This chapter opens with Jace insulting a cab driver, then getting on the phone and ‘barking’ orders at Alec, telling him to meet them for breakfast in the rudest way possible.  Because…sexy?  I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’m supposed to root for a guy that’s intentionally as rude as possible to everyone he meets, no matter how incidental.

They stop at a hole-in-the-wall for breakfast, and Alec shows up.  Alec mentions that Isabelle and Simon are not far behind him.

“Simon? Where did he come from?” Jace asked.

“He showed up first thing this morning. Couldn’t stay away from Izzy, I guess. Pathetic.”  Alec sounded amused. Clary wanted to kick him.

I’m with Clary on this one, though I think for different reasons.  See, I want to kick him (and the book) for assuming that romantic interest is the only thing bringing Simon back.  There are a million reasons Simon might have come back, such as the fact that these weirdos are hiding his best friend from him, or that Jocelyn and Luke (two people Simon knows well and is friendly with) are missing and he wants to find them, or maybe it’s as simple as the fact that he just learned fairies exist and how the fuck are you supposed to quietly go back to band practice after that?  Isabelle would be far down on my list of assumptions for why he came back.

The restaurant is guarded by an ‘ifrit,’ which Jace explains is a half-demon like a warlock, but without the ability to cast magic.  So…wait, I thought the reason they had all that prejudice against doing magic was because the ability came from demons.  They don’t have any issue with magic itself, just with humans who are able to produce magic.  Therefore, it’s the demon blood that’s ‘dirty.’  But here they’re fine with half-demons, as long as they can’t do magic?  What is the source of the magic-doing-hate in this book?  Every time it comes up, it makes less and less sense.

This place serves all sorts of magical creatures, as demonstrated by the weird shit on the menu.  I would count this as a nice world-building point, except the book dwells on it for so long that it becomes clear the author wants a pat on the back for coming up with a ‘fried bat sandwich.’

Alec’s crush on Jace isn’t just in my mind, it’s a real thing.  Kudos for including a homosexual crush, book.  Double-points for treating it the same as any other unrequited crush, rather than focusing on the ‘gay’ part.  I am honestly delighted at this development.  I really hope the book doesn’t screw it up somehow.

He reached across the table and flipped Clary’s menu over. “Human food is on the back.”

She perused the perfectly ordinary menu selections with a feeling of stupefaction. It was all too much. “They have smoothies here?”

So, Clary is perfectly fine with spending pages (pages, I tell you) talking about fairy food, but smoothies are just too strange to handle?

Banter, banter, banter.  Oi.  It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t shoehorned in at every opportunity, regardless of any plot-related talk that might be more relevant.  It’s like the author things that ‘witty sarcasm and irreverence’ should be every single character’s default setting, and discussing important matters in a mature way is for squares.

And then we get some truly disgusting fantastical racism. 

“So they’re good enough to let live, good enough to make your food for you, good enough to flirt with—but not really good enough? I mean, not as good as people.”

Isabelle and Alec looked at her as if she were speaking Urdu. “Different from people,” said Alec finally.

Hm, yes, where have we heard this kind of an argument before?  ‘Equal but separate’?  Good enough to be servile, but not ‘really’ a person?  Suitable for a fling, but not if someone from ‘real’ society might see you?

It gets worse, because then they go on talk about which of these ‘not people’ they are allowed to kill.  Yeah, because it really works in your favor as an author to draw that kind of parallel and then talk about killing some of them if they don’t happen to be useful to the ‘real’ people.

And then they start ranking fairies, humans, and hunters, in that order.

“Better than mundanes?” said Simon.

“No,” Isabelle said decidedly. “You could turn a mundane into a Shadowhunter. I mean, we came from mundanes. But you could never turn a Downworlder into one of the Clave. They can’t withstand the runes.”

That’s right.  A person’s worth is being equated to how likely it is that they might end up as one of the top tier people.  No one can be worthy or deserving or even ‘useful’ in their own right or by stint of their own skills and personality and deeds.  No, it’s all based on whether or not they might turn into one of these precious fucking shadowhunters.  And we still don’t have a good reason for why these hunters are so damn great in the first place, except “the author said so.”

