Chapter 9 of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones: I abuse italics way more than I should in this recap.

We’re back for another episode of ‘How Many Ways Can Cassandra Clare Use Weird and Totally Not Accurate Equivalent Similes to Describe Things That Don’t Need Describing’! Hope you’re all excited!

We start off with some lovely sentence confusion that probably could’ve been cleared up with some editing:

Clary stepped forward to touch Jace’s arm, say something, anything—what did you say to someone who’d just seen his father’s killers? Her hesitation turned out not to matter; Jace shrugged her touch off as if it stung.

SO, Clary moved forward to touch his arm, but this sets it up as if she’s in motion and hasn’t actually reached his arm yet, but then the next sentence is Jace shrugging off her touch, which I assumed hadn’t actually happened yet. THIS BOOK, GUYS.

Chapter 8 of The Mortal Instruments: The City of Bones: Simon's character death is getting so painful for me. :(

And we’re back! Of all the books I’ve planned to read this summer, I cannot believe this one is taking me this long. Especially because I still haven’t finished my Dickens novel and I feel like I’m cheating by wasting time on this but WHATEVER.

Fairy just fell through a portal... thing, and the first sentence (like every other first sentence of each chapter in this book) made me stop and go “WHY”:

The sensation of falling was the worst part: her heart flew up into her throat and her stomach turned to water.

As opposed to the entirely solid stuff that your stomach has in it in the first place?

Chapter 7 of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones: Fairy is the worst friend in existence.

I think weekly is the easiest way to update this, so let’s go with every Thursday/Friday (until that stops working because I have the dumbest schedule). I’m really hangry right now and waiting for pasta to boil so let’s take out some misplaced anger on the book:

They’re shown into the apartment with really vague ~mystical~ descriptions of what it looks like (if you’re picturing every fortune tellers apartment from 90s TV shows then you are absolutely correct). We also get to find out that Madame D (as she will henceforth be known) dabbles in literally every cultures’ kind of fortune-telling, which reads less as Madame D knowing her shit and more as CC just googling ‘fortune telling’ and mashing everything she could find into this one character.

Anyway, Mme D asks if they want tea and we get possibly the funniest (and not intentionally so) passage so far in this book. I’m not lying when I tell you I cackled with glee when I read it:

“I’ll have tea,”
[ ... ]
Jace succumbed. “All right. As long as it isn’t Earl Grey,” he added, wrinkling his fineboned nose. “I hate bergamot.”
Madame Dorothea cackled loudly and disappeared back through the bead curtain, leaving it swaying gently behind her.

Mme D is me, you guys. She’s me.