Chapter 10 of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones: I'm really sick right now so cut me some slack.

First, I’d like to apologise for being such a level 10 butt and not updating for two whole weeks, because apparently I got super busy and couldn’t deal with it. So, yeah, my bad!

I last left this book on an intolerable cliffhanger, obviously, since I didn’t think about this story the whole two weeks, which is exactly what you want as a writer. We found out that Valentine (Voldy) was married to Fairy’s mom, which... I guess is something I didn’t see coming. But the thing is, she never dropped any hints that this was a possibility to the reader the whole time, so it’s not really a big reveal if she just held all the cards under the table and was like ‘nothing to see here! Move along!’ until she decided she was ready. Part of the fun of reading is guessing what’s behind the cards.

Hodge raised his hands wearily. “Children—”
“I’m not a child.” Clary spun away from the desk.

Ah, the wonderful “I’m not a little girl anymore omg!!!11!!” line, slotted in to make all the teenagers reading this novel feel older. I get it, I definitely felt like an adult at 15, but man is it weird to read this as an actual adult, because... yes you are, Fairy.

Poor Hodge is apparently banished from “The Glass City” and can never return since he didn’t leave Valentine when he decided he wanted to kill all the muggles in the world, and he’s all, “Fairy, I didn’t know your mom who kind of had the same last name but not really could possibly have been the same Jocelyn who was married to the leader of one of the biggest uprisings in my history! Cut me some slack, okay! I’m Dumbledore and I’ll tell you exactly what you need to hear when I want the reader to hear it!”

"No one would wish for Valentine’s return.” He shook his head again. “When I sent for the Brothers of the Bone City this morning, I had no idea just what news we would have for them,” he said. “When the Clave finds out Valentine may have returned, that he is seeking the Cup, there will be an uproar. I can only hope it does not disrupt the Accords.”

Guess what, I only understand what two of those words mean because the author has not taken this perfect moment to inform Fairy (and therefore us) what they are. I don’t know why Fairy isn’t asking more questions here, but I’m guessing it’s because this was fanfiction and therefore those reading it would have been familiar with the Harry Potter universe, but it’s really frustrating not knowing what’s going on and whether or not I should care.

It turns out Fairy’s mom is a little dumb, too, and hid the cup, which can create new Shadowhunters easily, herself from the Clave and Valentine, because fuck all you men.

Isabelle comes in and announces take-out Chinese food for dinner, which, wow bring me some, and she calls Jace and Hodge terrible liars for some silly, teasing reason.

So of course Fairy takes it upon herself to make it awkward and super serious because ROMANCE YOU GUYS:

Isabelle was looking after Jace and Hodge, twisting the spoon in her scarred, pale fingers. Clary said, “Is he really?”
Isabelle didn’t look at her. “Is who really what?”
“Jace. Is he really a terrible liar?”
Now Isabelle did turn her eyes on Clary, and they were large and dark and unexpectedly thoughtful. “He’s not a liar at all. Not about important things. He’ll tell you horrible truths, but he won’t lie.” She paused before she added quietly, “That’s why it’s generally better not to ask him anything unless you know you can stand to hear the answer.”

Dun dun DUN. I don’t know how eyes can be ‘unexpectedly’ thoughtful, which kinda makes it sound like Fairy was expecting her to be a vapid bitch who never thinks of anything below the surface of how to seduce every male in her vicinity.

I bet this is a wonderful ‘clue’ to Fairy asking Jace who he’s fallen in ~luv~ with and him being ~omg unable to tell a lie he luvs her~.

she sat and looked at her glistening plate of noodles, toyed with her fork, and tried not to look at Simon, who was staring at Isabelle with a expression more glazed than the General Tso’s Duckling.

Why are your noodles glistening. Why are you calling it ‘duckling’, because I think it’s usually adult duck (this could be an American vs Canadian thing because I’ve never actually eaten General Tso’s anything, as far as I know).

But, you know, bask in that sentence, because it made me chuckle.

They tell Isabelle about Valentine and Fairy’s mom and she says this:

“Well, I think it’s kind of romantic,” said Isabelle, sucking tapioca pearls through an enormous pink straw.

Please let that be sarcastic, please let that be sarcastic....

Also, I don’t know why they suddenly have bubble tea but damn that Chinese food place delivers everything.

“Isabelle,” said Hodge patiently, “this is the man who rained down destruction on Idris the like of which it had never seen, who set Shadowhunter against Downworlder and made the streets of the Glass City run with blood.”
“That’s sort of hot,” Isabelle argued, “that evil thing.”

Basically, Valentine has decided he wants to build a gigantic fucking child army and kill as many children as possible while he does it (not on purpose, just as a means to an end, of course).

