This review as first written and posted in October 2012.

“But wait,” you say to yourself.  “What’s this?  Lost Souls already?  She hasn’t done Fallen Angels yet!”  Well, Fallen Angels is kicking my ass.  I’m not sure what it is that’s put me off it, since it’s not that much worse than the first three, but these things happen.  I’ll still get it done, but it’s time to move on with the promised book.  You can expect Fallen Angels to be put up…um, eventually.

The prologue opens with Simon trying to get into his house, which has religious symbols all over the door to keep him out, since his mom hates him now.

“You wear his face and speak with his voice, but you are not him! You’re not Simon!”

[…]

“Stay away from your sister.”

First of all, who talks like that first line?  Second of all, if the ‘vampire’ isn’t really Simon, then Becky isn’t really his sister.  The idea that she’s facing someone other than her son is what drives all this panic, but then she has no problem waffling back again and recognizing that the vampire and her daughter are related.  Come on, if someone is going to go so far as to scream “you’re not you!” then they should be devoted enough to the idea to carry it through.

Clary calls him to mention that Sebastian and Jace are both missing after the events of the last book.  (Sebastian was mid-resurrection for the climax of the book, and everyone thought they’d stopped it, but then evil!possessed!Jace finished the job when no one was looking.)

Then the first chapter starts, and we skip to two weeks later.  Despite the fact that the prologue opened on Jace’s disappearance, for some reason this book thought it would be a good idea to skip ahead and talk about it as a flashback.  Why?  Search me.  All I can say is that the quality of these books has seriously declined as the series got more popular and (I’m guessing) the editor got lazier.

Anyway, Jace went missing and it was all tragic and terrible and full of similes.  Because when someone goes missing, it’s important to stop and note that the light looked like camera flashes at a crime scene.  (Unlike, I guess, camera flashes anywhere else?)  Seriously, though, this flashback is incredibly long.  It spans several days.  It has dialogue.  It’s basically just a normal scene, but out of order and pissing me off more than it should.  Pointless flashbacks are a pet peeve of mine, especially ones like this.  It almost feels like the author wanted to tell one scene, realized she needed to drop some exposition, and then just didn’t want to do the minimal amount of editing it would take to insert a new chapter/longer prologue in the proper place.

Over the intervening two weeks, Clary has been giving testimony to the Clave, basically telling them the story of the last two books.  Now she’s waiting for judgment.  Once again, however, the book fails to tell us what she’s being charged with.  What has she done wrong that might be illegal?  What rule has she broken?  I’m not saying that she’s pure as driven snow or anything, but we really don’t know any of the details of the Clave’s supposed rule-obsessed society.  Every time this comes up, it’s always nebulous and undefined and just gives the impression that the Clave is free to say “you’re a poopyhead and we don’t like you.”  That’s pretty much the opposite of a rule-bound society. 

Indeed, Isabelle even lampshades this a moment later.

“You’ll be fine. You didn’t break the Law. That’s the important thing.”

So what the fuck is going on, then?  What are they deliberating over?  What ‘fate’ are they about to decide?  How much power does the Clave have, and is this normal?  THESE ARE IMPORTANT THINGS THAT WE WANT TO KNOW.  Well, in a better book with better characters, I’d want to know.

It was illegal for a Shadowhunter to raise the dead, but not for the Angel to do it; nevertheless it was such an enormous thing she had done in asking for Jace’s life back that she and Jace had agreed to tell no one about it.

That?  That’s what they’re up in arms about?  …in the last book, when Clary found a rune to make murder victims sit up and talk again, no one really believed it would work until a corpse started chatting.  There was a very distinct impression that raising the dead was impossible, not illegal.  That would be like us having a law against turning into a duck.  No one makes laws against things that can’t be done.

In some way she wished they would punish her. Break her bones, pull her fingernails out, let the Silent Brothers root through her brain with their bladed thoughts.

Woah, woah, woah.  You think this is an acceptable punishment for breaking the law?  You think it’s okay to respond to criminal acts with bone-breaking and fingernail-pulling?

Look, the point of punishing criminals is to act as a social deterrent.  And there’s plenty of debate over whether it actually works or not, or if there’s a point at which punishment/crueler punishment becomes less effective.  It’s not really a matter of petty revenge, not a matter of “you did a thing and now we hate you, therefore we’re going to smack you with a big stick.”  That isn’t justice.  That is petty revenge.  Justice is a matter of keeping social order, not taking karma into one’s own hands.  So what, in this case, would be the point of punishing Clary?  To keep other people from raising the dead…which they already can’t do anyway?  The book is pretty clear on the fact that raising the dead is something only the Angel does, so ripping off Clary’s fingers isn’t going to serve any greater purpose.  The Clave isn’t a vehicle for justice and order, it’s just a bunch of people with big sticks hitting the people they don’t like.

True, Clary is being down on herself and hyperbolic in this case.  She’s going through a stage of survivor’s guilt.  But in that case, it’s a failing on the author.  We don’t know what a normal punishment is, and the author is giving us only exaggerated statements.  She could have just as easily said “She knew that even the worst punishment the Clave could met out wouldn’t be enough.  She deserved to be beat with a large stick and have her nails ripped out.”  Then at least we’d be sure that this isn’t their normal form of punishment.

