The hospital hallway was blindingly white. After so many days living by torchlight, gaslight, and eerie witchlight, the fluorescent lighting made things look sallow and unnatural. When Clary signed herself in at the front desk, she noticed that the nurse handing her the clipboard had skin that looked strangely yellowish under the bright lights. Maybe she’s a demon, Clary thought, handing the clipboard back. “Last door at the end of the hall,” said the nurse, flashing a kind smile. Or I could be going crazy.

Just a reminder that this book is actually capable of being decent.  I like the sort of shell-shocked, totally-out-of-it feel to this passage, like she’s been through some shit and now she just sort of floats through the ‘real’ world, not quite processing it as a normal person.  It works.  It’s just the rest of the book that doesn’t.

They are in a hospital because that’s where Clary’s mom is.  Even though throughout the whole rest of the book everyone has been saying “hospitals can’t do shit for magic maladies.”  I guess now that it’s Jocelyn instead of the main character, a hospital will do fine. 

She goes into her mother’s room and finds Brother Jerry there.  Jerry says he won’t help her mother, then fails to answer the obvious question: if he refuses (not can’t, refuses) to do anything for Jocelyn, then what the fuck is he doing there?

By the way, Alec is all better.  Magnus helped him.  Because Magnus is the bomb-diggity.

“I know,” said Luke. “I’ve been talking to her. Almost nonstop.” He flashed a tired smile. “I’ve told her how brave you’ve been. How she’d be proud of you. Her warrior daughter.”

Eh?  When did Clary fight anyone?  Mostly she just ran around behind the other people that were fighting, getting dragged along on their adventures.

“Everything’s changed. Everything’s different. I wish sometimes it could all go back to the way it was before.”

“I don’t,” said Simon, to her surprise.

To mine as well.  I mean, okay, maybe don’t want everything to go back to the way it was, but come on.  Jocelyn is in a coma and numerous people went through very traumatic experiences that this author will not write out the consequences of.  (Oh, but they’ll be in my headcanon anyway.)  Even if you want to pick nits and say that some stuff is good, don’t flatly contradict the girl whose mother is in a coma when she says that.

Simon drives Clary back to the Institute, then before he goes, Clary invites him over the next day to just hang out.  Where are they going to hang out?  Her house?  Isn’t that the place that’s full of zombie demons and, oh yeah, also the furniture is gone and, oh yeah, also the place is half-wrecked because that Abbadon guy tore the whole place up by crashing through a wall and then catching on fire?

And, oh yeah, Clary is only sixteen and can’t be living alone in her empty, monster-infested, structurally-unsound house?

Book, do you even read your own words? 

“Do you think that it was a coincidence?” she asked.

“Do I think what was a coincidence?”

“That we wound up in Pandemonium the same night that Jace and the others just happened to be there, pursuing a demon? The night before Valentine came for my mother?”

Simon shook his head. “I don’t believe in coincidences,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

And therefore you believe in…?  No, really, I want to know.  If it wasn’t coincidence, then you believe someone deliberately manufactured the meeting.  Who?  God?  Angels?  Magnus?  Guys, there’s a difference between “a coincidence that worked out really, really well” and “a coincidence that’s just weirdly random.”

Clary goes inside and Isabelle immediately shows up and gives her a hug.  Because Isabelle is a good person, and Clary is a snotty child who thinks mean thoughts about everyone prettier than her.

“I was so worried about you,” said Isabelle brightly. “After you guys went off to the library with Hodge, and I was with Alec, I heard the most terrific banging explosion, and when I got to the library, of course, you were gone, and everything was strewn all over the floor.”

Isabelle must have been moving pretty slow, because Clary had plenty of time to sit around and mope inside her cage before getting out.  But hey, the book couldn’t remember that fact at the time, so I guess it only makes sense that it wouldn’t remember it now.

Blah blah blah, everyone talks about stuff that already happened, blah blah blah.

“You don’t have to pretend to be nice. I like it better when you just act like yourself.”

“Bitchy, you mean?” Isabelle said, and laughed.

WTF?  Isabelle isn’t bitchy.  She never has been.  I cannot recall a single point in this book where she’s been bitchy.  She got a touch offended when everyone made cruel jokes about her cooking, but that’s not bitchy.  She’s prettier than Clary, for which Clary hates her, but that’s not bitchy.  In fact, her niceness has been both prominent and thoroughly un-forced.  Clary is the one with the incredibly awkward forced ‘niceness.’

