield the weapons safely?

It’s like the old joke about Harry Potter; why couldn’t they just shoot Voldemort? Is there some reason a mundane weapon wouldn’t work?

And, again, why do you need an entire duffel bag full of weapons?

None of these questions are answered or even raised by the narrative; instead, Clary spots a picture from her apartment among Luke’s things, and realizes he must have been there following the demon attack. Jace reasons this is why the Portal led to Luke’s house — it just defaulted to the last location it was used to reach, since Clary wasn’t thinking of anything when she jumped through it. At this point I’m not going to quibble. Whatever.

I am going to quibble with the next part, though:

“Nice of Dorothea to tell us he was there,” said Clary. “He probably paid her off to be quiet. Either that or she trusts him more than she trusts us.”

Uh, did everyone forget that Clary’s apartment building is a safe house? Wouldn’t Dorothea telling people all about who’s been coming and going undermine the entire point? Also, Clary and co. vacated Dorothea’s apartment in the middle of tea, literally in the span of a few seconds. It seems plausible that maybe the good madame didn’t get to say all she wanted to say before their abrupt departure.

Simon shows up to inform Clary and Jace that someone’s coming. Rather, three someones; Luke, but he’s with two unfamiliar men. Jace asks if there’s a way out, like a back door, but Clary says there isn’t. Ten pages ago we were talking about the back door that Luke sometimes leaves unlocked. I’d say that it looks like this book was shoddily proofread, but we already knew that.

The kids hide behind a rosewood screen, which Jace draws a Mark on to make one-way transparent so they can see Luke and the other two men. The guys with Luke are big and threatening-looking, and they waste no time in having a look around, picking up Luke’s stuff (one of them quickly focuses in on a statuette of the Indian goddess Kali) and commanding the space as though they’re looking for something, or just wanna intimidate Luke, whichever. Luke looks to be in bad shape; he’s cut up, bruised and bloody. 

A long conversation ensues; it’s mostly not worth relating, because it’s hard to know what they’re talking about. We do learn that Clary’s mom is alive, but unconscious. Luke gets called “Graymark” a few times, which is a wolfy-sounding name and makes me think he’s probably our token werewolf. The two men are not here to find Clary, but Valentine is looking for her. Luke acts as though he’s indifferent to Jocelyn and Clary’s fate throughout the conversation, but, given that this is probably the smartest thing to do, that doesn’t tell me much. He maintains throughout that he doesn’t wanna get involved in any of this, but he doesn’t intend to get in anybody’s way, either. The men try to bribe him with the return of Clary’s mom in exchange for the Mortal Cup (remember, the thing that turns ordinary people into Shadowhunters), but Luke says he doesn’t know where the Cup is and isn’t interested in searching for it. After about a page more of this, the men leave. Luke, gathering up the duffel bag, follows shortly after.

Clary, it seems, took the entire conversation at face value — maybe to be expected given that she has a huge emotional stake in all of this — and feels devastated to learn that Luke doesn’t care about her and her mother. Simon does suggest that Luke and those men were not on friendly terms, but of course no one listens to Simon the one time he has valuable input. Jace informs the other two that the men with Luke were the same men who killed Jace’s father. Well.

Thoughts So Far:

This is still cardboard cutout fantasy. There isn’t a trope in play here that’s not incredibly predictable. I have a feeling I’m going to have to accept this eventually as a fact of the Mortal Instruments books and stop pointing it out every chapter, but for now, yeah, I’m gonna keep pointing it out. This is unoriginal tripe. 

I’m particularly bothered by the lack of personality among the main cast at this point. We’ve had plenty of time to get to know them, yet they all seem totally uninteresting to the point where I don’t even want to anymore. I feel sometimes as though I should cut the book some slack, since it’s not like this aspires to literary greatness, but there’s really no excuse for it. Being able to write compelling and varied characters is a baseline requirement for writing fiction, full stop. I don’t care if you’re writing a novel or writing dialogue for NPCs in a video game, if you are writing characters you need to be able to do this. And Cassandra Clare, it seems, cannot.

Let’s take a look at Clary. What do we know about her? She’s fifteen. She likes to draw. She likes to read fantasy novels. She’s kinda insecure about how she looks and it sometimes causes her to judge other girls harshly. She might be into video games and/or manga and/or anime; we’ve gotten almost no evidence to suggest she is but it’s been talked about a tiny bit. Beyond that, we know basically nothing about Clary as a person. And sure, minus her age, everything above is a character trait, but none of it is interesting.

“Okay,” you say, “but Clare is playing to the target audience.” That’s right, she is. There are gonna be a lot of teen girls reading this who have things in common with Clary. Liking to read fantasy novels is more or less a given, and most modern teens with a penchant for fiction have at least a bit of a taste for video games, manga, and anime. Drawing is a pretty common hobby among that crowd as well. As for the insecurity, society does a marvelous job of teaching teenage girls to feel horrible about their appearance; the entire beauty industry feeds off of this. Clary’s traits attempt to make her relatable to this book’s target audience of teen girls, but they do not make her a character in her own right, and in that way she ultimately fails at being relatable. Any real fifteen-year-old girl sharing Clary’s character traits is also worlds more complex than she, and not just by virtue of being a real person; Clary is missing great chunks of her personality by not only real-people standards, but fiction standards. What is her motivation as a character? What sets her apart from the people around her? Why does she act the way she does? What events have, in her fifteen years of life, served to shape her as a person?

Good characters impress themselves upon their readers in the way that real people impress themselves upon others they know. Clary fails to make an impression. She has the bare minimum of traits needed to make her seem like she has something in common with real people, without having any of the distinguishing features of a real person, without being interesting in the way that real people, and well-written fictional characters, are interesting.

The rest of the cast is similarly bland. Jace is a bad boy with a heart of gold (debatable so far, yes, but that’s clearly his trope), Simon is the token nerd that the audience is supposed to both laugh at and, perhaps, see themselves reflected unflatteringly in, and the two of them plus Clary form our token love triangle. The supporting cast is composed entirely of stock fantasy characters, with nary an interesting personality among them. No one ever does anything beyond what the plot requires them to do, which makes everyone seem terribly passive; this is especially bad with Clary, who doesn’t even get to do exposition like Jace or many of the side characters.

City of Bones: Chapter Seven - The Five-Dimensional Door

Jace and Clary enter Madame Dorothea’s apartment, which appears to have a similar layout to Clary’s even though back in chapter 2 it was mentioned that the building Clary and Madame Dorothea lived in was once a house belonging to a single family and thus it wouldn’t make sense for the building to contain similar apartments unless the interior had been completely remodeled which was implied not to be the case earlier. But whatever.

Dorothea’s place is filled with all the stereotypical fortune-teller junk; astrological posters, bead curtains, guides to palmistry, that kind of thing. Clary gets called nosy for looking at one of the posters, which I’m only mentioning because calling someone nosy for looking at a prominently displayed item in your home is kind of bizarre. Dorothea offers to make tea, and Jace says he’ll drink it so long as it isn’t Earl Grey because he hates bergamot. I’m extremely petty but this is heresy and I vote we set Jace on fire.

The bergamot comment leads into Jace and Clary having a discussion about Jace’s Shadowhunter education, since Clary finds it unusual that a teenage boy would a) know what bergamot is and b) know that it’s in Earl Grey tea. This discussion includes Jace literally fucking saying that he’s not like other guys, in cause we needed more incentive to want to set him on fire. He also calls Clary by her last name at one point, which really sets her off for some reason so I thought it was probably worth mentioning but who fucking knows. (She thinks about Simon immediately after, but I don’t know if that’s related to Jace’s comment since Simon never once, to my recollection, called Clary “Fray.”)

After the really fucking fascinating bergamot conversation, Clary and Jace get into another argument re: the definition of “magic.” This actually clears some shit up. As Jace explains, humans can’t do magic; only beings with demon blood (i.e. witches and warlocks) can. The weapons and tools Jace uses are magical, yes, but he has to undergo intense training to be able to use them; the Marks on his skin protect him, too.

Unfortunately, this discussion also raises a few too many questions. If Shadowhunters can’t do magic, who makes the magic weapons they use? Because it sure looked like Alec and Jace were crafting magic blades one chapter ago. For that matter, why did the two of them get so defensive when Clary asked if their magic weapons were magic, since, as Jace just admitted freely, she was right about that? Why do the Shadowhunters get so pissy when people think they do magic? It’s sort of implied that there’s a stigma around it since it’s associated with nonhumans, but, then again, using magic weapons is a-OK apparently, so what’s with that? What are the Marks (clearly made by Shadowhunters) classified as, if they’re not magic?

I mean, to be fair, right now is a bad time for an info dump. Right now is a bad time for a pleasant chat over tea, for that matter. This book has got a serious case of mood whiplash; we can go from fighting demons in one chapter to teatime in the next and the characters seem to roll with it easily, as if none of this is bothering them in the slightest. 

Onward. Madame Dorothea returns with the tea. She doesn’t specify what kind it is but I sure hope she gave Jace Earl Grey, brewed extra-strong so you can really taste the bergamot. She also brings out cucumber sandwiches. We learn that Jace hates cucumber. I bet cucumbers also hate Jace and would probably, if they could understand English, agree with me that he should be set aflame. Jace also says he hates liars. As a liar myself, I’d like to add that this saddens me, since I love Jace.

Dorothea says that she isn’t a witch, but her mother was. I should probably mention at this point that Dorothea has been reminding me vaguely of Harry Potter’s Squib neighbor, and this comment more or less confirms to me that she’s an expy of that character.

