Chapter 2 of The City of Bones: The Sea Vegetable Conspiracy starts practising tomorrow at 9, everyone welcome.

I just wanna clarify to anyone reading this: I’m not a book snob. You can take a look at my Goodreads and see the last three books I read were all cheesy YA lit and I enjoyed the crap outta them. I read the first three books of Twilight and enjoyed them (for the most part), I read The Vampire Diaries, I’ve read all those books with pretty slim girls in big ball gowns on the cover and been totally unabashed about my love for the escape they present; however, I’ve never pretended they were perfect. I’m not reading TMI series because I’m seeking to make anyone who reads this series and enjoys it feel bad about themselves—you’re not lesser because you like a badly written book!—I’m reading it because it’s popular, and because I’m interested in cultural phenomenon. A book being poorly written isn’t your fault, so don’t take any of the things I’m saying here personally (unless you’re Cassandra Clare, in which case, girl I told you I’d be your editor), just enjoy it! It’s okay to poke fun at things!

We’ve just left the Bangin’ Ecstasy Party Club and here we are at Chapter Two: Secrets and Lies. Our hero, Fairy, is trying to draw something:

The dark prince sat astride his black steed, his sable cape flowing behind him. A golden circlet bound his blond locks, his handsome face was cold with the rage of battle, and …
"And his arm looked like an eggplant,” Clary muttered to herself in exasperation.

Correct me if I’m wrong since I can’t even draw stickmen, but do artists actually narrate what they’re drawing? This seems so weird.

Also 5$ says that this is foreshadowing for Jace (I need a nickname for him).

With a sigh she tore yet another sheet from her sketchpad, crumpled it up, and tossed it against the orange wall of her bedroom. Already the floor was littered with discarded balls of paper

Again, not an artist, but no way in hell I just rip pieces of paper out of my notebooks when I’m writing. Like, goddamn, Fairy, YOU ARE DESTROYING THE ECO SYSTEM. EVER HEARD OF AN ERASER?

We’re in Fairy’s room, and the phone rings in the house, and Fairy picks it up and hears this:

“Is this Clarissa Fray?” The voice on the other end of the phone sounded familiar, though not immediately identifiable.

if only this was this movie

Clary twirled the phone cord nervously around her finger. “Yeees?”
“Hi, I’m one of the knife-carrying hooligans you met last night in Pandemonium? I’m afraid I made a bad impression and was hoping you’d give me a chance to make it up to—”

It’s okay because it turns out to be Simon and I’m a bit weirded out by that. If my friend was really shook up after seeing what she thought was two knives being pulled on someone in a club and they disappeared I... wouldn’t be prank calling them about it.

Also, who prank calls—we all have caller ID now; I get that Cassandra said that it was a retro phone, but that honestly seemed like more of an excuse than anything—like her editor (if she actually has one) was like “Hey, why wouldn’t she just have her friend’s name in her contact list? Wouldn’t she know it was him?” and they had to find a way around it.

It sounds like I’m being nitpicky here but all I’m saying is it takes one loose thread to unravel a whole goddamn sweater, okay?

Fairy’s mom was apparently really upset with her for coming home late, at which point I had to stop and google how old Fairy is in this series because... what? And google told me this girl is FIFTEEN. IN NEW YORK CITY. GOING CLUBBING IN NEW YORK CITY. AT FIFTEEN.

MY MOTHER WOULD HAVE SHIPPED ME OFF TO A CONVENT AND WE ARE ATHEISTS.

““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.”

when you turn 18, then you have my permission to club

How dare your mother be worried for you! How dare your mother be scared that a fifteen-year-old who can’t even get her learner’s permit yet and can’t legally drink anywhere yet and SHOULDN’T BE ABLE TO GET INTO CLUBS IS IN DANGER.

YOU SHOULD BE FEELING A HELL OF A LOT OF GUILT FAIRY.

Then Ron/Simon invites Fairy out to a poetry reading:

“Eric’s doing a poetry reading over at Java Jones tonight,” Simon went on, naming a coffee shop around the corner from Clary’s that sometimes had live music at night. “The whole band’s going to go to show their support. Want to come?”

I live for dumb coffee shop names in literature. I’m serious—I’ve even done it. They’re always named so obviously and it’s always an old white guy name or some stupid ‘hip’ pun.

Also, thank God she clarified that Java Jones is a coffee shop! I MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT IT WAS A COMPUTER PROGRAMMING PLACE, GOODNESS.

this joke is brought to you by my computer programming boyfriend

We also now know that Simon is in a band which means that everyone in this story wants to bang him; I don’t make the rules, okay?

