City of Ashes, Chapter 9: Plot Twist of the Century (that everyone saw coming)

After last week's sheer ridiculousness with Divergent, I can't believe I'm actually happy to return to City of Ashes. I'll say lots of terrible things about CC and the writing, but at least she managed to make a semi-compelling story (albeit a partly plagiarised one).

As you will remember, Clary and Jace kissed at the end of the last chapter, and then Simon ran home crying and retching once he realised his girlfriend was in love with her brother.

artist's rendition of Simon after leaving the Seelie Court

They are all headed back to the Institute, where no one is hanging out except for the youngest little Lightwood, Max.

Are you guys ready to dive right back into the incest? Well too bad because we are on a one-way train to Hell and this is every single stop.

[Jace's] jeans were soaked and hung low on his hipbones, showing a strip of pale, tattooed skin between the denim and the edge of his T-shirt.

Clary follows Jace into his room to get changed out of her wet clothes, all the while CC is doing her best to make it seem like Clary cares a whit about Simon even though right up until this very moment I'd sooner believe that Voldentine was in love with him over Clary.

Did you guys miss all the mentions about how petite and delicate our heroine is from the first book? 'Cause I sure did!

He went to the dresser and pulled a folded long-sleeved T-shirt out of a drawer. He tossed it to Clary. "That one shrank in the wash," he said. "It'll probably still be big on you, but..."

me, reading these chapters.

Jace and Clary have a huge blow-out argument about the kiss. Look, I know CC is super heavy-handed with her foreshadowing which means that Clary and Jace are gonna turn out to not be related. I get that. I can hear you screaming it at me through the screen. It's not hard to put two-and-two together and understand that, of course these two aren't related, they're just two angels that are destined to be together.

But the fact of the matter is that the plot is telling us right now that they are, and you can't just write your book without staying faithful to that.

"You shouldn't have kissed me like that."
He had been leaning against the door frame; now he stood up straight. "How should I have kissed you? Is there another way you like it?"

Jace and Clary go back and forth about why Jace kissed her and why they wanted to kiss each other; I could summarise but just imagine a couple arguing with a bunch of metaphors about Jace looking gold and like the sun. The rest of the dramatic fight plays out and ends on the grossest proclamation that everybody saw and nobody wanted to read:

"What do you want me to tell you? The truth? The truth is that I love Simon like I should love you, and I wish he was my brother and you weren't, but I can't do anything about that and neither can you! Or do you have some ideas, since you're so goddamned smart?"

Jace then returns this proclamation, telling Fairy that he's never, ever felt this way about anyone, because his childhood was so fucked up that he thought his poor, shrivelled heart would never love again. And then they talk about having a relationship with one another and hiding it from their parents!

I'm! Not! Kidding!

"We could keep it a secret."
"People would find out. And I don't want to lie to my family, do you?"
[ ... ] And my mother, what if she woke up, what would we say to her? This, what we want, it would be sickening to everyone we care about--"

D U H.

Jace stomps off to have a shower while Clary falls asleep and has a dumb prophetic dream. Honestly, I actually hate plot through dreams! It should be used sparingly, if ever, unless there's a really specific reason for it in the plot. Example: the fifth Harry Potter book where it turned out that he had a link between Voldemort's brain.

... Oh... now I see why CC keeps using this device. Right. Carry on.

YOU KNOW WHY.

She wakes up at 3 am, and Jace is just creepily sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, clutching that piece of the mirror that was the portal to the Downworld, brooding. The doorbell rings and when Clary gets downstairs, it's CC's cartoonish rendition of a Mexican-American holding a dead Simon.

Yup, that was a sentence you just read.

"What have you done to Simon?" For that moment, [Clary's] voice clear and commanding, she sounded exactly like her mother.
"El no esta muerto," Raphael said, in a flat and emotionless voice, and laid Simon down on the ground almost at Clary's feet.

Raphael has met them before. Raphael knows that they all speak English and no Spanish. So why is Raphael speaking in Spanish to them?

Turns out, all that foreshadowing about Simon becoming a vampire was legitimate (of course it was, CC is about as subtle as a hammer to the face) and Simon broke into a vampire's lair to see if he could reverse the effects. So he's dead, but he's gonna be reborn as a vampire, and CC has effectively gotten rid of the other love interest so now even if you wanted Fairy with Simon, it definitely cannot happen.

I actually just skipped over like six pages of dialogue, but literally nothing was said that wasn't summarised in the paragraph I just wrote. So there was a lot of melodrama about how Clary actually really does love Simon, yadda yadda yadda. There's nothing new or exciting, I promise.

me, at some point during this chapter

Also, I'm just gonna say, this chapter has made it even more obvious that it was fanfiction because there's a lot of line breaks that would have been natural chapter cliffhangers, but instead of being edited out for clarity, they're just there. So like, every couple of paragraphs, I get a setup for a cliffhanger and then an immediate resolution, which is just really shitty formatting.

Raphael tells The Gang (Jace, Clary, Isabelle) that they need to bury Simon and then help him dig himself out of his own grave (there's a pun in there somewhere), so Clary gets all noble and refuses to let him do it alone, and the chapter ends with them deciding to find Simon a Jewish cemetery.

See you guys next week for a trip back into Purgatory-- sorry, Divergent.