According to Jace, it’s impossible for Dorothea’s mother to be a witch, because witches (and warlocks) are half-human, half-demon, making them sterile crossbreeds. Clary says that this is like mules, which seems real tactful when we’re discussing somebody’s mother here. For some reason, instead of pressing on the topic of “what do you mean your mother is a witch, that’s impossible,” Jace launches into a lecture about different types of Downworlders. I’ll do bullet points:

Vampires and werewolves are humans who have been infected by diseases brought by demons into our world.

Warlocks and witches are the Downworlders whose powers are strongest, since they have one full-blooded demon parent.

Faeries are fallen angels, according to legend, though Jace says he’s also heard that they’re the offspring of an angel parent and a demon parent, and that he personally believes that’s more likely.

This goes on for about a page before Dorothea interrupts to clarify that she’s adopted.

Clary has, in the meantime, eaten all the cucumber sandwiches, and Dorothea tells her that it’s nice to see a girl who eats her fill. This makes Clary mentally compare herself to Isabelle and feel fat. Hey, Clary, here’s a short list of things you could be thinking about instead:

your missing mom

the freaky supernatural occurrences that keep happening around you

your recent fight with a demon, a demon you managed to kill, that knocked you into a poison-induced coma for three days

the fight between a supernaturally armed human and a monster you witnessed less than an hour ago after encountering said monster in your own bedroom

the fact that the two people next to you are calmly discussing magical beings

The second Clary finishes her cup of tea, Dorothea grabs it and starts trying to read the tea leaves. She declares them to be confusing and grabs Jace’s cup instead. According to Dorothea, Jace will have violence in his future, will fall in love with the wrong person, and will also have an enemy. Well, that’s not very interesting, honestly.

Dorothea says that Clary’s cup is full of completely jumbled images and asks Clary if she’s got a spell on her concealing a memory or blocking out her Sight. Clary says no, but Jace seems to think this is a reasonable explanation, and he’s probably right because he’s our exposition boy who knows everything and needs to be set on fire. As an alternative, Dorothea pulls out a pack of tarot cards and tells Clary to pick one. Clary draws the Ace of Cups (I know nothing about tarot, but Dorothea calls this the “love card”) and is surprised to find that she recognizes the art style of the cards. It’s her mother’s.

Jace gets aggressive upon hearing this and demands to know how Dorothea knew Jocelyn. Turns out Madame Dorothea and Clary’s mom had a bit of an arrangement where Jocelyn would do favors for Dorothea in exchange for any Downworlder gossip, particularly word on Valentine. Jocelyn was also, no surprise, a Shadowhunter.

Exposition boy graces us with yet more exposition. Clary’s apartment building is a Sanctuary, capital S, for Downworlders on the run from the Clave’s law. There’s magic in place to keep the building hidden and protected. Most importantly, as Jace reveals by dramatically ripping aside a curtain to reveal a door that I don’t know how he knew was there, there’s an escape hatch. The door is a Portal (capital P, no relation to the excellent game about a test-obsessed supercomputer and her disobedient test subject). Dorothea interrupts Jace’s exposition to add in her own, saying that the door can take one anywhere they wish to go. (She also calls the door a five-dimensional door, though she doesn’t explain why it’s called that.)

Clary puts two and two together; this was her mother’s way out in case she needed it, and she didn’t take it on the night of the Ravener attack because she was waiting for Clary to return home. Suddenly on the verge of tears, Clary lunges for the door and, as Jace and Dorothea protest, is sucked through to the other side.

End chapter.

Thoughts So Far:

Is it just me or was Jace totally more insufferable than usual in this chapter? I’m not sure, and it occurs to me — as I sit here drinking a freshly brewed cup of Earl Grey — that I may be biased, but I still move to get rid of him. He’s unnecessary.

Clary is still way too passive, all in all. Sure, she takes some initiative at the end, but it’s initiative of the “I’ve got no idea what the hell I am doing” kind, which is the sort of initiative I’m sick of seeing young heroines displaying.

I feel like this book has very little coherence as a story. The chapters feel too closed-off, in an odd way, like they’re each their own little story; it’s episodic, which works (somewhat) for a TV show or a fanfic but doesn’t work for a published novel where the reader isn’t expected to take a break between each chapter.

This doesn’t really surprise me, given where the author’s coming from; she was a former fanfic writer and she drew a lot of her inspiration from TV shows, after all. Nonetheless, it doesn’t work. There’s not enough sense of narrative continuity to compel the reader to keep going; it seems to be relying on the appeal of the characters (haha) or of the author’s humor (haha) to make us want to keep reading.

Needless to say, that’s not really working on me. Good thing I have this blog.

City of Bones: Chapter Six - Forsaken

In lieu of telling you how this chapter opens, here, have the opening sentence:

The weapons room looked exactly the way something called “the weapons room” sounded like it would look.

Part of me wants to let that sentence speak for itself, but I’d also like to note that this sounds exactly like the essays I wrote in twelfth grade when I’d stopped caring about high school. 

Anyway. Weapons room is full of weapons. Alec and Jace are sitting at a table, upon which are three “seraph blades” that they’re apparently “putting the last touches” on. Clary, noting that the blades don’t look too impressive, asks if they’re magic blades, which prompts Jace to go on a page-long rant about the definition of “magic.” (The rundown, as given by Alec after Clary points out that Jace is driveling, is that Shadowhunters aren’t magic users. From what Jace says, I think the exact definition of “magic” in this canon may restrict it to something nonhumans, e.g. demons and Downworlders, do.)

Clary tells Jace that she intends to go home, but that Hodge said Jace has to accompany her there. Jace, curious as to whether Clary’s mother is/was a Shadowhunter, agrees to the plan readily enough. Alec offers to come and gets pissy when Jace declines his company.

As they’re heading out, Clary asks Jace how he could tell she had Shadowhunter blood. He said that he guessed, and that it seemed like the most likely explanation. She slaps him across the face as payback for the possibility that he might have killed her.

There’s no description of where the Institute is in relation to the outside world; instead, there’s a scene break, and then they’re on the train to Brooklyn. No, really, where the hell is this place? Manhattan? One of the other boroughs? What’s it look like on the outside? I wanna know, dammit.

On the train, Clary spots a couple teenage girls, whom she mentally insults for no reason other than their spray tans and choice of footwear. Nice, author. Love this internalized misogyny, really cute and relatable, please write more. (I know this kind of thing is common in YA, particularly in stories with female protagonists, but that makes it worse, not better.) The girls are giggling to each other, and Clary wonders if they’re laughing at her before realizing they’re looking at Jace. This reminds her that he’s good-looking, and we get about half a page assuring the readers that yes, he is (to be fair to Clary, though, most of it isn’t from her; Jace explains to her that the girls are staring at him because he is “stunningly attractive” and continues in that vein for another paragraph or two.)

When they reach their stop, Clary asks Jace about his relationship with Alec, and Jace explains that they’re “parabatai” — a pair of warriors who battle together. Their fathers were parabatai as well, and Alec’s father was Jace’s godfather. Parabatai are considered to have a closer-than-brothers bond, just so that we can amp up the homoeroticism a little more. (It’s not mentioned if women have an equivalent to this, or if it’s just a dude thing. Dunno. Petition for Clary and Isabelle to have this kind of relationship eventually, though.)

They get to Clary’s apartment building, which looks peaceful and undisturbed from the outside. Jace pulls out another Sensor, explaining to Clary that it detects demon activity, and tells her that there’s trace activity (probably from the other night) but nothing strong enough to indicate a demon is currently present.

Inside, the bulb in the stairwell is still out. Jace runs his hand along the banister and it comes back slick with fresh blood; from who or what is uncertain. They head upstairs, even though I’m pretty sure fresh blood mysteriously coating the banister should basically function as a “TURN BACK THE WAY YOU CAME AND NEVER RETURN” signal.

Clary’s apartment is empty. And I mean really empty, like, as in the demons took the refrigerator and the microwave. It looks like it did when Clary and her mom first moved in. Jace figures they should just leave, but Clary wants to check her room. The door is shut, and the handle ice-cold to the touch, but she persists in turning the knob — and then the door bursts open and some sort of giant humanoid monster barrels out. Jace pulls out one of the seraph blades (turns out the part Clary saw earlier was just the hilt, and the real blade is stored inside — not to mention it’s about two feet long) and slashes it, then grabs Clary and dashes for the exit. The monster chases them out, and it and Jace proceed to fight; in the space of about a page, Jace manages to fatally wound it, but it hits him hard enough to break his arm.

In the aftermath of the battle, Jace stabs the thing once more to kill it quickly (it doesn’t disappear when killed, like the demon in Pandemonium did) and then uses his stele to complete a healing Mark on his arm, healing the break. The rune had been mostly drawn already, leaving only one line to be connected; it seems Shadowhunters typically do this kind of thing as a precaution. That’s actually pretty clever. 

Clary asks why the monster didn’t vanish when it died. Jace tells her that it’s not a demon, but a Forsaken, and we finally get an explanation on what that is:

“You asked me what happens when you carve Marks onto someone who doesn’t have Shadowhunter blood. Just one Mark will only burn you, but a lot of Marks, powerful ones? Carved into the flesh of a totally ordinary human being with no trace of Shadowhunter ancestry? You get this.” He jerked his chin at the corpse. “The runes are agonizingly painful. The Marked ones go insane — the pain drives them out of their minds. They become fierce, mindless killers. They don’t sleep or eat unless you make them, and they die, usually quickly. Runes have great power and can be used to do great good—but they can be used for evil. The Forsaken are evil.”

Uh, sorry, what? How the fuck are they evil? The Forsaken are made that way by others — aren’t the people who made them the evil ones? How do you go from “out of their minds with pain” to “pure evil”? Because it sure sounds to me like the Forsaken are the victims here.