“Valentine was insane,” he said. “Brilliant, but insane. He cared about nothing but killing demons and Downworlders. Nothing but making the world pure. He would have sacrificed his own son for the cause and could not understand how anyone else would not.”
“He had a son?” said Alec.
“I was speaking figuratively,” said Hodge, reaching for his handkerchief. He used it to mop his forehead before returning it to his pocket. His hand, Clary saw, was trembling slightly. 

So... he definitely had a son right. Like, Fairy has a brother out there somewhere possibly going all Scott Evil on us.

They don’t know where to find Fairy’s mother, and Jace is all “but I want to help!!!!!” and Hodge is like, “you’re 15 and not Harry Potter so... no.” And then they propose using Fairy’s memories to find her mom? Look, I am so lost at this point:

“Here.” Jace leaned forward and touched his fingers to the side of her temple, so
gently that a flush crept up her face. “Everything we need to know is locked up in your head, under those pretty red curls.”
Clary reached up to touch her hair protectively. “I don’t think—”
“So what are you going to do?” Simon asked sharply. “Cut her head open to get at it?”

I love how it says “gently”, like if she hadn’t put that descriptor there we’d have imagined him slamming his fist into the side of her temple.

Apparently “The Silent Brothers” are terrifying and creepy and they mutilate themselves so they can read minds, which is pretty cool, I will not lie, so points to you for that, CC.

Jace leaned across the table, so close she could see the darker amber flecks in his light eyes.

Anyone else imaging amber with like, fossilized poop in it or is that just me?

Simon is just trying to be her best friend again and is like, “MAYBE DON’T HAND HER OVER TO CREEPY MIND READER PEOPLE” but Isabelle is like “wow your time is so up here let me feel your bicep while I show you out” and of course we have to let Fairy get ‘confused’ over this.

If there was one thing she was learning from all this, it was how easy it was to lose everything you had always thought you’d have forever.

Did you seriously think you’d ‘have’ Simon forever? You showed no romantic interest in him, what did you expect to do with him? Keep him as a pet when you got a boyfriend?

Then, without even the slightest bit of anything, we get transported into an italics dream, with some very hard to decipher clues, wherein Fairy is at a fancy party and everyone is not what they seem~:

“You see someone more interesting than me?” asked Simon. In the dream he was mysteriously an expert dancer. He steered her through the crowd as if she were a leaf caught in a river current

Ah, yes, the dance of the leaf caught in the river current:

Then suddenly Simon is Jace, and he’s all amber and gold eyes and thin white shirts and are you understanding how devastatingly handsome he is yet you guys.

Fairy asks where Simon just disappeared to and Jace ‘mysteriously’ responds with:

“This place is for the living[”] 

Then she wakes up.

Jace has woken her up at 5 am to meet Jeremiah, the Silent Brother that’s gonna see into her mind, and she’s like “well I can’t let him see me in pyjamas so get out”.

Guess what time it is, guys? It's time to listen to the narrator compare herself disparagingly to another female character in the novel so we feel closer to her!

If only her thin freckled legs looked more like Isabelle’s lanky smooth limbs.

They get to the library and clearly the household got the memo that the creepy Silent Brothers were here because all of the lights are turned off and the only thing lighting the whole room is like, thin daylight. Which, you know, that’s exactly how to reassure a teenage protagonist that you’re about to ask to have her mind ‘broken’ into.

This is quite interesting, honestly. I think this is a good moment for Fairy’s character development as the protagonist—she has to do something she is not very fond of (revealing her secrets to others, from what I’ve gathered), in order to find and save her mother.

The Silent Brothers are very much like the dementors from the Harry Potter series, except that they communicate through projecting thoughts into others’ brains, which is a bit more interesting I suppose. But they have the ‘neutrality’ that is talked about in the books—they don’t care for either side, they just exist for themselves.

“It seems to me,” Clary said with an edge to her voice, “that no one the Clave thinks is dead is ever actually dead. Maybe they should invest in dental records.”

Fairy, do I seriously need to explain to you how dental records work or are you really that stupid.

With a quick gesture he raised his hands and drew the hood back from his face.
Forgetting Jace, Clary fought the urge to cry out. The archivist’s head was bald, smooth and white as an egg, darkly indented where his eyes had once been. They were gone now. His lips were crisscrossed with a pattern of dark lines that resembled surgical stitches. She understood now what Isabelle had meant by mutilation.

I can’t help but think of that Buffy villain:

if this episode didn't terrify you don't even talk to me

And honestly, I mean, what a yawn. Obviously if I met this person in a dark alley I would be terrified out of my mind, but as it stands.... this is such a half-assed attempt at being scary to me, when really I’m just picturing Jack Skellington.