After she gets off the phone with Simon, we're treated to a really passive-aggressive description of her apartment. There’s this entire paragraph which reads straight out of a Martha Stewart magazine:

"Evidence of her mother’s artistic tendencies was everywhere, from the handmade velvet throw pillows piled on the dark red sofa to the walls hung with Jocelyn’s paintings, carefully framed— landscapes, mostly: the winding streets of downtown Manhattan lit with golden light; scenes of Prospect Park in winter, the gray ponds edged with lacelike films of white ice."

How dare she have throw pillows on her damn couch the nerve of this woman.

I GET IT your mom is an artist. You literally just need to say that—and like, what artist has their art framed everywhere? I get having copies of your own work and being proud, definitely, but shouldn’t they be in art galleries if they’re that popular?

So of course, while she's thinking about her mom, she starts to think about her dad. Fairy’s dad was a soldier and he died in a car crash before she was even born, and her mom mourned him properly by never talking about him EVER AGAIN. Very healthy.

sure, a 'car crash'

We meet ‘Uncle Luke’:

“He was dressed in his usual uniform: old jeans, a flannel shirt, and a bent pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that sat askew on the bridge of his nose.”

I am suddenly getting very serious James Potter as a Canadian vibes. He’s brought boxes and things clearly aren't about to go well for Fairy even though she hasn't picked up on the fact yet.

And then we have an infuriating hat-tip to the actual universe/book itself, which is just so annoying:

“He plucked the book out of her hand and read out loud: “‘The world still teems with those motley beings whom a more sober philosophy has discarded. Fairies and goblins, ghosts and demons, still hover about—’”

Here’s why this is annoying: this is a fic. I get that it’s not a fanfiction anymore, but it was, and this shit is really annoying and feels like a cheap laugh to the readers. It’s not clever, and it stopped being clever about the second time someone realised they could break the fourth wall. The reference to the book you’re reading in the actual book (or repeatedly using the name of the book over and over again) is exactly like when your uncle tells a joke and no one laughs so he EXPLAINS THE JOKE TO YOU BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY NO ONE UNDERSTOOD IT.

We get it, you’re writing a novel. Write the novel instead of telling me that.

Fairy considers confiding in her ‘Unle Luke’ (who isn’t really her uncle, just a family friend), and asks him what he would do if he saw something no one else could see. His reaction is really effing strange:

“The tape gun fell out of Luke’s hand, and hit the tiled hearth. He knelt to pick it up, not looking at her. “You mean if I were the only witness to a crime, that sort of thing?”
“No. I mean, if there were other people around, but you were the only one who could see something. As if it were invisible to everyone but you.”
He hesitated, still kneeling, the dented tape gun gripped in his hand.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Clary ventured nervously, “but …””

First of all: LOL at that first sentence. ‘The tape gun [ ... ] hit the tiled hearth”, what a mouthful. I didn't even know where he was standing and now you’re giving me flowery descriptions of the floor? Just say the floor! I don’t care!

Second, it really annoys me when, in novels, the characters are clearly acting suspicious and the protagonist is all “Golly gee why isn't anyone telling me anything!”. It makes me feel like the author thinks the readers are dumb so they need to push us down the path the plot is taking us—the writing should do that for you. You shouldn't need a character acting ‘strange’ this obviously around your protagonist in order to hint to us that there’s something unusual about her. Show us, don’t tell us.

Luke abruptly is like, ‘you’re an artist dude it’s totes normal to see weird shit don’t worry about it’ and then Fairy brings her dad into it, which is just friggin’ weird, but before that conversation can get out of control, Fairy’s Perfect Beautiful Mother walks in.

If I had sat down and written how I thought Fairy would describe her mother before I started this book, I can tell you right now that I would have been dead-on:

"Jocelyn Fray was a slim, compact woman, her hair a few shades darker than Clary’s and twice as long. At the moment it was twisted up in a dark red knot, stuck through with a graphite pen to hold it in place. She wore paint-spattered overalls over a lavender T-shirt, and brown hiking boots whose soles were caked with oil paint."

I wanna sit and rip this apart, because people seriously suck at descriptions nowadays. This is literally a description of any character in any fanfiction at any moment:

“Jocelyn Fray was a slim, compact woman” Is your mom a car? Is she a mirror? Is she an object that can be easily folded into small spaces? Why are you describing her like this?

pictured: Fairy's mom, probably

“her hair a few shades darker than Clary’s and twice as long” this description (and I feel like it’s gonna be a problem with other characters based off of Harry Potter characters) is why re-writing your fanfiction is just a bad idea in general. In fanfiction, you get to be a bit lazy with the descriptions: everyone knows what Harry Potter looks like, they all have their own unique distinct image of him in their heads (if it’s not DanRad), so all you need to do is give a few key words and everyone already knows who you’re talking about.