Jace instructs Clary to wait where she is and starts heading back up the stairs, but a voice advises them to stop, because “there are more where the first one came from.” The speaker is Madame Dorothea, and I’ve got no idea whether or not she’s threatening them, but Jace and Clary seem to assume she’s not. 

We learn, in a conversation not really worth relating, that Dorothea is not a Shadowhunter, though she seems not to be a mundane either. Clary questions Dorothea about Jocelyn, and, after a bit of threatening on Jace’s part, Dorothea invites them into her apartment.

Jace seems reluctant to go in — after his threat, Dorothea threatened him right back and also called him by his full name, Jace Wayland, which he doesn’t know how she would know — but Clary is eager for possible info on her mom, and so they decide to enter. End chapter.

Thoughts So Far:

Well, this was a hell of a lot of cookie-cutter fantasy bullshit. Weapons room, giant monsters, old lady next door who knows more than she lets on — it’s like the author pulled fantasy tropes out of a hat.

I wanna go back and talk about Jace’s “this isn’t magic” rant from early on in the chapter, because it’s been bugging me and I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I think I may have figured it out. It’s insulting the readers. Let’s face it; we’re all on Clary’s side when she assumes the weapons Jace and Alec are working on are magic, because this is a fantasy novel and magic has been happening left and right since chapter 1. And, hell, I’m willing to go along with it if Jace says “actually, what we do isn’t considered magic: here’s what magic actually is, here’s the proper term for what these blades are” — establishing rules like that is fine and counts towards worldbuilding. What isn’t fine is treating the readers like they’re idiots for assuming that something that conforms to their idea of what magic is isn’t actually magic.

That whole scene told me basically nothing, all in all. Apparently the blades aren’t magic, but they clearly aren’t mundane, either, and having not been told what they are I’m going to keep on thinking of them as magic blades. Because fuck this book, that’s why.

City of Bones: Chapter Five – Clan and Covenant

Clary drifts in and out of consciousness for the first two pages of this chapter. She catches someone saying she’s been asleep for three days. Alec and someone else (most likely Isabelle) chat about how Clary managed to kill the Ravener. I have no idea why they keep having conversations around Clary’s unconscious body — well, aside from the obvious “so that she can overhear them having these conversations” reason.

That’s one of my main problems with this book; the authorial puppet strings are all too visible. A lot of it is minor things like this that do make sense from an economy-in-writing standpoint, but these things add up. It’d be simple to get this information across by having Clary ask about it when she wakes up, for example, instead of having her conveniently overhear things.

I haven’t pulled quotes in a bit, so let’s look at a questionable simile, since the author seems to specialize in questionable similes:

All her thoughts ran as thickly and slowly as blood or honey.

Honey’s appropriate for this simile, but blood? Blood isn’t a thick, slow-flowing liquid, as anyone who’s ever had any interaction with the stuff (that is, everyone on the planet) ought to know. It might ooze out of a wound slowly, but that doesn’t have to do with the viscosity of the liquid; that has to do with where on the body the wound is. You try severing an artery and see how thick and slow the blood comes out.

I’m noticing a trend here with the author undermining her own similes by using two examples instead of just one (the spring grass / antifreeze thing in chapter 1 comes to mind). Only two words need to be cut from this sentence for it to make sense. Why did no one catch this?

Clary has a bunch of symbolic dreams while she’s asleep, because why not:

She saw her mother lying in a hospital bed, eyes like bruises in her white face. She saw Luke, standing atop a pile of bones. Jace with white feathered wings sprouting out of his back, Isabelle sitting naked with her whip curled around her like a net of gold rings, Simon with crosses burned into the palms of his hands. Angels, falling and burning. Burning out of the sky.

Whoa. Whoa, okay, one of these is not like the others. We have all this pseudo-biblical imagery and then Hot Girl Poses Nude With Whip right smack in the middle.

I love symbolism, myself. Good symbolism. Which this is not. This is word vomit. There’s also no reason for it to be here; Clary doesn’t even know half these people yet. Unless she has precognitive powers, or something, it makes no sense for her to be having all these super-symbolic dreams. They’re crap if you take them individually, too. I mean:

We don’t have a damn clue what happened to Clary’s mom. Imagining her in the hospital is a bit of a stretch when, again, we have no idea what happened. We don’t know if she’s alive, if she was wounded, if she was kidnapped, if she fled, etc. — the hospital image is too specific at this point. It does suggest to the reader that Clary’s mother is wounded but alive, though, which makes me wonder why you’d want to give the readers that impression at this point instead of simply leaving them in the dark. The latter seems like a much better way to build suspense.

Jace with wings. Okay. And? I mean, angel stuff aside, this is a totally random image.

If you take the Isabelle part on its own it sounds like part of a wet dream. Even shoved into the middle of things, it’s pretty gay. Reminder that Clary’s only met Isabelle once, incidentally.

Simon with… crosses burned into the palms of his hands? What? This is probably the most glaringly out-of-place one, besides Isabelle’s; I mean, Simon doesn’t have any involvement in the Shadowhunter stuff yet. There’s no reason for Clary to even be imagining him in this context, let alone with crosses burned into the palms of his hands, whatever the hell that’s supposed to symbolize.

The last bit about the angels is 100% there because the author liked the way it looked on paper. It has no bearing on anything. Nothing related to angels has even happened yet in this book.

When Clary awakens, she feels like her eyelids have been sewn shut. Rather than embracing this feeling and using it in order to better synchronize with her Three-Star Goku Uniform, she opens her eyes, and we get another weird sentence:

She imagined she could feel tearing skin as she peeled them slowly open and blinked for the first time in three days.

She didn’t feel tearing skin, she just imagined she did. Which kinds begs the question “why?”, and also doesn’t let us know what she was actually feeling, but okay.

Clary’s in some sort of infirmary. Judging by the traffic sounds outside, she’s still in New York somewhere. Isabelle is sitting on the next bed over, apparently just waiting for Clary to wake up. (Can I ship them?)

They have a brief chat, mostly regarding where they are (the Institute, though we still don’t know where that is), before Clary doubles over in pain due to not having eaten for three days. Isabelle pours her a cup of something, which she says is a “tisane” that Hodge, whoever he is, made. A tisane is a type of medicinal herbal tea. I would think that in this situation Clary’s most in need of some actual food, but the tea seems to do the trick, so maybe they’re magic herbs. The book doesn’t bother to explain, anyway.

Isabelle and Clary introduce themselves — we learn that Isabelle’s last name is Lightwood — and Isabelle asks about the Ravener. She’s surprised that a mundie like Clary was able to kill a demon. Clary doesn’t explain about the Sensor.

Apparently Clary’s old clothes had to be burned, as they were covered in blood and Ravener venom. This raises the question as to what the hell Clary is wearing right now. Isabelle offers Clary some of her old clothes to change into.

Clary asks Isabelle if Jace is always rude, and Isabelle says yes, he is, and that “it’s what makes him so damn sexy.” Uh? Clary is confused because she assumed Jace and Isabelle were siblings, but, as it turns out, they aren’t. Jace’s parents died when he was younger — his mother when he was born, his father at the hands of demons when he was ten. I’m not really sure why Isabelle is telling Clary all this, as that seems like awfully personal information to be divulging about someone else, but okay.

We get another description of how Clary is Definitely Not Attractive (Except She Secretly Is) when she goes into the bathroom to change into Isabelle’s clothes. Of course, since Isabelle is taller and curvier than Clary, the clothes don’t fit right. Clary feels that she looks ridiculous in them. So what.

Look, Clary, now really isn’t the time for small talk, or for worrying about how you look in someone else’s clothes — your mom is missing, you don’t know where you are, you were asleep for three days after being attacked by a demon in your own apartment, etc. There are way bigger things for you to be stressing about.

She heads out into the hall. Someone is playing piano. She follows the sound, and of course it’s Jace. For once, can I read a bad book where the good-looking asshole boy doesn’t play piano? We also get yet another bizarre sentence:

Watching the quick, sure movements of his hands across the keys, Clary remembered how it had felt to be lifted up by those hands, his arms holding her up and the stars hurtling down around her head like a rain of silver tinsel.

The use of “tinsel” in the simile makes the whole image sound cheap and artificial. Certainly it weakens the hell out of the image of having stars hurtling down around one’s head. Maybe the author was, for some reason, intending this to sound underwhelming, but her constant failed similes suggest otherwise to me.

Also, I’ve fainted before, and there were no weird visual effects involved except loss of vision. I started to lose consciousness, and as my consciousness faded so did my ability to see. It’s kind of the opposite of dramatic, at least from the perspective of the person actually doing the fainting.

After a bit of small talk, in which Jace continues to be a bit of a dickhead, they head off to see Hodge. There’s some description of the Institute along the way:

The Institute was huge, a vast cavernous space that looked less like it had been designed according to a floor plan and more like it had been naturally hollowed out of rock by the passage of water and years.

You got that image in your head? Good, because the next sentence is going to destroy it.

Through half-open doors Clary glimpsed countless identical small rooms, each with a stripped bed, a nightstand, and a large wooden wardrobe standing open.

God, this author can’t do description to save her life, but it’s not even in the normal sense of “utterly fails to describe things.” Instead, she gives contradictory descriptions. First, she describes the Institute as looking like some sort of naturally-formed stone cavern; one sentence later, she describes the “countless identical small rooms” that make it up. These two images are not compatible. You don’t get tons of small identical rooms in a natural cavern.

To top it all off, a page ago she was talking about the Victorian wallpaper and the rose-shaped glass lamps lining the corridor. Author, which is it gonna be? You can have the Institute be some grand, faded old Victorian, or you can have it be a fucking rock cavern, whatever — but, for the love of god, you can’t do both.