Trying to get at her memories makes Fairy clench her fists so hard that she draws blood in her palms, which, ow, and then the Silent Brother is all, “someone put a spell on you so now you have to come to that super secret city we don’t let just anyone come into. If I sound bored it’s because I feel like this scene didn’t have to happen and we could’ve just had you come to the Bone City right away instead of wasting everyone’s time with this scene that adds nothing to the plot except for to have Jace become ‘worried’ about you’

Seriously, that’s the only reason I can think to have this scene happen—the only thing of note that happens here that couldn’t have just happened in the Bone City and therefore making this unbearably long chapter a thousand times shorter is that Jace has to worry about how she’s reacting to having her mind read and volunteer to go with her—which, didn’t he not really care about her a few chapters ago? I have been given no reason for this sudden turn in emotion—but whatever, don’t tell your readers anything, that’s cool.

Leaving the Institute was like climbing into a wet, hot canvas bag. Humid air pressed down on the city, turning the air to grimy soup.

What a way with words—I’m sure we’re all familiar with the feeling of being in a wet, hot canvas bag, since we’ve all been kidnapped, right?

She leaves Simon alone again even though she’s definitely harbouring secret love for him, guys, this love triangle will happen if it’s the death of us, and she’s all “Simon!”

“No, I’m Jace,” said Jace patiently. “Simon is the weaselly little one with the bad haircut and dismal fashion sense.”

Okay, Draco, calm yourself. Seriously, who the hell talks like this? Moreover, Simon is supposed to be Fairy’s best friend—why the hell would she be attracted to someone that is constantly putting him down?

Sidenote: Weaselly, Weasley.....

Clary wondered if perhaps Isabelle was smarter than Jace gave her credit for. Maybe she would realize what an amazing guy Simon was: how funny, how smart, how cool. Maybe they’d start dating. The idea filled her with a nameless horror.

Oh, don’t worry, Fairy, none of the girls in this novel are smarter than you.

The Silent Brother turns up in an actual fucking horse-drawn carriage, and it’s described as wonderfully as you’d imagine:

[T]he car looked like Cinderella’s carriage, except instead of being pink and gold
and blue like an Easter egg, it was black as velvet, its windows darkly tinted. The wheels were black, the leather trimmings all black. On the black metal driver’s bench sat Brother Jeremiah, holding a set of reins in his gloved hands. His face was hidden beneath the cowl of his parchment-colored robe. On the other end of the reins were two horses, black as smoke, snarling and pawing at the sky.

What colour was it, again? I missed it.

I don’t know whether or not to be thankful that she didn’t try and force sixty different words for the colour ‘black’ into that paragraph, or be upset that she didn’t just mash it down into one easy sentence. And, again, what is her deal with not knowing what colour smoke is? When I think of smoke, I think of grey, maybe a dark one, definitely not black. In fact, when someone wants to describe black smoke, they need to put the colour in front of it since most people will default to thinking the colour that I just described.

Editing could have saved this book.

“Then you’ll see the world as it is—infinite,” said Jace with a dry smile.
“Don’t quote Blake at me.”
The smile turned less dry. “I didn’t think you’d recognize it. You don’t strike me as someone who reads a lot of poetry.”
“Everyone knows that quote because of the Doors.”

I love me some Blake, honestly, I do. And I love The Doors' lyrics a whole lot, but do you see how pointless this dialogue is? This is a piece of dialogue that I could copy and paste into any point in the novel where there is a conversation between Fairy and Jace, and it wouldn’t make a damn difference, because it adds nothing to the plot.

Also, it’s really interesting how creating female characters has shifted and changed throughout the years (as far as my perception of it goes); a couple decades ago, writing about a female character as young as Clary is that recognises the music of The Doors and actively listens to it would have qualified as an interesting character trait—before the internet was around, getting music was really up to digging through CD bins and listening to cassette tapes from your parents’ collections—but now it’s just unbearably stale. I want a female protagonist that listens to One Direction and Kelly Clarkson unabashedly, and shrugs whenever someone asks her about The Clash or Nirvana, and then goes back to dancing around her room to fun, upbeat pop music and it isn’t viewed as a bad thing. After all, it’s so out of place in novels where there’s a whole different world bubbling under the protagonist’s feet—we’re trying to save the universe, here, and you’re telling me about your love for music acts that aren’t ‘in the mainstream’? Go away.

Fairy then assumes that because he hasn’t heard of The Doors, he just doesn’t listen to music in general, which is exactly like assuming if someone hasn’t tried pizza, they’ve never eaten food in their lives.

They start talking about his dead dad, which is super romantic, let me tell you, and she notices that he’s a bit vengeful about the whole thing.