The problem here is that we don’t actually know what Clary looks like yet, because in this novel she isn’t Ginny. When Cassandra tells me that her mother has hair like Clary's but just a bit different, I have no reference point-- I could literally be imagining purple hair and I might be right.

The rest of the nauseating ‘all-artists-constantly-look-like-their-craft-threw-up-on-them-and-they-never-shower’ aside, I really wish authors would actually fucking describe the person they’re talking about. If you’re gonna do an intro, fine, but give me the whole face! None of this ‘here’s the eye colour and oh this is what their hair looked like and what they were wearing is that clear as mud?’ bullshit.

“People always told Clary that she looked like her mother, but she couldn’t see it herself. The only thing that was similar about them was their figures: They were both slender, with small chests and narrow hips.”

‘I am not like my mother at all EXCEPT FOR IN ALL THESE WAYS’.

“She knew she wasn’t beautiful like her mother was. To be beautiful you had to be willowy and tall. When you were as short as Clary was, just over five feet, you were cute. Not pretty or beautiful, but cute. Throw in carroty hair and a face full of freckles, and she was a Raggedy Ann to her mother’s Barbie doll.”

I’m gonna start using a checklist for YA authors describing their hero because this is just getting stupid:

• Weird jealousy over their mother/sister/someone who is not them but who they feel constantly compared to even though no one really compares them: check
• Comparing a female to a Barbie doll for deigning to fit into society’s standard of beauty: Check
• Strange internalised hatred for themselves even though everyone has told them over and over again that they are beautiful: check.

I still don’t even know what Fairy looks like! I know she has red hair, I know she’s freckly and short, and that she’s probably klutzy (and I am never going to stop blaming this on Bella for being a popular ‘flaw’ in female characterisation). I know that she’s slender, but that’s it. If I was gonna draw a photo of her this is what I would have:

I told you: not an artist.

What does her nose look like? Is it wide? Does her chin jut out too far or slope straight into her neck? Are her cheeks round and full and red or does she have razor-sharp cheekbones? Is her mouth full and quick to pout or are her lips thin but do they smile easily? Are her eyes blue or brown or do we not get to know that until the main male hero stares into them and she realises how beautiful they always were?

Make me care about this girl! I don’t want to read about your sad straw character that serves as a self-insert!

“Jocelyn even had a graceful way of walking that made people turn their heads to watch her go by. Clary, by contrast, was always tripping over her feet. The only time people turned to watch her go by was when she hurtled past them as she fell downstairs.”

I blame you, Meyer. I blame you.

HOW OFTEN ARE YOU FALLING DOWN STAIRS? I have fallen down three sets of stairs in my life and even THAT is a lot more than most people!

Okay so then Fairy’s mother does a really weird thing where she decides they’re going to ‘the farmhouse’ for the summer, even after Fairy has paid for art school classes at Tisch already. Which, holy shit how much money do you people have because Tisch is expensive and you have a farmhouse? I don’t mean to sound like a bitter poor person (just kidding, I totally do) but can we have a single mother and a small apartment where the hero has to work a full-time job to help with rent? Are people seriously too lazy to put the ‘hey this person doesn’t have money’ thing into the equation when they’re writing?

““I have to get away, Clary,” Jocelyn said, the corners of her mouth trembling. “I need the peace, the quiet, to paint. And money is tight right now—" 
“So sell some more of Dad’s stocks,” Clary said angrily. “That’s what you usually do, isn’t it?””

SELL YOUR FARMHOUSE. I side with Fairy on this but what the hell? What kind of dumb explanation is that? Money is tight so we’re going to go to our vacation home and also hang on to this one?

Clearly something else is happening, and Uncle Luke knows about it too because he HULK!SMASHes a frame leaning against the wall, because that’s totally normal behaviour.

5$ they both know about Fairy’s weird ‘powers’~ or something. And her dad has something to do with it.