Clary asks about all the bedrooms, and Jace explains that they’re in the residential wing, which can house up to two hundred people. They’re pledged to give safe lodging to any Shadowhunter who needs it. (This actually raises several more questions regarding how many places like the Institute are out there, and exactly how many Shadowhunters there are in the local area/in general, but Clary doesn’t ask.) Most of the time, the Institute is home only to Alec, Isabelle, Max (Alec and Isabelle’s little brother), their parents, Jace, and Hodge. At present, Max and his parents are overseas, visiting the “Shadowhunter home country,” Idris.

Okay, I know this review is already getting long as hell, but you have to suffer through another couple rants about Idris. This place makes no sense. Quote from Jace:

“Mundanes don’t know about it. There are wardings—protective spells—up all over the borders. If you tried to cross into Idris, you’d simply find yourself transported from one border to the next. You’d never know what happened.”

There are so many reasons why this wouldn’t work, but even setting aside a lot of the more minor ones — is there also a spell to ensure the weather matches on both sides of the border? what about the landscape? how do people not realize they’ve skipped a chunk of land the size of an entire country? — you’re left with the most glaring issue, which is that this leaves a country-sized chunk of the planet unaccounted for. Cartographers would notice this. Hell, I don’t know why this country isn’t showing up on satellite images, or whatever, and why — even if there’s some sort of magic in place keeping Idris from being spied on — no one noticed that things weren’t matching up.

Continuing from the last quote:

“So it’s not on any maps?” “Not mundie ones. For our purposes you can consider it a small country between Germany and France.” “But there isn’t anything between Germany and France. Except Switzerland.” “Precisely,” said Jace.

I was positive this was bullshit, so I had a look at a map. Belgium is also between Germany and France. For that matter, so is Luxembourg.

Jace says he grew up in Idris, and that most Shadowhunters do; even the ones who don’t consider it “home” in a spiritual sense. When Shadowhunters from Idris grow up, they’re sent wherever they’re needed to fight demons.

They reach the library. A blue Persian named Church is hanging around outside. I don’t know if the cat is going to be relevant at all, I’m just mentioning him in case he is.

Hodge, who turns out to be an elderly white guy (are these sorts of fantasy mentor figures ever not elderly white guys?), immediately pegs Clary as a book lover, because she has a look of awe on her face as she views the library. For the record, the library got a three-paragraph description, and I can assure you it’s no ordinary library from said description (if you want a little detail, it’s in a tower, the books have leather bindings, metal clasps, and jewels on their spines, the floor has a constellation pattern inlaid into it with semiprecious stones, and even the desk in the center of the room is described as “magnificent”); she has plenty of reasons to be staring besides a love for books.

He’s right anyway, though, because fuck making sense.

Hodge has a pet raven named Hugo, whom Clary somehow manages to mistake for a hunchback. I don’t know. Also, Hodge’s last name is Starkweather.

Clary gets praised a bit for having killed the Ravener; Hodge seems very impressed. Even when she explains that she shoved Jace’s Sensor down the thing’s throat, Hodge praises her on her “quick thinking.” Everyone knows Clary is a mundie, right? How do they expect her to have any tactical knowledge on how to fight demons? Why doesn’t anyone recognize that she beat the thing due, essentially, to luck?

Alec is revealed to also be in the library, and it turns out that he just doesn’t believe that Clary killed the Ravener at all. He says it’s impossible, seeing as she’s a mundie and a “little kid.” Clary protests that she’s almost sixteen, and Hodge adds that Isabelle is the same age.

“Isabelle hails from one of the greatest Shadowhunter dynasties in history,” Alec said drily. “This girl, on the other hand, hails from New Jersey.” “I’m from Brooklyn!” Clary was outraged.

Okay, so Clary says more after that, but I cut it off right there because it’s much funnier if you read her line as New Yorker outrage at being taken for a New Jersey resident.

Clary calls Alec a dickhead, which pisses him off. He gets even more pissed off when Jace finds the whole thing funny and doesn’t jump to Alec’s defense. They have an uninteresting, page-long argument about whether or not Clary killed the Ravener.

The conversation then turns to something plot-relevant; why the demon was there in the first place. According to Alec, warlocks and demon lords use Raveners as search-and-destroy machines, and they’d have no reason to target a mundie household. Clary suggests that they might have been going after Madame Dorothea, the downstairs neighbor who runs a fortune-telling business, but Jace says he looked into it and she has no actual magical ability.

Jace and Hodge argue for a bit over whether or not to inform “the Clave.” Hodge says they have to because Clary is a mundie. Jace counters that she isn’t. He knows because of the rune he put on Clary’s arm the night she was attacked by the demon; if she’d really been a mundane, the mark would have killed her, or “turned her into a Forsaken,” whatever that means.

Hodge and Alec yell at Jace for being reckless, but not because she might have died — she would have if he didn’t use the rune to hide her, too. They’re worried about the Forsaken thing. We don’t get an explanation on that yet.

Jace asks Clary about her parents, but from the little info she’s able to give it’s difficult for anyone to guess whether her mother, father, or both were Shadowhunters. The talk of her family reminds Clary that she has to call Luke, and, after asking to use the nearest phone, she does.

Luke hasn’t heard anything about Clary’s mother. She tells him she’s in the city, with friends, and that she could take a cab to his place if he wants. He tells her to stay put, that it’s too dangerous. He’s short with her, telling her not to call him again as he has his own problems and doesn’t need to be bothered with hers, then hangs up. She dials back, but it goes to voicemail.

Hodge asks the boys to leave so he can talk to Clary alone. They oblige, Jace reluctantly so. Hodge asks Clary about the demon encounter, and about her mother. Clary explains that her mother had no interest in anything fantastical, hated Disney movies, and didn’t even like Clary reading manga. Somehow, Hodge fails to recognize this as a probable symptom of someone who has had bad experiences with the supernatural.

He asks about what the demon said to Clary, and if it mentioned anyone’s name. Clary says that it mentioned someone called Valentine. Hodge reacts in shock. He explains that Valentine was a Shadowhunter, but that he’s been dead for sixteen years. (Clary’s dad. Calling it right now.)

Hodge suggests that maybe someone was using Valentine’s name as a means of sending a message, because some sort of peace negotiations are taking place. It’s all very vague.

We get an information dump here, which I’ll try and relate briefly. Legend has it that the Shadowhunters were created in response to a demon outbreak “over a thousand years ago,” which is kind of a vague time period (how much over?) but okay. An angel — Raziel, if anyone knows their angels — was summoned by “a warlock” (defined as a half-human, half-demon); some of the angel’s blood was mixed with human blood in a cup, and given to those humans to drink. Those who drank the blood became Shadowhunters, as did their descendants. No one’s quite sure if the legend is true, but the cup from the legend exists — or it did, until Valentine destroyed it in a deliberately set fire that also killed him and his wife and child.

Valentine, it seems, was an extremist who believed in slaughtering Downworlders; warlocks, vampires, werewolves, faeries, and the like. The official Shadowhunter stance on the matter is that alliance with Downworlders is necessary to drive off the demons for good, but Valentine disagreed. He and his group, the Circle, rebelled in what was basically a Shadowhunter civil war. The Circle was defeated, but only just; on top of that, Valentine ended up hurting his own cause, since the whole thing basically proved to the Downworlders that the Clave (Shadowhunter government?) was willing to fight against anyone who threatened genocide against Downworlders.

Hodge wraps up his story, and Clary asks if she can go home, to see what’s left there. Hodge consents, reluctantly, on the condition that Jace accompany her.

Clary turns as she’s leaving to see Hodge bent over a piece of paper:

Sending a message to the mysterious Clave, she guessed. They didn’t sound like very nice people.

Wait, why not? We’ve had very little on the Clave; the major bit of information we’ve gotten was that they were willing to fight in defense of Downworlders. How do you get “not very nice” from that?

Perspective switches to Hodge for the end of the chapter, just so we can get about half a page on memories he has of the war. Not worth relating.

Thoughts So Far:

For how far we are in the book, I think the amount of info we’ve gotten is more or less appropriate. I’m a fan of not doing big info dumps, but there is a plot justification and Clary hasn’t been told much beyond what’s directly relevant to her current situation, so, okay, cool.

On a page-by page level, there’s nothing that wrong with this chapter (save, of course, for what I’ve already pointed out). The big, glaring problem is that, holy shit, Clary is borderline unconcerned about what has happened to her mom. Oh, sure, she puts in the phone call near the end, and has a cry over it afterwards, but the majority of this chapter has her passively listening to everybody’s exposition.

I think you guys, if you’re regular readers of this blog, are all used to characters whom the plot revolves around. They’re staples of bad/amateurish writing. What we have here is basically the opposite; Clary does whatever the plot requires her to do. If the plot requires her to keep quiet for one chapter while we get an info dump, then so be it, and fuck the proper human emotions she should be experiencing at this point. Even if she’s so numbed out by the shock and trauma of what’s happening that she’s unable to do much, which would be very likely given all that’s happened to and around her, then we should get some sense of that through her behavior and through the narration.

On top of that, the entire Valentine thing is blatantly Harry Potter (come on, the dude is basically Voldemort), and there are parts of this that also reek of Buffy. I’ve been basically picturing Hodge as Giles the whole time. The library setting doesn’t help.

Positive note: The relationship being set up with Isabelle is better than I expected. Female characters tend to be given female rivals, and they’re usually rivals over petty things like beauty or men; I expected Isabelle to be that for Clary. Instead, though, it seems that she’s got some genuine respect for Clary and isn’t above showing it; though she comes off as standoffish and a little uppity, she hasn’t been mean, and I do expect a certain amount of standoffish, uppity behavior from Hot Whip Girls.

