City of Ashes, Chapter 4: I had to look up Dane Cook for this recap, so you're welcome.

You guys. YOU GUYS. I finished my undergraduate degree. From here on end I can read and write whatever I want and not feel guilty about it at all!

[nervously hides Grad School applications]

SO. I had said previously I would be going back to updating City of Ashes on the blog. The reason? I think they were funnier in this format. So my youtube channel will be reviews and stuff for a bit, but I’m figuring it out. Sit tight.

It’s been so long since I’ve read this book (and I’ve read so many other white male authors that CC is starting to look enticing) so I had to peek back at the last chapters but I’m caught up.

Basically, Jace is awaiting his trial by sword because he discovered that he's Voldentine's son and not Jace Wayland? Basically his parents thought they were raising their best friend's kid but they were actually raising the son of an evil mass murderer.

it's been 84 years and I can still hear the musical cue after I read this

The chapter opens with a charming description of expired food in Luke’s fridge because haha he’s a bachelor and men can’t cook amirite ladies?

“Orange juice, molasses, eggs—weeks past their sell-by date, though—and something that looks kind of like lettuce.”
“Lettuce?” Clary peered over Simon’s shoulder into the fridge. “Oh. That’s some mozzarella.”

Fun fact: your eggs are probably fine past their sell-by date. Also, I hate this trope and I’m sick of reading it.

ALSO, isn’t Clary’s sibling/love of her life about to potentially get killed? This book is so bad at raising stakes and then letting them go absolutely nowhere. The end of the last chapter what Jace saying he’ll wait for a verdict that could possibly end his life, and now we’re opening with this.

Clary is the real MVP and comes to the rescue in terms of pronouncing Isabelle and Alex’s mom’s name—it is apparently ‘May-ris’.

I will, again, re-iterate my plea to authors to have fucking normal character names.

Also now the main character is going to sit and give us a recap of what just happened in the last chapter, because apparently CC doesn’t think her reader’s attention span lasts longer than three seconds.

Simon is beginning to feel very anti-Shadowhunter, I’m sure for reasons completely unrelated to his unrequited love for Fairy.

“ [...] But the Shadowhunter thing—they’re like a cult.”
“They’re not like a cult.”

I’m gonna (WEIRDLY) have to agree with Fairy here—they’re more of a different race? Genetic mutation? Regardless, you can be ‘born’ as one, and not trained into being one, which makes it not a cult.

“Sure they are, Shadownhunting is their whole lives. And they look down on everyone else. They call us mundanes. Like they’re not human beings. They’re not friends with ordinary people, they don’t go to the same places, they don’t know the same jokes, they think they’re above us.”

This book gets a lot more fun when you realise that Simon is describing Death Eaters in this section. It also gets more fun when you replace ‘Shadowhunters’ with ‘the Popular Kids’ or ‘the monarchy’.

it also gets more fun if you chug one of these to get through it

Simon tells her about the werewolf girl he met, and I’m going to pause the inevitable inner-Fairy monologue of “ugh why am I upset he TALKED to another girl ugh” for yet another episode of ‘Writing Does Not Mean Using Big Words and Convoluted Over-Explanations’:

Luke was back in the kitchen carrying a square white pizza box. He dropped it on the table and Clary reached over to pop it open. The smell of hot dough, tomato sauce, and cheese reminded her how starved she was. She tore off a slice, not waiting for Luke to slide a plate across the table to her.

Let’s make this less complicated, shall we?

Luke came back into the kitchen carrying the pizza. He dropped it down onto the table and Clary inhaled, suddenly realising how hungry she was. She grabbed a slice without waiting for a plate and took a huge bite.

Personally, I would cut this whole thing completely and replace it with “Luke had re-entered and they all began eating the pizza he bought for them” or something, but I don’t need the author to tell me the exact components that go into making a fucking pizza. Also, you don’t ‘tear’ off pizza slices, that is literally why they’re pre-cut.

Sidenote, I can’t wait for a heroine that eats three square meals a day and is like, “Yeah, I’m pretty upset, but I’m starving let’s go eat some food.”

Better yet, let’s stop talking about eating in novels because it is so. fucking. boring.

[Simon] took a third piece of pizza. It was truly amazing, Clary thought, how much teenage boys were able to eat without ever gaining any weight or making themselves sick.

First of all, yawn, that’s a boring joke. Second of all, STOP TALKING ABOUT THEM EATING. I REALLY DON’T NEED TO KNOW.