“It’s not one-way,” he said. “We may not always like Downworlders, but they don’t always like us, either.”

Gee, I wonder why?  Couldn’t possibly be because you treat them like shit and have to have a reason to allow them to live.  No, hating the Wonderous and Marvelous Shadowhunters for a thing like that would be just silly!

“Yes, but nobody cares what you [Simon] know.” Jace examined a fry before biting into it. “I enjoy the company of certain Downworlders at certain times and places. But we don’t really get invited to the same parties.”

This is disgusting and I hate everyone involved in this scene.  Seriously, seriously disgusting.  There are no words for how bad this is. 

I think the worst, and most telling, part of all of this is that Clary just sits there.  She doesn’t say a word, she doesn’t think a word, she just allows all this talk to go on around her.  Since Clary is supposed to be the author/reader stand-in, it leaves the uncomfortable conclusion that the book doesn’t see any of this as any sort of problem.  It’s just the way things are, as if casual racism is what it is, and there’s no point making a comment about it. 

Well, since there’s no point in commenting on everyone at that diner table being a horrible person, the narration just moves on like it never happened.  Instead we start talking about how Isabelle just happened to get an invitation from that demon back in chapter one, inviting her to the home of Magnus Bane, since it seems Magnus is throwing a huge party.  The demon had a big stack of them and was handing them out.  Jee, would have been nice to see that before right now.  How convenient that as soon as they need to find Magnus, this little plot device just shows up, drops right into their laps, so that they don’t have to put in any actual effort and figure things out on their own.

They have a whole day to kill before the party, so they split up into different groups to do what people do, and Clary finds herself alone, bored, and in the library.  She picks up a book that Hodge had been reading, and a pictures falls out.  It’s a photo of the Order– I mean, of the Circle, back when they were all younger.  Jocelyn is in it, standing with Valentine. 

She’d never thought of her mother being involved with anyone other than her father, since Jocelyn had never dated or seemed interested in romance. She wasn’t like most single mothers, who trolled PTA meetings for likely-looking dads, or Simon’s mom, who was always checking her profile on JDate.

Um…right.  Because the ultimate goal of every single woman everywhere is to find a man so that she won’t be single anymore.  The only reason a woman wouldn’t act like that is if she is somehow more special and important than all the rest of the world, because it’s just so hard for women to overcome that man-needing weakness they all share.  Uhg.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to want to date, because we’re fundamentally social creatures.  Seeing romantic attachment is not a bad thing.  It’s the blanket statement about how ‘most’ single mothers go about this that really grinds me.  It presents it in a pathetic light, as if saying that single mothers, by stint of being old, have to ‘troll’ in order to find dates.  It’s this weird mix of saying that these women are so pathetic that they have to find a man, but then on top of that they’re extra pathetic and have to look for men in these crap-tastic ways.  And of course, Clary’s mom, being non-pathetic, is above all that.

Hodge shows up and tries to explain about why the Circle formed.

“The Accords have never had the support of the whole Clave. The more venerable families, especially, cling to the old times, when Downworlders were for killing. Not just out of hatred but because it made them feel safer. It is easier to confront a threat as a mass, a group, not individuals who must be evaluated one by one…and most of us knew someone who had been injured or killed by a Downworlder. There is nothing,” he added, “quite like the moral absolutism of the young. It’s easy, as a child, to believe in good and evil, in light and dark. Valentine never lost that— neither his destructive idealism nor his passionate loathing of anything he considered ‘nonhuman.’”

So, racism is wrong when the end result is killing, but everything short of that is okay?  No, really, that’s what I’m getting from this passage, when coupled with the earlier scene at the diner.  There is no textual evidence that this book sees a problem with segregationist racism, just with the sort that ends in genocide.  It’s like the thing in an earlier chapter, where they thought that the only part bad part of a child army was that a bunch of kids would die in the army-making process.  It’s like this book just can’t process the thought that there is bad shit in this world that doesn’t end in ‘death.’  Or even that bad things that aren’t the ‘worst’ bad thing can still be bad things.

“What was so great about Idris?” Clary asked, hearing the grumpiness in her own voice.