No, instead the one who hates Clary is Alec. Which I suspect is because he is gay for Jace. Still a somewhat refreshing change of pace, I guess.

City of Bones: Chapter Four – Ravener

We left off, as you may recall, with Clary running home to check on her mom after receiving an ominous phone call. She’s also carrying a device called a Sensor, which she snatched off Jace, believing it to be a cell phone,

When she reaches home, she sees that the lights are on, which she thinks is a good sign for some reason. As soon as she steps into the foyer, her stomach sinks as she notices the stairhead light has burned out. Why this is such a cause for concern is not stated, as this seems like a fairly mundane occurrence.

Clary’s stopped by Madame Dorothea (their eccentric downstairs neighbor, if you recall), who mentions that Clary’s mom has been making a “god-awful racket” upstairs. Her feeling of dread increasing, Clary heads up to her apartment.

Every light in the place is on. Clary’s mom’s purse and keys are where they usually are, indicating she’s home, or at least that she was. Both windows in the living room are open, and several of the couch cushions are ripped open as well. The bookshelves have been tipped over, as has the piano bench. Worst, all of the paintings on the walls have been cut from their frames and shredded.

In a panic, Clary checks the kitchen. No one there. The cabinets are open, and, save for a broken bottle of sauce, the room seems mostly undisturbed.

Clary runs over the possibilities for what could have happened in her head. Her first thought is robbers, but the really expensive stuff — TV, laptops, other electronics — is untouched, as is Clary’s mother’s purse. She knows she should leave the apartment and try and call the police, but she doesn’t want to leave before she’s found her mom.

Clary’s mother’s bedroom looks untouched. As Clary is looking around, she suddenly hears a slithering noise from behind her, approaching. She turns around, and… well.

It was crouched against the floor, a long, scaled creature with a cluster of flat black eyes set dead center in the front of its domed skull. Something like a cross between an alligator and a centipede, it had a thick, flat snout and a barbed tail that whipped menacingly from side to side. Multiple legs bunched underneath it as it readied itself to spring.

Now, I wouldn’t want you to miss the thrilling details of the ensuing fight, but I also don’t want to take too long summarizing it, so here’s the rundown:

> Wild FREAKISH HELL BEAST wants to fight! > FREAKISH HELL BEAST used TACKLE! > FREAKISH HELL BEAST’s attack missed! > CLARY used FLEE! > Can’t escape! > FREAKISH HELL BEAST used THREATENING SPEECH! > CLARY used FRAMED PHOTO THROW! > It’s not very effective… > FREAKISH HELL BEAST used TACKLE! > CLARY used STRUGGLE! > But it failed! > FREAKISH HELL BEAST used ACID DROOL! > CLARY used the SENSOR! > It’s super effective! > Enemy FREAKISH HELL BEAST used PARTING STING! > Enemy FREAKISH HELL BEAST fainted! > CLARY fainted!

Clary comes to outside, lying on damp grass while Jace kneels over her, tearing a piece of cloth into strips to make a bandage. He tells her not to move, and that the freakish hell beast (called a Ravener, evidently) stung her in the back of the neck — not with a lot of power, since it was half-dead by that point, but, nonetheless, she needs to be taken to the Institute.

Clary asks about the Ravener. Jace explains that it’s a type of demon, just a less sophisticated one than the one she saw at the club.

The bandage, which Jace ties around Clary’s neck, has some sort of salve on it that numbs the pain from the sting. He assures her that she’ll still be dead soon if they don’t get her to the Institute. Police are on the scene, but, as Clary notices, the police are demons too; Jace tells her that “demons have a way of hiding their tracks.”

Jace uses a thing called a stele to draw a symbol on Clary’s wrist so that she won’t be noticed. He probably should have done one to prevent her from fainting, though, because guess what she does next.

Thoughts So Far:

Swear to god you didn’t miss anything great in that action scene when I decided to do a Pokémon-style summary. The best thing it had going for it was description, and about half of that felt out-of-place given that the context is an action scene. (We did not, for example, need to know that the picture Clary threw at the Ravener showed Clary, Luke, and her mother about to go on the bumper cars at Coney Island.)

To clarify, though — Clary killed the thing, or at least incapacitated it, by shoving the Sensor in its mouth when it lunged, mouth open, at her. She didn’t know what she was doing; it was the action of someone panicked and desperate. So we’re not going the route of “Clary is magically great at fighting demons.” We may, however, be going the route of “Clary is not competent at anything plot-relevant,” which unfortunately is a trope you see female protagonists in YA urban fantasies having sometimes. Bella Swan comes to mind. However, it’s too early to pass judgement.

I’ll give the author points for the detail about the torn-up paintings; it’s weird, disturbing, and makes you want to know why the hell all the paintings needed to be so deliberately cut from their frames and cut to pieces. However, points off for the scene changes here. Ending a scene by having Clary faint? Twice in a row? Circumstances aside, that seems really fucking lazy from an authorial standpoint. The second time, there’s not even any direct causation — sure, any number of things could have done it, but that makes it read even more as “author needed to find a way to end the chapter.”

City of Bones: Chapter Three – Shadowhunter

The two kids get to the poetry reading, which looks like it’s going to be horrible. Clary suggests they make a run for it, but Simon says he promised he’d be there. He goes to get them coffee while Clary finds a place for them to sit.

After she sits down, a blonde girl seated nearby leans over to ask Clary if she’s dating Simon. When Clary says she isn’t, the girl asks if Simon has a girlfriend. Clary says no, and the girl asks if he’s gay. Just then, Simon returns and we are spared the answer to this question, which we all know is gonna be “no” anyway.

You know, just once I wanna see a story where one or both of the guys in the love triangle isn’t straight. Bisexual or pansexual, maybe, so that he can be crushing on the girl but also on the other dude. And then it leads to polyamory or something. I dunno. We just need more LGBT characters, and also this love triangle business is getting hella boring.

Clary stares at Simon when he comes back with the coffee and tries to ascertain whether or not he’s good-looking. She concedes that he has nice eyes and could look good with a different haircut. Simon notices Clary staring and asks what’s up, and she tells him that the girl seated nearby thinks that he’s cute. The conversation is conveniently interrupted yet again by the poetry reading starting.

As predicted, it’s awful. Simon’s friend Eric is a simply dreadful poet. This part’s actually decently funny — there’s a good line about how all Eric’s poems have loins in them. After a few paragraphs of snarking on Eric’s bad poetry, Clary tries to change the subject back to the girl who thinks Simon is cute. Simon tells her he has something he wants to tell her. Hoo boy.

I mean, credit where it’s due; at least this proves the author is intentionally being obvious about Simon’s crush on Clary, and if he actually manages to confess to her this early on it could change the later love triangle dynamic in interesting ways (usually the secondary love interest, in this case Simon, doesn’t get to confess first). However, what with the way every conversation thus far in this chapter has been conveniently interrupted, and given Clary’s general cluelessness about the situation, I doubt he’ll manage to get his confession out, so this won’t change anything.

Simon awkwardly says he wants to talk to Clary about how he doesn’t have a girlfriend, and Clary suggests he ask out Jaida Jones, who is apparently a schoolmate of hers and “one of the few girls at [her school] she actually [likes].” Man, I hate to nitpick, but I really do have a nit to pick with this. Dear authors: stop making your teenage female characters dislike all or most of their teenage female peers. This whole “I’m not like the other girls” trope is misogynist, since it relies on your protagonist putting down the rest of her gender in order to make herself look good. We also need to stop telling teen girls that it’s normal and expected for them to hate other girls their own age. It’s not normal. It’s internalized misogyny.

Simon says he doesn’t wanna ask out this Jaida person because he likes someone else already. Clary asks him if he’s gay, just so that we can get the confirmation that he isn’t, I guess. Also, Simon says that if he were gay, he would dress better, which got me thinking about how sexuality supposedly correlates with fashion sense. So gay guys dress better than straight guys, but what if you’re bisexual? Does it cancel out or something? What if you’re pansexual? I mean, I’m pan and last night I went to bed wearing boxers and a Captain Underpants t-shirt.

Got a bit sidetracked there. Anyway, just as Simon’s either about to confess to his crush on Clary or try and weasel his way out of the “who do you like?” question she’s just posed, Clary hears someone cough loudly and derisively behind her. She turns and sees Jace sitting on a couch nearby. Simon asks her what’s up; he’s following her gaze, but obviously isn’t able to see Jace.

Jace waves at Clary, then gets up to leave. She springs to her feet and follows him, telling Simon she’ll be right back.

Outside, Jace greets her by telling her that Eric’s poetry sucks. Clary demands to know why he’s following her, he acts really condescending and treats her like a child, blah blah blah. Nothing worth summarizing happens for about a page and a half. Jace asks Clary to show him her right hand, explaining that most Shadowhunter kids get Marked (yes, capital M) on their dominant hand when they’re young. The rune in question is permanent — unlike the ones Jace and co. used against the demon the other day, which are single-use — and grants the Marked person a bit of extra weapons skill. Jace shows her his own, which Clary at first is unable to see until she lets her “mind relax.”

Jace goes into a bit more info-dump for Clary’s sake, which seems kinda weird as earlier he was acting super condescending towards her, but okay. Incidentally, I’m wondering what the age difference between these two is. Clary’s only fifteen, so, yeah, she really is a kid. I can’t imagine Jace is any older than seventeen, though, and he certainly seems to like treating her like a baby.

Once he’s finished explaining about the Marks to her, Jace tells her that they have to leave. He’s bringing her back to “the Institute,” to meet with some bloke named Hodge, who wants to talk to Clary because apparently no mundie has known about Shadowhunters in at least a century. Clary asks what happens if she refuses to go, at which point Jace essentially threatens to kidnap her. Just then, Clary’s phone rings, and she finally decides to answer.