Guilt swelled her throat. If it hadn’t been for her, Alec wouldn’t be on crutches at all. “I’m really glad you’re okay, Alec,” she said, putting every ounce of sincerity into her voice that she could muster.

See?  She isn’t sincere, she’s ‘putting’ sincerity into her voice.  I’m sure the author means for that to actually be sincere, but if that’s the case, she should have used different words.

Because as it turns out, words mean things, and an author’s job is to use them correctly. 

“I wonder how Magnus knew to come? I asked him, but he wouldn’t say.”

Clary thought of the folded paper Hodge had thrown into the fire after Valentine had gone. He was a strange man, she thought, who’d taken the time to do what he could to save Alec even while betraying everyone—and everything—he’d ever cared about.

Yeah, isn’t it weird how people are actually complex, and can care about multiple things, often at the same time?  Like, it’s just so bizarre that Hodge can want his curse lifted, but also give a flying fuck about the dying teenager in his house.  Because, as we all know, one single, solitary bad thing you do makes you evil, and evil people are incapable of giving a shit about anyone but themselves.  (Hodge didn’t even betray ‘everything’ he’d cared about.  All he did was hand over a cup to get his curse lifted.  That’s it.  That’s the extent and scope of his betrayal.  He didn’t promise to murder the kids, he didn’t give over state secrets, he didn’t vow to join Valentine’s side and raze Idris to the ground.  At best, he was just selfish.)

Alright, I realize here that the characters are the ones making these assumptions, and one could argue that Clare is trying to turn that trope on its ear.  But!  The problem here is that the trope was wrong to begin with, and subverting it should be called ‘writing people as being fucking normal,’ not something shocking.  She’s writing her characters as if flat, villainous people are the norm, and that the characters in her books just accept that and have to be taught otherwise.  Normal people are capable of understanding the concept of “a guy who helped raise a boy might give two shits about that boy, even while selfishly trying to lift his own curse.”  She’s making her characters stupider in order to make herself look better.  If you have to make your characters into morons in order to make your writing look good, then something is wrong.  And being better than shit does not make you into gold.

Blah, blah, Alec and Clary make up from their earlier fight without ever addressing the real substance of that fight.  Namely, that Jace wants to commit suicide-by-heroism.  But hey, let’s just ignore that little detail, as long as you two are sorry for saying mean things!  Much better to just sweep the entire issue under the rug and never talk about things that are uncomfortable.  Because that’s never led to any unfortunate consequences before. 

Now he did look at her. She wondered how it was that they could be brother and sister and look so little alike. Couldn’t she at least have gotten the curling dark lashes or the angular cheekbones? It hardly seemed fair.

Hm…this was set up as a love triangle, and you can’t have incest in a bestselling novel.  Plus, now they’re hanging a lampshade on the fact those two look nothing alike.  They aren’t really brother and sister, are they?

Clary and Jace start to have a fairly decent talk about why Jace likes Idris and his father so much, and he says some legit deep things about home and self-identity.  And then he ruins it all by saying that he’s totally changed now, all because of Clary.  Apparently she’s the only person he’s felt connected to, and having human connections changed his priorities.  Well, that’s at least better than having a personality transplant, but…why is Clary so fucking special?  He lived, trained, and fought with Alec and Isabelle, but he didn’t give a shit about them in any way?  That’s pretty cold.  So what, really, did Clary do to break through that?  What makes her so awesome that Jace forms an emotional attachment to her that he couldn’t do to anyone else?

Clary wants Jace to come to the hospital and visit her mother, so he agrees, and then he takes her to see that he now has his very own (stolen) flying motorcycle.  And then they go flying off into the night, never to visit her mother in this story, with all the loose threads still flapping in the wind.  But Clary’s on a bike with a hot boy, and that’s all that matters, right?

Seriously, talk about emotional whip-lash.  This is written like some romantic, triumphant “ride into the sunset” ending, full of laughing and dare-devil bike tricks…but they’re on their way to visit her comatose mother.  This book sucks at setting an emotional scene right up to the very end.  Well, got to give it points for commitment, I guess.