Clary, naturally, protests the idea that her mother was part of the magical KKK.  Hodge goes on to say that, basically, everyone we’ve heard about in this book so far was part of the Circle.  Jace’s father, Alec and Isabelle’s parents, Hodge, Luke, everyone.  Hodge and the two parents didn’t leave the group, they just surrendered after the group lost, so now they’re banned from actually living in Idris, which is why they are in New York.

Hodge moans about how he’ll never see something called the Glass City again, and Jace repeats their group’s motto at him.  “The Law is hard, but it is the Law.”  I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take from this.  I think this motto is supposed to be part of the plot, or at least the idea of it, since we were introduced to the idea that Jace’s group might not be fair back in Dorthea’s parlor.  It made for an interesting point there, when she admitted to hiding people from an overly-harsh set of laws.

Here?  Hodge was part of a group that tried to start a war and murder all the fairies.  For his crimes, he was merely banished.  That’s not ‘hard.’  I don’t feel sympathy for him just because he can’t go see some cool city.  That’s not ‘hard,’ that’s just Hodge being whiney.  In his case, the law is being extremely lenient, which throws sand in the face of this whole subplot.  (If it turns into a real subplot.)

Isabelle comes in to announce dinner.  She stopped trying to cook and ordered take-out Chinese.  Why, why, why is she in charge of the kitchen if she can’t cook?  Give me a reason, book.  GIVE ME A REASON.  I refuse to accept that it’s a matter of course just because she’s the only girl.

Over dinner, Isabelle and Jace sit around and make light-hearted jokes about Valentine trying to ‘woo’ Jocelyn with flesh-eating demons.  Wow, could the author get any more awkward with her forced ‘witty’ banter?  This really isn’t the place for jokes, especially not with Clary sitting right there.  And especially not since Valentine’s return means Big Uber Bad Shit is likely going to go down.  It really couldn’t be any clearer that the author’s number one concern here is to make sure that people find her characters clever.

“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.”

No.  No it’s not.  This makes no sense.  The other hunters are people she knows, people her parents know.  They are her friends and comrades and the keepers of the culture she grew up in.  And this man directly harmed all of that.  People say ‘evil is hot’ about random, fictional badies that exist apart from actual, tangible pain and suffering.  Someone who can see and be threatened by ‘that evil thing’ isn’t going to find it hot.  (Well, fine, the vast majority of people won’t find it hot.)  This shows, in painfully stark terms, the fact that the author cannot empathize with her own characters.  She cannot process events in relation to them.  She can only process them as an outside observer, a reader, and she assumes that everyone in the book would have the same reactions that the readers do.  It doesn’t work like that.

Turns out Valentine wants the Cup so he can make his own army, but only children can be made into hunters by drinking from the cup, it wouldn’t work on adults.  So…he would have to make his army, then wait a decade, and also spend a lot of time and effort training them.  He’s being awful noisy for a guy whose plan is still years and years away from fruition.  They don’t seem to understand the concept that he’s not a threat with the Cup, he’s a thread with the army.  Getting the Cup does not make him unstoppable.  It’ll force him to go underground and hide until he’s done growing his child army into a usable force.  Unless he plans to throw a bunch of 10 year-olds at the hunters.  (For that matter, it’s not very clear what powers the hunters have, except the ability to live through magic.  Even then, that’s a skill that has to be taught.  Nothing so far indicates that badassery is automatically conferred; everything we’ve seen has been a training issue.  Theoretically, he could just train up a group of ninjas to take on the hunters, no angel cup required.)

“I don’t know,” said Simon. “Turning a bunch of kids into warriors, I’ve heard of worse stuff happening. I don’t see the big deal about keeping the Cup away from him.”

I…I…I don’t even know what this is.  I hate you Simon and I hope you die an especially painful death.

Where did this idea come from, that if something isn’t the WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME EVER then it’s not that bad?  And for that matter, how can you define what is or isn’t ‘worse’ than forced child soldier?  Can you really sit there and give me a quantified answer on why A, B, or C is worse than being taken from one’s family, home, and childhood and forced into a world of pain and violence?  Some people would call a lot of things worse than that, but I bet a child soldier wouldn’t.