“It was,” Hodge began, and corrected himself, “it is, home—for the Nephilim, where they can be their true selves, a place where there is no need for hiding or glamour.”

Eh?  Since when have any of these guys needed to change their appearance to hide?  They run around in plain sight all the time.  They don’t even do anything all that special or different from normal humans, except hunt demons.  So, what, is Idris just a 24/7 killing ground?

Hodge gives her a sleeping potion, since she mentioned not being able to nap in spite of being tired.  She goes back to her room and drops it when she sees Jace going through her sketchbook.

So, now we can add ‘thief’ and ‘complete disregard for personal space and property’ to the list of things that make this guy ‘sexy.’  Gag.

Clary, despite shrieking when she saw him looking at it, immediately calms down and seems only mildly put out about the matter.  Then sits down to chat ‘wittily’ with him as if it’s no big thing.

“You could try not being charming all the time,” Clary said. “It might be a relief for everyone.”

I’d settle for seeing him begin to be charming.

Jace offers to tell her a bedtime story to put her to sleep, and ends up telling her a story about how he got a falcon when he was a boy and had to train it.  Turns out his father was a shithead as well and gave him a wild falcon instead of a domestic one, but didn’t tell him.  Also, this author knows diddly squat about how to train a hunting falcon.  It’s like she looked up the process on wiki and thought “Hoods?  No, that’s mean.  Jace will be super awesome and leave the hood off, and somehow that will make things better.  Because obviously those people who do this for a living don’t know jack.”

The story ends when the father kills the bird, because Jace made it too tame, because his father is an idiot as well as an asshole.  A tame falcon can still be trained to hunt.  They don’t have to be ‘wild’ in order to do a job that they are trained to do.  Anyway, apparently Jace learned “that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.” 

Nope, sorry book.  You will not convince me that Jace’s behavior is somehow justified because he’s got a broken backstory.  Not happening.  Child abuse (Clary rightly identifies this story as child abuse) is a horrible thing, but there comes a point at which a person has to take responsibility for their own actions and realize that they are doing harm.  On top of that, the story doesn’t even apply to his jerkish behavior, because there is a world of difference between ‘broken by love’ and ‘just don’t insult everyone you meet at the drop of a hat.’

Clary tries to talk him out of his ‘love just hurts you’ mindset, and while I agree with the sentiment, it’s just such a trite execution.  Especially since we’ve seen this character a million times before.

Later that day, Isabelle comes to wake Clary up.  She’s all dressed up for the party and pretty, so Clary hates her.  No, really.

She looked like a moon goddess. Clary hated her.

Could this book be any more blatant with the girl-on-girl hate?

Isabelle then decides to play dress up with Clary, since Clary doesn’t have any party-suitable clothes.  Naturally, when Isabelle gets made up and pretty, we’re supposed to hate her.  When Isabelle makes up Clary, it’s fine, because Clary is the main character and deserves to be beautified.

Then they talk about how Alec is gay, and I’m…ambivalent.  It’s not a good scene, but it’s not a bad one.  Seems the hunter attitudes towards gays are pretty on par with our society, and their parents would flip out if they knew, but Isabelle is okay with it.  Alright, I’m on board.  Until…this line.

“I love my brother,” said Isabelle. “I’d do anything for him. But there’s nothing I can do.”

Do?  About what?  Is she saying that she would turn him straight if she could figure out how?  Or is she saying that she wishes she could do something about their parents’ inevitable reaction?  It could easily go either way, and since Clary drops the subject in favor of makeup and hairdos, we’ll never know what she meant.

They go out to meet with the boys.

Even half in demon hunter clothes, Clary thought, he [Simon] looked like the sort of boy who’d come over to your house to pick you up for a date and be polite to your parents and nice to your pets.

Jace, on the other hand, looked like the sort of boy who’d come over to your house and burn it down for kicks.

And yet she ends up with Jace.  Tell me again why I’m supposed to care about this girl and her idiotic romance triangle?  It’s like the books is actively trying to make me hate Jace for some reason. 

Jace gives her a knife out of the blue, and they all go off to the party.