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.

Clary raised her eyebrows at Jace. “You hate bergamot?”
Jace had wandered over to the narrow bookcase and was examining its contents.
“You have a problem with that?”
“You may be the only guy my age I’ve ever met who knows what bergamot is, much less that it’s in Earl Grey tea.”

First of all, jesus Christ Fairy, I hate to break it to you but it sounds like you hang out with complete fucking idiots. Either that or they (shocker) don’t care about what is in the tea they do or do not drink and don’t care to put other people down for not knowing it.

Second of all, it’s not like it’s super common? Bergamot is probably well-known as like, an ingredient, but to know exactly what kind of plant is in most black teas is something not a lot of people care about—for a good reason. This is so unbearably ‘special-snowflake’ that I don’t even want to keep commenting on it. I bet Fairy also looks down on people who go out and party instead of ‘staying in and drinking tea’. She probably has a tumblr full of quotes about how different she is than ‘other girls’.

The best part about this is I can just see Fairy going on a date with someone and then whining about it to Simon all:

“Ugh, and the worst part about it was that when I asked him if he liked bergamot or not, he asked me what it was. Soooooo déclassé. Hey, you wanna go to Starbucks later?”

(P.S.: I drink a metric fuckton of Starbucks so don’t start about how I’m being judgy).

AND THEN JACE LITERALLY SAYS THE THING:

“Yes, well,” Jace said, with a supercilious look, “I’m not like other guys. Besides,” he added, flipping a book off the shelf, “at the Institute we have to take classes in basic medicinal uses for plants. It’s required.”

Yeah, ‘cause most other guys don’t go around almost killing girls they just met.

Also, they totally have a grow-op at the Institute am I right? Jace is a Hufflepuff aaayyyy.

‘[F]lipping’ a book off a shelf really confuses me, too. Did she mean that he flipped through a book from the shelf? Did he make it do some sick aerials before it landed in his hand? Did he accidentally break his beautiful ‘fineboned’ nose or am I still going to have to do that for him?

He calls her by her last name and she freaks out:

Jace flipped a page. “Very funny, Fray.”
Clary, who had been studying the palmistry poster, whirled on him. “Don’t call me that.”
He glanced up, surprised. “Why not? It’s your last name, isn’t it?”
The image of Simon rose up behind her eyes. Simon the last time she had seen him, staring after her as she ran out of Java Jones. She turned back to the poster, blinking.
“No reason.”

this is still the best scene in the movie.

So I’m gonna guess she wouldn’t take kindly to my nickname. Also, this is the first fucking time she’s mentioned Simon since she literally disappeared off the face of the earth for three days. If that was my best friend I would’ve set up camp at their apartment already, and she doesn’t even bother to think about maybe contacting him and going “hey just so you know, I’M NOT DEAD”.

Jace keeps going on and on about how he ‘doesn’t do magic’ and I just... I so don’t care. Like, he is literally arguing about semantics with her. Just because she said he ‘does’ magic and not ‘uses’ it he’s all up in arms. Chill out, man. You’re talking to a girl from a generation raised on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Harry Potter, and Hocus Pocus—that’s what we know, and we’ll always try and connect it to that somehow.

The bead curtain rattled again, and Madame Dorothea’s head appeared. “Tea’s on the table,” she said. “There’s no need for you two to keep standing there like donkeys. Come into the parlor.”

??? Is that a saying, really? REALLY?

Then Mme D lays down a sick burn to Jace and I want to high-five her:

“If you were half as funny as you thought you were, my boy, you’d be twice as funny as you are.”

Oh, Mme D, make me tea and talk shit about Fairy and Jace with me.

They go into her parlour and the description is, yet again, Umbridge-meets-white-woman-pretending-to-be-exotic, and there’s a little tea plate on a table:

In the middle of the table was a silver tea service, laid out for company: a neat plate of stacked sandwiches, a blue teapot unfurling a thin stream of white smoke, and two teacups on matching saucers set carefully in front of two of the armchairs.