“Leaving out that he would inevitably use this army to launch an attack on the Clave,” Hodge said dryly, “the reason that only a few humans are selected to be turned into Nephilim is that most would never survive the transition. It takes special strength and resilience. Before they can be turned, they must be extensively tested—but Valentine would never bother with that. He would use the Cup on any child he could capture, and cull out the twenty percent who survived to be his army.”

Again: child solider = forced into a world of pain and violence.  Kidnapped.  Traumatized.  Brainwashed.  Ripped from their childhood and coerced into hurting and killing people before they can even define the concept of death. 

None of these characters care about the actual child soldiers.  Yeah, the fact that this army would be used against the Clave (btw, we still don’t have a clear answer on what they are) and that 80% of the kids would die is terrible, BUT SO IS ALL THE REST OF THIS IDEA.

They go on for a while talking about how awful it would be if all those children die, and…and I just sound like a broken record now.  I hate all of them.

Hodge decides that all the kids are kids and shouldn’t get involved, because kids.  Jace does not take that well, but I don’t care.  Mostly because his reaction is so typically teenager.  He’s not really doing anything to convince me of his maturity and ability.

Clary objects and says that Valentine is out of their hands, but what about her mother?  They argue back that they don’t know where to even start looking.  Jace interrupts and says that the answer is probably buried somewhere in Clary’s subconscious.  Um…why?  Why would Clary know where a man she’s never met might be hiding her mother?  She’s not seen anything or done anything apart from the other characters, she doesn’t have any suspicious black holes in her memory, so why is Jace so convinced that she knows where Jocelyn is?

Turns out the Silent Brothers Jace wants her to go to are mindreaders.  Simon continues to be an idiot and not understand that THE WORST THING EVER is not the only bad thing, and it’s possible to not like the thought of people reading your mind. 

“Maybe we don’t get to look for the Cup,” he said softly. “Maybe the Clave will do that. But what’s in your mind belongs to you. Someone’s hidden secrets there, secrets you can’t see. Don’t you want to know the truth about your own life?”

WHY DOES HE THINK THIS?!?!?!?!

Clary doesn’t want to go, and when Simon tells the others to stop pressuring her, they kick him out of the building.  Boy, for an organization sworn to defend humanity, they sure don’t give a fuck about humans, do they?  At every turn, they’ve dismissed those that are human (or thought human) as being worthless and pathetic, and they show actual surprise at the thought of sheltering or helping anyone who isn’t just like them. 

Assholes.

Later, Clary has another prophetic dream.  It’s pointless.  Moving on.

Apparently Clary fell asleep in the hallway and they had to move her to a bed, but she doesn’t remember any of that.  See, now, if she’d been doing crazy stuff like this from the start, then Jace’s mindreading plan would make sense.

One of the Brothers has shown up to see Clary.  She never agreed to this plan, but they went ahead with it anyway, and now she’s playing along like a good little puppet.

They meet Brother Jeremiah.  You know, he sure got there fast.  And yet for some reason we still don’t have an answer from the Head Honchos about the whole ‘your mortal enemy is back from the dead, how about some backup?’ issue.  Why such a prompt reply from these guys?  Oh, silly me, it’s because Clary’s the main character.

Jerry is creepy and talks through telepathy.  Well, that’s a very…literal interpretation of ‘silent.’  I would make a comment about vows of silence, but we don’t actually know why they don’t make sound.  (They talk just fine.  I refuse to go along with this idea that silent communication is somehow not communication.)

Clary randomly questions why Jocelyn would have the Cup, and despite being given very reasonable answers, she’s still suspicious of the real reasons because…just because.  Authorial hinting, and very awkward hinting at that.

When will authors realize that when the characters just ‘know’ things for no reason, it makes their own fingerprints blatantly obvious?  And on top of that, when will they realize that having characters figure shit out without it being handed to them by the Writer In The Sky is okay?

Apparently they want to reach memories from way back in her childhood, even though that’s not how memory works.  Just because a baby is around something, doesn’t mean the baby processed that and stored it away in their subconscious. 

Not that it matters in Clary’s case, because when Jerry tries to read her mind, he finds a block there.  Jerry can’t break the mind-blocking-spell, so she’ll have to go to the bone city and the rest of the brotherhood. 