Her mom, sounding frantic, warns her not to come home under any circumstances, to go to Simon’s house instead and [loud shattering noise] call Luke and tell him that someone’s found her [sound of wood splintering] [slithering noise] “I love you, Clary.” [line goes dead]

Clary freaks out and immediately calls her mom back, but she just gets a busy tone. She tries to call one more time, but her hands are shaking and the phone slips out of her grasp. Frantically, she snatches what she thinks is a phone out of Jace’s pocket — he informs her as she does so that it’s actually a “Sensor” and she won’t be able to use it — and snaps at him that she needs to call the police. He grabs her wrist and asks her to tell him what happened so he can help, but she scratches at his face, pulls free, and runs towards home.

Thoughts So Far:

Well, the action’s picking up. Unfortunately, the action picking up also coincided with the author’s prose slipping in quality. This chapter’s high point prose-wise was when the characters were snarking at Eric’s bad poetry; from there it just kinda went downhill.

Jace is obnoxious in the way that handsome dudes in fiction sometimes are — you know, that sort of obnoxiousness that’s supposed to be kinda sexy, or alluring, or whatever. Clary’s responses to him have made it clear that his behavior is in-universe intended as obnoxious, though, which at least puts this a step above Twilight. Jace is an asshole, canonically. We’re going to be expected to like him despite, or because, of that fact, later on, but the fact remains that he’s canonically an asshole, and, well… if we’re going to take that route, I guess it could have been done a lot worse.

The sexual tension between the two is there, but not smack-you-in-the-face-with-it there. I’d say it’s most apparent when Clary shows Jace her hand and her narration remarks that she feels exposed doing this, as though she’s showing him her bare chest. It’s also clear on Jace’s side, since, like I said, he’s playing predictably into the trope of good-looking jerkass-with-a-heart-of-gold flirts-with-girls-by-acting-condescending antihero boy — in fact, he reads like a Draco in leather pants, which isn’t at all surprising if you remember that the author’s responsible for that term. I’m pretty sure Jace was inspired by, or even an expy of, the author’s take on Draco Malfoy.

Really, though, there’s not a whole lot I can say to this chapter. We got a little more about Jace, but not enough to make me like him. Clary still doesn’t stand out in my mind much as a character, but protagonists don’t always manage to do so right away. The plot’s going somewhere, but where remains to be seen. I’m reserving judgement.

I’m seeing the Buffy-inspired humor pretty clearly here, though. That’s not a bad thing, per se, just perhaps worth noting. Makes me wonder if the author started coming up with this story directly as a result of writing her Draco Trilogy; from what little I’ve heard and seen of said trilogy, this book seems to share some of the same characteristics and mood. Minus the blatant plagiarism, hopefully.

City of Bones: Chapter Two – Secrets and Lies

The chapter opens with Clary sketching in her bedroom. Now, at first glance this is cool and I’m glad, because previous experience with the “supernatural romance” subgenre of YA lit has taught me that young female protagonists are often not given any talents or hobbies outside of what’s needed to advance the plot, and even then it’s often the job of Superhuman Love Interest Boy to be actually good at things. Other times the protagonist is given a skill that’s never demonstrated or made plot-important. So, hey, nice to see Clary having a hobby outside of killing demons or mooning after Jace or whatever.

On the other hand, the actual sketching scene is weird. Almost all the adjectives in the description of her sketch are about color, but she’s not coloring the drawing, she’s doing the initial sketch. Which is most likely in lead pencil. So no colors.

She’s also drawing a blond prince. Probably supposed to be Jace.

By the second paragraph of the chapter, Clary has given up on the drawing; the prince’s arm isn’t coming out right. She crumples up the sketch and angsts about how she wishes she could be as talented as her mother, Jocelyn Fray, who is apparently a professional artist. According to Clary:

Everything Jocelyn Fray drew, painted, or sketched was beautiful, and seemingly effortless.

Now, my dad’s an artist — he writes and illustrates children’s books, actually. I know what it’s like to grow up as an artistic person with an artistic parent. And, yeah, especially when I was younger, all my dad’s work seemed amazing and I wondered how he was able to so quickly turn out sketches much better than the ones I’d labor over for hours. But, on the other hand, even though everything my dad draws is obviously more skilled than my stuff — he’s got decades more experience than I do, after all — I never had an impression of him as a perfect artist, because every single artist goes through what Clary is going through right now, where nothing she draws seems to be coming out right. I’ve seen my dad go through many, many drafts of the same picture trying to get one that looks how he wants it to. Clary, realistically, should have seen her mom do the same thing. If she hasn’t, either:

Clary’s mom is a magical fairy who is magically able to always create perfect works of art on the first try; or

Clary’s mom is not allowing Clary to observe her entire artistic process, which seems pretty shitty given Clary’s interest in art.

Of course, there’s always the third option, which is “the author didn’t really put any thought into this.”

The phone rings. It’s Simon. We learn during the course of their conversation that it is one day after the incident at Pandemonium in the previous chapter. Clary tells him she got in trouble for getting home late that night. Simon protests and says that they only got home late because of the traffic, to which Clary replies:

“Yeah, well, she doesn’t see it that way. I disappointed her, I let her down, I made her worry, blah blah blah, I am the bane of her existence,” Clary said, mimicking her mother’s precise phrasing with only a slight twinge of guilt.

Does… does the author not realize how harsh that sounds? Being called a disappointment because you got home a bit late is bad enough, but having your mother call you the bane of her existence for such a mild offense as this (or for most offenses, really)… that’s quite harsh.

Furthermore, the way Clary offhandedly says this suggests that she’s used to having her mother talk to her like this.

As is revealed through Clary and Simon’s phone conversation, Simon is in a band with his friends Eric, Matt, and Kirk. Of these three, Eric is also a poet, and he’s doing a reading that night in a nearby coffee shop. Simon invites Clary along, but Clary isn’t sure if her mom is going to officially ground her or not.

Clary hangs up the phone and, for no real reason, we get a bunch of description of the living room. It’s not bad description, and it does serve to illustrate further that Clary’s mom is an artist — there are handmade pillows in the room, and multiple paintings by her mother hanging on the walls — but it feels randomly inserted.

From there we go into some backstory on Clary’s father, who was a soldier who died in a car crash before Clary was born. (Given the author’s previous involvement in HP fandom, and the fact that Harry was told as a kid that his parents died in a car crash, I get the feeling that Clary’s dad did not, in fact, die in an automobile accident.) Clary’s last name is her mother’s maiden name, which her mother went back to using after the death of Clary’s father.

We get some more info dump on how there’s a box with some of Clary’s dad’s old things next to Clary’s mom’s bed. The most relevant piece of information here seems to be that there’s a lock of blond hair in the box, which Clary’s mom sometimes takes out to hold.

Incidentally, Clary’s father was named Jonathan Clark, so we now have full names for both her parents. Cool.

Clary hears someone at the door and is snapped out of her “reverie,” which reminds me that we’re supposed to believe that this whole exposition fest we just sat through was Clary’s internal thought process. Which, y’know, makes no sense. But okay.

The someone at the door is a fellow called Luke, who is a family friend. Clary thinks of him as being an uncle, though he’s no actual relation. Luke is carrying cardboard boxes, which he evasively says are for packing up “extra stuff lying around the house.”

Clary asks Luke what he’d do if he could see something no one else could see. He misinterprets the question and tells her that of course she sees the world differently, she’s an artist. Clary asks Luke, “If my dad had lived, do you think he’d have been an artist too?”, which is sort of weird phrasing given that, y’know, her dad was a grown-ass man when he died and had plenty of time to refine any artistic talent or inclination he may have had.

Just then, Clary’s mother returns. We get some description of what she looks like; she’s slender, with dark auburn hair. She’s also very pretty, and Clary feels inferior. Great.

This leads into some description of Clary. She’s short, redheaded and freckly, and with a somewhat boyish figure. Clary is convinced that this means she cannot be beautiful and must content herself with being “cute” instead. Clary’s also clumsy. Awesome. Definitely never seen that trait in a young female protagonist before.

Back to the plot. Clary starts to catch on that there’s something fishy going on with the boxes, so she asks her mom about it. After about half a page of hesitation, Jocelyn tells her that they’re going on vacation. “Vacation” in this case means going to the farmhouse Luke owns upstate. They’re going to be there for the entire rest of the summer.

Clary objects — she had made plans with friends already, and she’s taking summer art classes in the city that she paid for with her own money — but Jocelyn says the decision is final, and Luke backs her up. Clary tries to get her mom to let her stay in the city on her own (which is probably not legal, since Clary is a minor, though she’s old enough to be legally working), but her mom won’t let her.

Luke and Jocelyn have a whispered conversation about someone named Bane, who is in Tanzania. Also, there’s talk about how Clary “isn’t Jonathan.” Clary wonders what all this has to do with her dad.

Just as Luke is about to leave, the door flies open. It’s Simon. Luke leaves, and Clary, ignoring her mother’s pleas to stay and talk, promptly exits with Simon.

Once they make it outside, we get some description of where Clary lives; a three-story brownstone in Park Slope. The downstairs tenant is an old lady who styles herself as “Madame Dorothea, Seeress and Prophetess.” As Simon is joking around about how hard it is for prophetesses to get work these days, a man leaves Madame Dorothea’s apartment. He’s given a full description, which involves comparing his skin tone to maple syrup and his eyes to those of a cat, so, well… make of that what you will. Also, he smiles at Clary and she suddenly feels as though she’s going to faint. Okay.