So he storms out and we get this hilarious conversation:

“…Bane,” Jocelyn was saying. “I’ve been calling him and calling him for the past three weeks. His voice mail says he’s in Tanzania. What am I supposed to do?”
“Jocelyn.” Luke shook his head. “You can’t keep going to him forever.”
“But Clary—”
“Isn’t Jonathan,” Luke hissed. “You’ve never been the same since it happened, but Clary isn’t Jonathan.”
What does my father have to do with this? Clary thought, bewildered.
“I can’t just keep her at home, not let her go out. She won’t put up with it.”
“Of course she won’t!” Luke sounded really angry. “She’s not a pet, she’s a teenager. Almost an adult.”

when tanzania is in ashes, then I will return and give you money or something

Fairy is like, fifteen, she’s probably not even allowed to work without her mother’s permission yet and SHE CANNOT DRIVE so I’m actually Team Jocelyn on this one—Fairy definitely cannot stay home alone, that would be incredibly stupid. Especially because she likes to chase people wielding knives. She's not 'almost an adult', I'm an adult and my mom still makes me call her to know I've arrived home safely.

So Jonathan was probably a Shadowhunter, right? And that’s how he got killed? Or something—I like to guess but I have no fucking idea because this book is not leading me toward anything anymore, except for the idea that CLARY IS VERY SPECIAL and SOMETHING VERY BAD MIGHT HAPPEN SOON.

And then Simon comes along and saves the day! He’s my favourite so far but I suspect that has to do with the fact that Cassandra hasn’t actually written him doing anything.

“Jesus!” Luke exclaimed. 
"Actually, it’s just me,” said Simon. “Although I’ve been told the resemblance is startling.”

COME ON YOU ARE ADORABLE you’re such a nerd.

We find out Fairy lives on top of a psychic shop to which I can only say: ARE YOU KIDDING ME.

As they’re leaving, Fairy snaps at Simon, further putting her on my shit list:

“Do you have to be sarcastic about everything?” Clary snapped.
Simon blinked, clearly taken aback. “I thought you liked it when I was witty and ironic.”

Don’t worry about her, Simon, she’s just mad because her mom is RUINING HER LIFE!!!

from now on, Anna and her mom are now in this movie.

But then they spot someone actually coming out of the psychic shop:

He was tall, with maple-syrup-colored skin, gold-green eyes like a cat’s, and tangled black hair. He grinned at her blindingly, showing sharp white teeth.

[cracks knuckles] As a Canadian, I have a thing to say about the maple syrup simile here: there are FOUR grades of maple syrup:

[stompin' tom connors plays in the background]

As you can see, they're all really different in colour. If she's talking about the nasty-ass sugar corn syrup you guys in the USA put on your pancakes then I don't want to hear about it because that isn't maple syrup that is a sin against nature and you all need Jesus.

WHICH MAPLE SYRUP CASSANDRA, WHICH ONE?!!?!?

All jokes aside, I’m not sure they’re exactly something I would use to describe a skin tone, and if this person is a POC, that means Cassandra is using that gross trope of describing POC with food-related adjectives, which is total bullshit. This is such a wishy-washy adjective—just tell me he was tan! Tell me he had dark skin! Olive skin! Anything but ‘maple-syrup-colored’! Now I'm just imagining his skin flaking off the way maple sugar does when it hardens.

The rest of it is just making me picture the Cheshire Cat with a Snape wig on, so if that’s what she was going for, uh, congrats?

Anyway, she sees Snape Cat and feels incredibly dizzy, and then Simon’s all ‘I’ll buy you food’ and I’m just like WOW PLEASE MARRY ME.

[On a totally unrelated note, I typed in “The Mortal Instruments” on 8tracks and have been shuffling through the fanmixes without looking to read this. So far they’ve all been really intense post-apocalyptical mixes with songs by singers who scrunch their faces up real hard when hitting notes that aren’t that hard to sing, but I just got to one called “Magnus Bane” and the first song was a Fergie song and I AM SO PUMPED TO MEET THIS CHARACTER NOW]

It cuts to Fairy and Simon eating, and we get this hilarious scene:

“I just can’t believe she’s being like this,” Clary said for the fourth time, chasing a stray bit of guacamole around her plate with the tip of a nacho. They were at a neighborhood Mexican joint, a hole in the wall called Nacho Mama. “Like grounding me every other week wasn’t bad enough. Now I’m going to be exiled for the rest of the summer.”

Where do I start? WHERE DO I START. I’m having a blast imagining her chasing a green glob of avocado that’s suddenly grown sentient and decided it wants to live around her plate—don’t forget that it’s ‘stray’, which means it shouldn’t have been on the plate in the first place? Honestly, my head hurts.

The MEXICAN PLACE NAME IS PURE BRILLIANCE I refuse to believe she didn’t rip that off from someone, I actually snorted.

in case you were wondering, she wrote this series in LA.

I told y'all she didn't make it up.