Throughout everything, in fact, Isabelle had been her staunchest defender. Meeting her every day at the door to the Council Hall, she had held Clary firmly by the arm as she’d marched her past clumps of glaring, muttering Shadowhunters. She had waited through endless Council interrogations, shooting dagger glances at anyone who dared look at Clary sideways. Clary had been astonished.

Throughout all these books, Isabelle has continually been the nicest person around, never showing the acerbic side that people keep claiming she has.  And yet Clary continually describes her as “bitchy” and acts shocked when proven wrong.  It’s almost as if everyone, author included, has assumed that pretty girls must be bitchy, and she’s trying to have these “shocking” moments of niceness, all while forgetting that they lose the shock value when that’s all you ever show.

Alec shows up and tells Clary that she’s fine, the Council isn’t going to beat her with a big stick for being a poopyhead.  Then he delivers the news that some big ward is broken, so the Council is going to focus more on that issue than on finding Jace.

First, why has finding Jace been a Council-wide matter anyway?  Do these people not know how about division of labor?  Do they not have an equivalent to a missing person’s unit?  Or is Jace just so special that he deserves everyone’s attention when he goes missing.

Second, that ward thing makes no sense.

Wards…surrounded Earth… They could be bypassed by demons but not easily, and kept out the vast majority of them, preventing the world from being flooded by a massive demon invasion.

Do demons come from space?  Because, if I remember correctly, demons are supposed to come from a different dimension.  I guess if a place is protected from inter-dimensional holes opening up and there’s a ward around it, that would make sense for keeping demons out, but around the whole damn planet?  When we already know that there’s inter-dimension holes on the planet?  What good is a ward if the demon’s door is already inside it?  Or is there something about wards that keeps inter-dimension holes from opening up inside them?  (Or at least makes it harder to do?)  I mean, there’s ways to make this work.  However, “throwing that line out there without caring” is not one of those ways.

The general consensus is that Sebastian—of course, they call him Jonathan when they talk about him—

You know, since it’s his actual name and all.  Come on, Alec, there was a real Sebastian that died because of this guy.  It’s dishonoring his memory to let the guy who stole his name keep it.  Fuck this book, I’m going to call him Jonathan from now on, too.

“They don’t want Jace’s disappearance to throw them off the track of changing a bunch of stupid old Laws?

Let’s see, one guy that went missing two weeks ago, or the daunting task of trying to eradicate institutionalized racism.  Yeah, I’m with the council on this one.  Quit your whining, Clary.

Apparently there were other people on the Council that were arguing that Jace is more important than ending racism, and they argued that quite vociferously, but thank god they were all overruled.   

Clary decides that since the Council isn’t going to be taking up all her time or keeping a close eye on her anymore, and since they aren’t going to look for Jace quite as hard, she’s going to take matters into her own hands.  She decides she’s going to go ask the Fairy Queen for help.

“I just want one of you to come with me. I’m not good with translating faerie-speak.

…you mean, English?  These fairies speak English and are incapable of lying.  Does this mean that Clary is incapable of hearing words and thinking critically about what they really mean, and that’s why she needs someone to come along and tell her what she’s hearing?

“The Council asked them if they knew where Jace and Sebastian were,” Clary said. “Not if they’d be willing to look for them.

Well that makes the Council pretty fucking stupid, but we already knew that much I guess.

Anyway, they decide that they’ll all go along to see the fairies and help Clary understand English.

Isabelle pulled her golden whip down from where it hung on the wall and wrapped it around her wrist so that it looked like a ladder of shining bracelets.

There is literally no point in any of these books where she’s allowed to carry her whip without it being “like” something.  Why can’t just be “like a whip coiled around some body part” or “like she always does” or just not “like” anything at all since we’ve already got at least a dozen similes to draw on?

She had curled her hair and dyed the gray brown, but Clary still recognized her—Luke’s sister, Amatis.

Come on, authors.  More than one of you are guilty of this, and it’s always been annoying.  People identify others by more than just hairstyles.  There’s no need to point out that Clary can ‘still’ recognize Amatis when no one would have any reason to think that she couldn’t.

They go downstairs where there’s a big crowd of people for some reason.  We meet LESBIANS and as much as this book fucks up homosexuality, I have to say I’m happy to see it anyway.  In most books, if you ever see a gay person it’s because the book is All About Being Gay And How That’s Okay, or else there to teach the main character about How Not To Hate Gays.  I mean, Clare still says some unfortunate things about hers, but the fact that these wildly popular books had more than one sexuality and weren’t about sexuality and were still popular might lead the Big Six publishers to relaxing their gay ban a bit.  We could see a larger amount of diversity among these characters, which would mean that people don’t latch onto a few examples and think that those few have to represent the entire breadth of that sexuality.

Clary, Isabelle, Alec, and Aline just stand around and talk for a while, everyone agreeing that their angst is indeed angsty-angst.  I honestly don’t give a crap about the fact that they think Jace is more important than racism, so I’m just skimming until something happens. 

Looks like I’ll have to wait until tomorrow for something to happen.