Simon and Clary head to a nearby Mexican restaurant, where Clary explains about the upstate “vacation.” They discuss how Clary’s mom is kind of weird. Clary mentions that she knows very little about her mom’s life prior to Clary’s birth. Simon brings up how Jocelyn has lots of little thin scars all over her back and arms, which Clary has somehow never noticed. (Is this going to be explained later? Really, how do you not notice that your own mom has scars all over her body?)

Clary’s mom calls, but Clary lets it go to voicemail. She decides she’ll call her mom back after the poetry reading. Clary and Simon leave the Mexican place and start walking while chatting about Simon’s band. Apparently the band does very little actual music-playing and mostly sits around arguing about band names and potential logos. Simon goes on about how everyone in the band besides him has a girlfriend, while Clary pays little attention because she’s too busy avoiding looking at anyone for too long, afraid that she’ll start to see things that shouldn’t be there.

Clary’s mom calls once again, and once again Clary doesn’t pick up. The two kids continue on their way to the poetry reading. End chapter.

Thoughts So Far:

Look, I have to concede that this book isn’t all bad. There’s an ominous tone to this chapter which is actually rather effective, particularly in the last part of the chapter; it started to dawn on me as I was reading that, shit, Clary really needs to go home and talk to her mom, because whatever’s going on is more serious than simply an argument over vacation; of course, because Clary’s fifteen years old and mad at her mother, she’s not going to, and by the time she finally does get home it might be too late for dear ol’ Mum.

It’s fairly obvious that Clary’s mom is a Shadowhunter, or used to be; those scars she has are probably from the magic runes demonstrated in chapter 1. Clary’s dad almost certainly did not really die in a car crash, and there is likely a very good reason that Jocelyn doesn’t talk about her life before having Clary. The sudden decision to spend the summer upstate was more than likely Shadowhunter-related. Et cetera, et cetera. I may be reading this differently because this is technically my second reading of the book — though I barely remember my first — but doesn’t this seem very predictable?

While we’re on the subject of predictable, let’s talk about Simon and Clary’s relationship. Seems like every YA fantasy novel is now required to have a love triangle along the lines of the following:

attractive-but-doesn’t-know-it female protagonist

female protagonist’s male best friend, often someone whom she’s known since childhood; his crush on the protagonist is usually unacknowledged by said protagonist until he outright states it, and nearly always unrequited

the true love interest, a mysterious and very handsome boy with whom the protagonist most likely develops an immediate connection and/or mutual obsession

And, come on, even from chapter 1 we could see that yet another of these triangles is setting up between Clary, Simon, and Jace. What’s with these love triangles, anyway? The outcome is always predictable, so it doesn’t even build dramatic tension. If you really want two boys to be fawning over your protagonist, then maybe you should make her polyamorous for some variety. (Alternately, make her uninterested in either of them.)

It’s not even that it’s being badly done here — in fact, this isn’t a very odious example at all. Except for the possible reference to Jace in the form of Clary’s drawing, there’s no sign that Clary has become infatuated at first sight; as for Simon, his crush on Clary is readily apparent, but we aren’t being hit over the head with it. Still, this trope is so overdone in YA fiction that I think even its inclusion deserves an eyeroll.

What we’ve got here is a cookie-cutter YA fantasy setup: teenage girl protag, love triangle, mysterious and somewhat ominous supernatural occurrences (tied to a mysterious and somewhat ominous group, tied ultimately back to the protag), evil supernatural beings, implications that protagonist is crucial to the plot for reasons she herself doesn’t yet realize or understand, and so on. Hell, even small specific details, such as Clary’s clumsiness, are common clichés of the genre. (Not to mention stuff like Clary’s missing dad, which I’m nearly positive will become plot-important later, in part because missing dads are always plot-important.)

It’s not the worst example of any of these things that I’ve ever seen, but, damn, if you take it all together it’s clear how formulaic this is. Maybe if this was truly my first reading I’d be holding out hope that we’d get some deconstruction of these tropes later on, but I honestly can’t remember the book doing anything of the sort (and I live for clever deconstruction of tropes, so I’d probably recall if there was anything like that).

Final note: Clary’s acting remarkably calm for someone who witnessed a freaky supernatural occurrence the day before. I liked the detail about her not wanting to look at anything for too long because she’s afraid that if she does she’ll start to see things that shouldn’t be there, but that’s still an awfully understated reaction considering what she went through. In fact, the opening scene of the story doesn’t seem to logically connect to what’s happening now; its relevance to the current events is questionable, at best, since the sole “mundie” witness barely even has it on her mind. And if the protagonist doesn’t care, then why should we?

City of Bones: Chapter One – Pandemonium

We open with our main character, fifteen-year old Clary Fray, and her best friend, Simon, waiting in line to get into an all-ages club called the Pandemonium Club. The line is about fifty teenagers long, which is pretty typical for this club, especially on Sundays, and—

—no, stop, I call bullshit already. Why the fuck would there be so many teens going out clubbing on a Sunday night? Maybe as a one-off thing, okay, but on a regular basis? Don’t they have school in the morning? Even if it’s summer, don’t they have curfews? Why is this seen as a typical event when it is so obviously weird and wrong? Why did the author decide that it made sense to declare Sunday the busiest night of the week, instead of, say, Friday or Saturday?

Anyway. At the front of the line, the bouncer is telling some kid that he can’t bring a fake weapon into the club. The fake weapon, described as looking like a pointed wooden beam (we’re not told the size), is part of the boy’s vampire hunter costume. He’s allowed in after demonstrating that his weapon is made of foam rubber.

…this strikes me as a little weird, too. If people regularly attend this club in costume (which would seem to be the case), then there are probably rules in place about fake weapons. The kid shouldn’t have had to argue with the bouncer about it; either the thing passes inspection, or it doesn’t. On top of that, we still don’t know how big it is, but “wooden beam” makes it sound pretty damn large, and I guarantee you it would be possible to hurt someone with a large beam, foam rubber or no foam rubber.

We’re only on page 2 but I’m still not done nitpicking. The boy is described as looking fairly normal for this club; his hair is dyed electric blue, but that’s not a standout compared to what other club-goers sometimes sport (we’re told it’s not uncommon for people to show up with facial piercings and “elaborate facial tattoos,” the latter of which I can only assume are fake considering that the club-goers are underage). There is something weird about this boy’s looks, though. At one point Clary gets a look at his eyes, which are “way too bright a green … the color of antifreeze, spring grass.”

I had to look up what color antifreeze is. It’s a very bright, vivid, artificial green. Spring grass is a color that I’m of course familiar with; also a very bright, vivid green, but a totally different shade and not artificial-looking at all. This is a terrible simile. Both colors are clearly unnatural eye colors for a human, yes, but they’re two distinct colors, with one suggesting harsh, artificial chemicals and one suggesting nature. I have no idea what this detail is supposed to say about this kid now — he’s probably a supernatural being, but is he something malevolent and poisonous or is he some kind of nature spirit? And, of course, I have no fucking clue what color his eyes are supposed to be now, other than just “bright green,” which could have been said on its own without the need for any bad similes.

Clary observes him as he enters the club, thinking that she likes the way he moves and that her mother would have described him with the word “insouciant.” I don’t know how to feel about that word being invoked. Sure, it describes the character — “insouciant” means “showing a casual lack of concern” — and, while it might seem out-of-place in the average fifteen-year-old’s vocabulary, it is stated that that’s the word her mother would have used and not one she’d have thought to describe him with herself. It’s still clunky. It stands out as the author trying to impress the readers with her vocabulary.

We then shift perspective to the boy, now inside the club, which is described as being filled with “dry-ice smoke.” I looked this up to check if it was correct — I mean, sure, you could fill a club with dry ice, but dry ice vapor settles low to the ground and dissipates as it rises, which doesn’t fit the description in the book — and apparently, yes, you can use dry ice in a fog machine, but you can also use mineral oil, glycol, or glycerine solutions, and those solutions would produce actual fog instead of a cloud of vapor at foot level. Also, probably a lot cheaper than dry ice. So the author didn’t do her five seconds of Wikipedia research.

Unsurprisingly, the boy is some kind of supernatural being, and the weapon he got into the club is in fact a real weapon that he disguised to look like a fake one using magic. He also hypnotized the bouncer into letting him in. Apparently this guy just gets off on tricking humans — he calls them “mundies” — in the most blatant way he can. Okay.

Also, apparently he can sense energy given off by humans and appears to get sort of high off it. Is he some sort of energy vampire? I have no idea. 

Demon-boy is apparently from a “dead world” with a dying sun. That’s all we’re told so far. Okay.

A girl in a white dress catches his eye. She’s gorgeous, with long dark hair and dark eyes. She’s wearing a large red pendant, which demon-boy recognizes as being “real — real and precious.” Real what? Are we just talking fancy expensive jewelry, or magical artifacts? I have no clue.

Her dress is rather terribly described. Aside from three details about how it actually looks — white, floor-length, lacy sleeves — we’re just told that it’s “the kind women used to wear when this world was younger.” How much younger? A hundred years? Two hundred? Five?

The girl makes eyes at him, and he follows her, already thinking ahead to the kill. Except it’s rather obvious to the reader that she’s tricking him. Is he a bit dim? Does he just underestimate humans? Has he never met one that knew what he was?

She lures him into a storage room with the promise of sex. No, really. She hikes up her skirt to show off her thigh-high boots in a gesture that’s pretty obviously sexual.

Great. Girls fighting boys with sex appeal. I haven’t seen that trope five hundred times before.

Back to Clary. She and Simon are dancing, very awkwardly. It’s quite obvious that Simon has a crush on Clary; she either doesn’t know, or doesn’t reciprocate. He’s only there, the narration (third-person limited, incidentally) states, because Clary likes going to the club. Clary, for her part, likes the atmosphere of the place but is too shy to talk to anyone there.