Oh, look, she agrees to all of that immediately.  How anti-climactic.  I guess all that claptrap earlier about how she doesn’t want people reading her mind was just dropped.  Now she has no problem with a whole group of strangers reading her mind.

Clary and Jace head out, and then Clary randomly remembers that Simon exists and she’s supposed to have a romance subplot with him.  She spends a while thinking about how he’s such a great guy and wondering why she’s suddenly jealous of him and Isabelle.  It’s dull and comes out of nowhere and then we move on like it doesn’t matter.  Because it doesn’t.

Blah blah blah, not-funny banter.  Blah, blah, blah, magic car that’s really a horse-drawn carriage.  (And why is that superior to a car, again?  No, really, why?  This is the same problem I had with Harry Potter, this constant insistence that old shit is better than mundane shit, just because the cool people have it.)

Jace’s tone was sharp. “Not at all. He indulged me. He taught me everything—weapons training, demonology, arcane lore, ancient languages. He gave me anything I wanted. Horses, weapons, books, even a hunting falcon.”

Hunting falcon.  Horses.  Why are these people stuck in some poorly-informed caricature of medieval life?  Why do so many authors seem to think that old-timey shit is superior Just Because?

But weapons and books aren’t exactly what most kids want for Christmas, Clary thought

Heh.  Most kids.  Expand your mind, Clary.  Embrace the idea of bookworms with training.  (Or not, that way you’ll never see us coming.)

They talk about Jace’s dead daddy, and Clary randomly looks out the window and notices, in detail, a bunch of homeless kids.  I’m sure they won’t in any way be important later.  Nope.  Don’t mind the author, folks, she’s just setting the scene.  Then there’s some stuff about how demons are bad, all bad, no exceptions, let’s hammer in some more the fact that demons are bad, and oh, by the way?  Demons are bad.

Turns out the bone city is in a graveyard.  How original. Also, Clary fails to recognize or understand the point of a mausoleum.  They go down to a basement level where the real city is and see a bunch of arches all over the place.  Apparently, hunters are cremated, and then the ashes turned into arches, because demon hunter bones are a strong magical protection.  (Even though humans can’t ‘do’ magic because that only comes from demons.  It’s really sad when the author can’t keep track of her own damn world.)

How exhausting, Clary thought, to fight all your life and then be expected to continue that fight even when your life was over.

Can’t be any more exhausting than decomposing somewhere in a crypt.  I mean, really, it’s not like he said the dead guys have to put in any effort after their dead, or that their souls are protecting them, or anything like that.  It’s just bones. 

There’s graves and more tombs all over the place, and yet the whole thing is so sparsely described that I can’t even come close to calling it creepy.  Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t find neat, well-kept, obviously-revered cemeteries to be creepy by default.  So far it’s just a bunch of marble buildings and arches, and that’s not scary.

They reach a room where the rest of the brotherhood is already gathered, just standing there waiting for.  Because they obviously don’t have anything better to do with their time.

“Stop,” she said, and to her astonishment her voice came out firm and strong.

The rest of us are astonished, too.

After some token resistance that gets resolved in a paragraph, Clary allows them all to try reading her mind.  She comes up with a bunch of random memories that are mostly of her and her mother running around through various dark streets, and the last one is them going to see some guy named Magnus Bane.  *yawn*  We heard that name already at the start of the book.  I thought there was actually going to be something new here.

The brothers tell her the block can only be completely removed by the person who put it there, and Magnus put it there, so they have to go find them.  But since Jocelyn was talking about Magnus right before she disappeared, a half-aware protagonist would have found him already and made this entire side-trip to the not-creepy cemetery completely pointless. 

No, really, I’m kind of pissed off about this.  If she really wanted to find her mother, she should have been doing everything possible, and that means wracking her brain and following down every single thing she could remember about her mother and the last few days.  She should have tracked down Magnus, she should have visited the place they were going to stay in the country, she should have made contact with Luke while at his house.  Instead, she just sort of drifts through the plot, claiming she wants to find her mother only when it’s convenient to speak, and allowing other people around her to tell her what to do. 

She’s not a heroine.  She barely even counts as a fly on the wall.