They keep discussing the meeting between Maryse, Luke, Clary, and Jace. Remember that we found out Luke was a Shadowhunter before he became a werewolf, but was banished from the clave. Which should be super interesting but instead we’re treated to dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone who hasn’t heard a joke not told by Dane Cook in twenty years:

“There’s nothing wild about me. I’m stolid. Middle-aged.”
“Except that once a month you turn into a wolf and go tearing around slaughtering things,” Clary said.
“It could be worse,” Luke said. “Men my age have been known to purchase expensive sports cars and sleep with supermodels.”

this was a dark time in pop culture.

Also, because of a kosher joke, I know that Simon is Jewish now. Just throwing that out there as info.

Fairy broaches the topic of getting some Shadowhunter marks? Runes? Whatever they are, and Simon reacts like she just told him she’s having six illegitimate children with separate fathers, naturally, because Simon is the worst and hates Fairy doing anything on her own that has anything to do with Jace,

Fairy gets gifted with her mother’s old wand stele:

“It’s an old model, of course, almost twenty years out of date. They may have refined the designs since.”

Is this a used car or a conductor of powerful ancient magic because I’m confused.

We cut abruptly to Jace waking up after having a nightmare that looked a lot like a repressed abusive memory, but what do we care about that when there’s jokes about hickeys to be made!

“You have something on your neck,” he observed.
Alec’s hand flew to his throat. “What?”
“Looks like a bite mark,” said Jace. “What have you been doing all day, anyway?”

MAGNUS. But whatever. Moving on.

Alec and Jace walk to the library together, still just recapping what has happened in the first three chapters, just in case we had forgotten again even after Fairy and Simon went over it. They have a fight over Jace not telling him he was Voldentine's son, which... kinda unfair. But it gives us this gem of a line:

But Jace was already gone, leaving Alec’s distress behind.

I’m just imagining an anthropomorphic version of distress running after Alec and Jace like ‘you guys! Wait for me!’

Jace reaches the library and there’s an older woman in a chair, who turns out to be the Inquisitor, and she's here to be creepy and make it so the plot goes absolutely nowhere.

The Inquisitor moved toward Jace like drifting gray smoke.

Okay, seriously imagine someone moving like this and try not to laugh at it.

Jace decides to snark his way through an interrogation that is literally deciding if he will die or not because, why not, he’s a dumb teenager.

“My name is Jace,” he said. “Not boy. Jace Wayland.”
“You have no right to the name of Wayland,” she said. “You are Jonathan Morgenstern. To claim the name of Wayland makes you a liar. Just like your father.”
“Actually,” said Jace. “I prefer to think that I’m a liar in a way that’s uniquely my own.”

LOOK. I can’t say I wouldn’t be just as snarky in this kind of situation, but I feel like I might try and tone it down if I was about to die.

The interrogation continues, and, lucky us, there’s another heavy-handed bird metaphor! We love those!

“Do you know about the cuckoo bird? [ ... ] You see, cuckoos are parasites. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests. When the egg hatches, the baby cuckoo pushes the other baby birds out of the nest.”

So... this analogy would work a lot better if Jace had tried to murder Isabelle or Alec at all, but instead he’s been nothing but an upstanding member of the family.

The Inquisitor endures some more backtalk (honestly just imagine any snarky character talking with an authority figure and you’ll have it) while she compares him to Voldentine. Then she decides to ship him off to ‘the prisons of the Silent City’, wherever that is.

Jace could only stare. [ ... ] The prison cells were at the very lowest level of the City, [ ... ] The cells were reserved for the worst of criminals: vampires gone rogue, warlocks who broke the Covenant Law, Shadowhunters who spilled each other’s blood. Jace was none of those things.

Weeeird, almost like another story that had an inquisitor that liked to threaten to send people to a certain high security prison for petty crimes because of the fact that they were a terrible human.

hem hem

ALSO:

Her smile was like a grinning skull’s.

That might be because... our skull... has teeth... which is what.... a smile is made of...

Because CC felt this chapter wasn’t long enough, we’re returning to Luke’s kitchen, where someone has just knocked on the door. It turns out to be Maia.

“I wanted you to meet each other because Maia’s going to be working around the bookshop for the next few weeks.”

Am I reading a novel or a bad fanfiction library AU?

Simon offhandedly calls Fairy his girlfriend, and she doesn’t contradict him, even when Luke asks afterwards. You guys, I’m so fucking confused about the love quadrangles in this book.

Simon stays over, and the chapter ends with Fairy and Simon about to go makeout in bed? I’m so confused! When did this happen? WHAT IS GOING ON?

I guess because Jace is conveniently in prison then Simon is the boyfriend du jour, but I’m sure this isn’t over yet. I’m just glad Simon isn’t related to her.

As far as I know.

That's all for today folks! I'll see you next week with Divergent!

- C