Simon, incidentally, is described as dark-haired and with glasses; sort of a nerdy chess-club type. Still no description of Clary. Are we going to wait until she looks in a mirror?

The whole time, Clary’s watching blue-haired demon-boy. She think that there’s “something about the way he [moves] that [reminds] her of something,” which… gee, thanks, narration, that was some real helpful information there. She has a bit of a crush on this boy and wonders if she should go up to him and introduce herself, maybe offer to show him around since he looks a bit lost.

At that point, the boy’s attention turns to the girl in the white dress, and Clary watches as she beckons him over to the storage room. She notices that there are two tall boys, dressed in black, following demon-boy. Actually, take a look at this passage:

She couldn’t have said how she knew that they were following the other boy, but she did. She could see it in the way they paced him, their careful watchfulness, the slinking grace of their movements.

You guys all see what’s wrong here, right? In the first sentence the narration tells us she isn’t sure what’s tipped her off to the fact that these two boys are following demon-boy. In the second sentence the narration explains exactly why she can tell they’re following him.

Man, whoever edited this was slacking off.

Simon is talking to Clary this whole time and saying increasingly ridiculous things because she’s not paying him any attention; she’s still fixated on the two boys. One of them, a blond, pulls a knife as they approach the storage room door.

Clary yells to get Simon’s attention, but it takes her most of a page to manage to tell him that the blond boy near the storage room door is carrying a knife. Once she finally manages to convey this information, Simon leaves to get security and Clary, for some ill-advised and poorly defined reason, decides to go after the knife-wielding boy herself.

We cut back to demon-boy. He asks white-dress-girl what her name is. She says it’s Isabelle. They have some flirty dialogue. As he approaches her, he notices what he takes for a bracelet around her wrist; getting closer, he suddenly notices that it’s not a bracelet, but a design inked into her skin. Before he has time to react to this (I’m guessing it’s magical runes or something?), she slaps him, hard, then pulls out a golden whip (what?) and wraps it around his ankles, tripping him. The two boys in black haul him to his feet and bind him to a pillar. Seeing the symbols on the boys’ skin, demon-boy calls them “Shadowhunters.” Okay. And that makes him a Shadow?

Back to Clary. She opens the door to the storage room, which is apparently quite large as she isn’t able to immediately spot the group. Oh, except then suddenly they’re right there, and I guess she’s not supposed to see them because magic. Or something.

Listening to them talk, Clary assumes there’s some sort of “gang war” thing going on, until blond boy starts going on about demons and she instead assumes they’re crazy.

More clunky prose. There’s a passage where blond boy, whose name is Jace, launches into an explanation of what “demon” means for no good reason — except lazy exposition, of course! A bit later, this sentence happens:

Jace raised his head and smiled. There was something fierce about the gesture, something that reminded Clary of documentaries she’d watched about lions on the Discovery Channel, the way the big cats would raise their heads and sniff the air for prey.

Man, this author really loves the word “something.” Also, the way this is phrased implies that Jace reminds Clary of documentaries, not of lions. If it were turned around — something like “…that reminded Clary of lions she’d seen in nature documentaries…” — then it’d actually make sense. This is why it is important to have a good editor, or at the very least a competent one.

Demon-boy tries to worm out of his predicament by offering the group information on someone called Valentine, but they think he’s lying and decide to just kill him. Right as Jace is going in for the kill, Clary yells “Stop!” and he drops the knife, startled.

There’s a lot of unimportant dialogue — mostly Jace rambling and calling Clary a “little girl” and generally acting like a superior prick. We learn that the other boy’s name is Alec, and that Isabelle is his sister. While the humans are distracted, demon-boy gets free and leaps at Jace, pinning him down. They have a brief, uninteresting fight scene before Jace pulls out another knife and stabs the demon in the chest. He bleeds black blood, hisses something ominous about “the Forsaken,” then dies and vanishes. Uh, okay?

The three Shadowhunters argue over what to do with Clary. Jace says let her go. Alec says take her to the Institute, as someone named Hodge would like to talk to her. Isabelle says no way they’re taking a mundie to the Institute. Jace asks Clary if she’s had any dealings with the supernatural before, and as she’s telling him that she has no idea what he’s talking about Simon shows up with the bouncer.

It’s immediately apparent that Simon and the bouncer can’t see the Shadowhunters; they think Clary is alone in the room. Simon asks her if she’s okay and what happened to the guys with knives, and Clary says she must have been mistaken when she thought she saw them enter the storage room.

Cut to later. The two are trying to hail a cab. We’re finally given some sense of location; they’re on Orchard Street, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Simon tells Clary he doesn’t buy her story about the guys with knives just vanishing, because she looked pretty spooked when he saw her in the storage room. Clary sticks to her story and tells him it was just a mistake.

The more I think about it, though, the more that scene seemed to wrap up way too conveniently. The sudden scene cut didn’t help, of course, but more than that; why didn’t the bouncer at least investigate? We were told earlier that the storage room is fairly large. There are places where the guys could have hidden. Especially given that Clary was visibly scared/nervous, wouldn’t the bouncer at least consider the possibility that she knew perfectly well where the guys with knives were, and was withholding that information in fear of her life?

Here’s another sentence where the author overuses “something,” just to prove to you that she does it a lot:

And there was something about what had happened — something about the black blood bubbling up around Jace’s knife, something about his voice when he’d said Have you talked with the Night Children? that she wanted to keep to herself.

Finally, a cab stops for them — incidentally, earlier Clary wonders aloud where everyone is going at midnight on a Sunday, which reminded me again that apparently in the world of this book it’s perfectly normal and expected for literally hordes of teenagers to go out clubbing at midnight on a Sunday, and that’s still really fucking weird — and they get in. Simon tells the cabbie to take them to Brooklyn. Where in Brooklyn? I have no idea, it’s not said. Okay.

The chapter ends. Well then.

Thoughts So Far:

About the only positive thing I can say is that the prose is better than that of Fifty Shades, though that’s really not much of a compliment. Fifty Shades was incredibly amateurishly written; this, at least, looks at first glance like published-novel prose, though it’s definitely not good published-novel prose. I’ve pulled out some of the more obvious mistakes for you to look at (keep in mind that this is only the first 17 pages of a 485-page book), but on a sentence-by-sentence level the prose is never good, just passable.

The fantasy setting we’ve been given here is fairly standard; supernatural beings, people who fight supernatural beings, protagonist is probably super-important to both sides for reasons she doesn’t understand yet. Of course, Clary/Jace is going to be a thing, but the story actually isn’t hitting us over the head with it yet and for that I am grateful. I do like the detail about the magic runes on their bodies which are a giveaway to the demons they fight — hence why Isabelle had to wear a long-sleeved, floor-length dress — but I’m not exactly sure where we’re going with that yet.

I really don’t know what to think of our characters, though, because we really don’t know much about them at all. Look, here’s a quick run-down of everything we know about our cast:

Clary Fray

Fifteen years old

Best friend named Simon

Likes boys (whoa, what a shocker)

Can’t dance

Likes going to the club because it’s more exciting than her everyday life

Likes to draw

Has some sort of special ability to see Shadowhunters

Lives in Brooklyn

Simon (no last name given)

Has a crush on Clary

Has brown hair

Wears glasses

Does not like clubs

Also can’t dance

Hates trance music

Lives in Brooklyn

Isabelle (no last name given)

Tall, long dark hair, very pretty

Has some sort of special necklace thing

Shadowhunter

Can fight demons using a possibly magical whip

Brother named Alec

Jace (no last name given)

Blond

Shadowhunter

Bit of an asshole

Reminds Clary of a lion

Alec (no last name given)

Taller than Jace

Shadowhunter

Isabelle’s brother

And here’s what we know about the redshirt demon who was killed on page 14:

Wears a red zip-up jacket

Bright blue hair

Bright green eyes

Disguised himself as a vampire hunter

Used magic to fool the bouncer into letting him into the club with his weapon

Cute, according to Clary

“Insouciant”

Likes fooling “mundies” in the most obvious way he can

Likes being around human energy

From a “dead world” with a burnt-out sun

Experienced with hunting and killing human prey

Weakness to whatever metal Isabelle’s whip is made of

Might have knowledge about someone named Valentine

Has claws sharp enough to draw blood

Bleeds black

Doesn’t this seem disproportionate? We got a ton of info, relatively speaking, on a character who didn’t even make it 20 pages into the novel. We got very little information on our protagonist, her closest friend, or the three Shadowhunters they meet later on, at least one of whom is going to be a very important character. I mean, I was more invested in the demon than I was in Clary, but he’s dead and will almost certainly never reappear, whereas we’re stuck with Clary for the next 450+ pages, and for the next two books after that.

Of course, that gives us a ton of time to further develop our main cast, but when you see how quickly the author was able to give us a basic character sketch of the demon, it’s absurd that she didn’t bother to do the same for her other characters. Sure, demon-boy wasn’t a very fleshed-out character, but he was certainly fleshed-out enough for one who only lived for a handful of pages — hell, we even got a few pages from his POV. If that’s the amount of characterization we’re going to be giving characters who are essentially redshirts, then we need to step it way up for the actual protagonists. (And if we’re going to give that much characterization to redshirts, we ought to be giving more to other minor characters; the bouncer, for instance.)

We’ll see how it goes. First chapters can be awkward; sometimes the story gets into more of a rhythm once you’re a bit into it. Then again, an awkward first chapter is a sign of a bad editor, and what with some of the obvious mistakes in this chapter (see: all the “somethings”) I’m already a little suspicious of this book’s editing.

Again, we’ll see how it goes, but my hopes aren’t high at this point. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that someone who relied on plagiarism when writing fanfiction can’t actually write worth a damn.