Simon is still a sarcastic little shit and a way more level-headed friend than Fairy deserves, but he’s also kinda insinuating that ‘lol your mom is crazy’ which is a bit tired. Mom’s are fucking crazy—they’re usually raising YOU ASSHOLES. But Fairy is lamenting that she doesn't know anything about her mom pre-her-being-born, which is a bit strange I guess.

“I mean, she never talks about herself. I don’t know anything about her early life, or her family, or much about how she met my dad. She doesn’t even have wedding photos. It’s like her life started when she had me. That’s what she always says when I ask her about it.”
“Aw.” Simon made a face at her. “That’s sweet.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s weird. It’s weird that I don’t know anything about my grandparents. I mean, I know my dad’s parents weren’t very nice to her, but could they have been that bad? What kind of people don’t want to even meet their granddaughter?”
“Maybe she hates them. Maybe they were abusive or something,” Simon suggested. “She does have those scars.”

Aside from this all being really weird (Fairy what the hell that is adorable what’s wrong with you), I can think of a lot of reasons Fairy’s mom wouldn’t want her to associate with her family. As Simon (kinda grossly) points out, abuse could have been involved, and maybe her mom doesn’t feel she’s old enough to really know the story. It’s fucking weird that he noticed that her mom had scars on her back and on her arms. I’m a bit uncomfortable that they’re discussing this so nonchalantly over nachos.

They get up to leave and Cassandra SUBTLY SETS UP THE LOVE TRIANGLE I CAN FEEL COMING:

The strap of her messenger bag slid down her arm. Simon pushed it back up absently, his fingers lingering at the bare skin of her shoulder.

You don’t do things like that absently—you just don’t. I move hair out of my friends’ faces all the time, I would say I did them maybe without thinking about them much, as lots of friends are wont to do, but I definitely think about I’m doing, as in, ‘wow that piece of hair in your face is driving me nuts I gotta move it out of the way’. I’m pretty guilty of this in my own writing, so I’ll actually let it slide.

What drives me the most insane is the ‘fingers lingering at the bare skin of her shoulder’—he does this, and Fairy doesn’t even bat an eye. I have PLENTY of friends with whom I am very physically affectionate, and I would notice if they let their fingers linger around my shoulder. It’s such a weird way to set this up (especially because isn’t Simon based on Ron and Clary on Ginny???).

They move to the hip coffee house with live music and poetry readings, but on the way we get this hilarious conversation about band names:

“We’re choosing between Sea Vegetable Conspiracy and Rock Solid Panda.”
Clary shook her head. “Those are both terrible.”
“Eric suggested Lawn Chair Crisis.”

I’m 90% convinced Simon is just making fun of her the entire time and she has no clue. Also I’m calling dibs on Sea Vegetable Conspiracy as a band name and I’ll just tell Cassandra that it was an ‘homage’ to her book.

““Which means,” Simon continued, “that I am the last member of the band not to have a girlfriend. Which, you know, is the whole point of being in a band. To get girls.””

Ugh, why do I get the feeling I'm gonna read the word 'friendzoned' in this novel.

And then in the next paragraph we have the stunning Internalised-Misogyny Feminist White Warrior, here to tell everyone the right kind of woman to be:

move along, nothing to see here.

“There’s always Sheila ‘The Thong’ Barbarino,” Clary suggested. Clary had sat behind her in math class in ninth grade. Every time Sheila had dropped her pencil—which had been often—Clary had been treated to the sight of Sheila’s underwear riding up above the waistband of her super-low-rise jeans.
“That is who Eric’s been dating for the past three months,” Simon said. “His advice, meanwhile, was that I ought to just decide which girl in school had the most rockin’ bod and ask her out on the first day of classes.”
“Eric is a sexist pig,” Clary said, suddenly not wanting to know which girl in school Simon thought had the most rockin’ bod. “Maybe you should call the band the Sexist Pigs.”

I can't do this.

So, basically, Sheila is given a degrading nickname because of her underwear, and then we’re meant to presume she’s sexually available because you sat behind her and saw her thong when she bent down to pick up her pencil?

Anyone else think Sheila was hitting on Fairy and she just didn't realise?

But of course, Eric is the sexist pig for essentially saying that Simon should pick someone he finds attractive and just go for it, which, you know, isn’t terrible advice.

I'm getting the feeling that Fairy has an intense case of "I'm not like other girls"-itis.

Fairy’s mom calls a second time, and she feels a bit guilty, but she forges onward because she needs to see the Sexist Pig read his poetry instead of answering her phone and telling her mom she’ll call her back later, and that’s the end of the chapter.


You guys? You guys, I've written so much on this and we’re only at the third chapter now. Help me.