Jace looked down at his hands. They were slim and careful hands, the hands of an artist, not a warrior. The ring she had noticed earlier flashed on his finger. She would have thought there would have been something feminine about a boy wearing a ring, but there wasn’t. The ring itself was solid and heavy-looking, made of a dark burned looking silver with a pattern of stars around the band. The letter W was carved into it.

I’m supposed to believe that someone who spends their whole life training to fight demons has slim and soft hands? If anything, he’s wearing that ring because it’ll do a hell of a lot of damage when he needs to punch someone. Also, that line about expecting to find a man wearing a ring to be feminine...? Most of the men I know actually wear more jewelry than me, not that that has anything to do with their gender or mine.

Let’s try a quick editing exercise with that paragraph, though, and see if I can make it move along quicker:

Jace looked down at his hands. Clary noticed a heavy-looking ring of burnished silver with a star-pattern around the band and the letter W carved into it on them.

Ta-da! All the (relevant, I guess) info and none of the gender normative and prosey bullshit!

“I was ten,” Jace said. She turned to look at him. He was without expression. It
always seemed like some color drained out of him when he talked about his father.

Considering he’s talking about watching his parents being murdered, I’m really not shocked.

"He told me to hide, so I hid. Under the stairs. I saw those men come in. They had others with them. Not men. Forsaken. They overpowered my father and cut his throat. The blood ran across the floor. It soaked my shoes. I didn’t move.”

Aside from the fact that blood running across his shoes while he’s hidden under the stairs kind of taking a stretch of imagination, does anyone else feel this sounds robotic? Here’s a moment where you could definitely interject with a character’s nervous tics—did he clench his jaw, did he defiantly stare at her or look away in thought, did he do anything that showed any emotion outside of the weird robotic sentiment you are portraying?

Jace explains that demons come from the millions of other universes that exist, and they’re the only ones who can pass through the boundaries between all of them, so the Shadowhunters can’t really stop them from coming in or out, they can only contain them in this world, and try to stop them. But because of the nature of the job, a lot of them die and there are more demons than ever, or something.

“Aren’t you, uh …” Clary searched for the right word. “Reproducing?”
Jace burst out laughing just as the carriage made a sudden, sharp left turn. He braced himself, but Clary was thrown against him. He caught her, hands holding her lightly but firmly away from him. She felt the cool impress of his ring like a sliver of ice against her sweaty skin. “Sure,” he said. “We love reproducing. It’s one of our favorite things.”

In what world is that attractive?

They get to Bone City, which is in a graveyard (quelle surprise).

He jumped down from the carriage. Clary slid to the edge of her seat, dangling her legs. It was a long drop to the cobblestones. She jumped. The impact stung her feet, but she didn’t fall. She swung around in triumph to find Jace watching her. “I would have helped you down,” he said.

IS THIS CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT? IS THIS WHAT PASSES FOR IT NOW? Oh my God congratulations she jumped down from the top of a carriage without a man’s help she’s so amazing?

They travel through a tunnel into the Silent City, and while it’s okay to have a bit of exposition to set the scene, trust me when I say this sentence sums up the whole passage (that lasts like 2 pages by the way) easily:

The marble itself was a pure, ashy ivory, hard and polished-looking, inset in places with narrow strips of onyx, jasper, and jade.

That’s it, that’s the whole city, over and over and over again.

She goes in, and consents to a huge mind invasion by a whole bunch of creepy Jack Skellingtons, which, if you’re into that sort of thing, sure.

Again, her ‘memories’ are really boring, and they don’t seem to be anything other than pretty images meant to make me feel ominous about the future, so I won’t bother you guys with them. She sees one name in her dream, Magnus Bane, and then the Silent Brothers are like, “We actually can’t get past that mind block without killing you, we just wasted everyone’s fucking time again, lol. Pce out txt u l8r.”

SERIOUSLY? This chapter was fucking TWENTY THREE PAGES LONG AND YOU COULD HAVE EASILY CUT IT IN HALF. I get that it’s a novel, and needs to be a certain length, but you wanna know what happened in this chapter?:

• The aftermath of Fairy finding out her mother was married to Valentine
• Fairy meeting a Silent Brother and discovering her mind has a block in it to prevent her from remembering things, and that it requires more than one Silent Brother to undo.
• All of the Silent Brothers at the Bone City discovering they can’t undo this block without killing her and telling her to seek the person who placed it there.
• That’s it
• 
  
• 
  
• That’s all that happened by way of plot
• 
  
• 
  
• I want to kill myself
• 
  
• Ps the rest of it was long-winded descriptions and ‘banter’ between Fairy and Jace

Anyway, I’d like to apologise again for being a butt, but here you go—hopefully the longest chapter in the whole book is finally done!