So, she’s not having tea? Also, there wouldn’t be smoke coming from the teapot, unless she’s serving them some truly noxious tea, it would be steam, and steam is always white so you don’t need to tell me unless it isn’t.

Everyone go and write a thank you letter to the editor of your favourite (well-written) book right now so you finally understand how important they are to making novels readable.

They’re eating and they’re making dumb comments about how Jace hates cucumber (wow thank you so much I desperately needed to know this) and then we find out Mme D is just a cheap rip-off of Sybil Trelawney which of course she is:

Calmly the old woman set her teapot down. “You can call me a liar all you like. It’s true, I’m not a witch. But my mother was.”

Apparently that’s totes impossible and then they explain to us that everything is part demon? Like everything ‘magical’? Vampires and Werewolves are just ‘diseases’ (which is kind of interesting, I guess) that affected humans weirdly. Faeries are the ‘fallen angels’, and I’m having a really hard time figuring out why this is all relevant because I don’t actually know what the conflict in this book is yet.

Turns out that she’s just the adopted child and she’s there to ‘watch over’ something in the apartment.

Then this gag-worthy thing happens:

With a wink the older woman reached for a sandwich from the plate, but it was empty. Clary had eaten them all. Dorothea chuckled. “It’s good to see a young
woman eat her fill. In my day, girls were robust, strapping creatures, not twigs like they are nowadays.”
“Thanks,” Clary said. She thought of Isabelle’s tiny waist and felt suddenly gigantic.

made doubly hilarious by the fact that this is movie Simon

This is so problematic on so many levels. First, uh, we know how was cast as Clary Fray in the movie and Lily Collins is certainly not someone I would ID as ‘robust’, so there’s strike one. Second, if Fairy actually is a petite but chubby girl, why has CC not described her like that? Because Fairy is referred to as small many times in this novel.

This comes off as almost self-loathing, and it makes me sad. I struggled with my weight for a long time and when I used to write, my heroines were always petite, slim girls because I believed that they were more deserving of the things I gave them in stories. The way this is all phrased is so negative, and so unsettling that Fairy thinks she’s gigantic, and that CC thought it would be a good way to set up a rivalry between the two girls. Plus the body-shaming is not a good look, and the ‘compliment’ Mme D paid Fairy is the kind of ‘compliment’ that family members used to give me when they thought I was getting too big. That entire paragraph is a mess.

Also, the day a woman eats something without the whole world commenting on it is the day I drop dead of shock.

Mme D tries to read Fairy’s leaves, sees nothing, then reads Jace’s and says this:

“I see violence in your future, a great deal of blood shed by you and others. You’ll fall in love with the wrong person. Also, you have an enemy.”

Which, L O FUCKING L. Gee, I wonder who this ‘wrong person’ is going to be.

Jace and Mme D are convinced that Fairy’s memories are being blocked, and therefore determined to help ‘unblock’ them. She uses tarot cards, and it’s all a heavy-handed way of Mme D telling Fairy her mother was a Shadowhunter:

“Jocelyn was what she was,” said Dorothea. “But in her past she’d been like you. A Shadowhunter. One of the Clave.”
“No,” Clary whispered.

This is me, being totally shocked at this revelation:

Fairy are you serious? All signs were pointing to this and you’re surprised? GET OUT OF HERE.

Anyway, apparently being a Shadowhunter on the run is a bad thing, and the house that Fairy and her mom lived in is enchanted to be a ‘hideout’ for Shadowhunters hiding from the Clave. Jace is VERY UPSET about this.

It also turns out Mme D has a portal into the downworld (that place where all the demons hang out) into her house, and Fairy’s mom was using it as an escape hatch in case she ever needed to get out.

like this?

She didn’t take the escape that night because Fairy wasn’t with her, and she’s understandably upset.

But then she just fucking decides to barrel through the door without anyone and the chapter ends.

You guys, I gotta tell you, Fairy is the dumbest heroine I’ve ever met. Like, how she isn’t dead already is astounding.