This chapter starts off with more descriptions of what people are wearing.  Is this going to a thing in this book?  It feels like it’s going to be a thing.  I feel some hate coming on.

Simon goes home and find Maia and Jordan both getting on his case about talking to his sister, since she’s been calling him constantly.  Simon says he’s been putting it off…but wasn’t the prologue all about how he was trying to talk to his sister?  He was going on about wanting to talk to her while his mom yelled at him to stay away.  But now, here, he won’t even pick up the phone when she calls?  What gives?

And…that’s it for this scene.  Just two people nagging Simon to get his sub-plot moving, since he’s going about it in fits and starts on his own.  I really hate it when characters can’t even get their own personal plots going.  Why can’t Simon want to talk to his sister on his own (like in the prologue) or have him avoid her throughout and then placed in a situation where he has to deal with her?  Why all this time and dialogue spend, basically, just saying “go talk to your sister”?

Now we cut to Clary, who is about to sneak in to the library to get the rings.  Amazingly, even with Jace missing, we’re still not spared from the endless rhetoric of how hot he is.  Clary goes ahead and muses on his utter, earth-shattering hotness even in his absence, because…that’s what this book thinks is important.  Clothes and Jace’s hotness.  Why would you need anything else?

a delicate glass flacon whose stopper was an enormous emerald

…do falcons usually have a “stopper”?  I’m guessing this is something that normally has a stopper, fashioned into the shape of a falcon, but that’s pretty shitty word-choice.  And who uses an emerald for a stopper?  There’s no way to make it tight enough to do any good.

Was this really her? Stealing from the Clave to pay the Queen of the Fair Folk, whose promises, as Jace had told her once, were like scorpions, with a barbed sting in the tail?

You know what questioned hasn’t been asked yet?  Whether or not they should go to the Clave with this fairy offer.  Those guys only deprioritized it because it was taking too much time and manpower, not because they want Jace and Jonathan to stay missing.  If Clary popped up and said “Hey, the Fairy Queen totally will help us find those guys if you give her those rings,” what does she think would happen?  Either the Clave guys will go “oh, duh, why didn’t we think of that?” or else they’ll tell her “btw, those rings also have the power to fry people with a thought, which is why we didn’t let her have them,” or whatever the case may be.  The flat insistence on keeping things from adults makes no sense in this case, because the adults aren’t being a block here.  Unless making deals with Fairies at all is against the law?  But in that case, well, that would be nice to know.

Damnit, Clary, stop acting like such a teenager and ignoring authority just for the sake of ignoring authority. 

Well, she’s about to steal the ring when Jace and Jonathan come in.

The ice that had been in Clary’s veins seemed to crystallize, freezing her in place.

Stop it with the ice blood!  I’m really sick of this simile; it’s been overused to the point that it doesn’t make any sense.  The closest I can think to it meaning is that kind of shivery feeling people when afraid, but that doesn’t persist for two solid weeks.  And with lines like this, when it ‘crystallizing’ is the first mention in a scene, it makes it sound like she’s walking around in a permanent shiver. 

By the way, let’s take some time to go over in excruciating detail what Jace and Jonathan look like.  Again.  Fun!

The two boys are on buddy-buddy terms and looking through the library for a book on summoning.  But first they stop to giggle at a demon porn book.  Good lord, this is tedious.  It’s like every page worth of actual material is being stretched into three, stuff with pointless crap to the point that my eyes are just glazed over.  It’s like those days where you spend hours at a time online, look up, and think “it’s 9pm already?  Man, if you held a gun to my head I couldn’t tell you what I did today to eat up that much time.”  If my life depended on it, I could not tell you why that scene took so many pages.  It’s like my brain is filled with Jello and is slowly congealing.

I’m even starting to overuse similes.  This book is taking me over!  Help!

Oh, who am I kidding.  You people like to see me suffer.

The boys banter some more and then disappear via magic.  All while Clary continues to…shiver?

And suddenly we cut over to Alec, because this book can’t stick with one storyline to save it’s life.  Alec is all pissed off because his boyfriend is old.  Apparently it annoys him that Magnus is 700 and has a bunch of nifty old things in his apartment.  They have, frankly, a very believable fight about how there’s tension between them because Magnus is, well, 700 years old.

Here’s the thing, though.  It sounds like two teens having this fight.  So, in a nice bit of Catch-22, the fight about him being 700 only works if we ignore the fact that he’s 700.  Throughout this whole bit, I’m just thinking “really, Magnus?  You didn’t see this coming when you started dating him?  Have you never had a mortal lover in the whole of your 700 years and learned how to deal with this particular blow-up?”  Because I find it really suspect that Magnus is reacting to this fight like he has no idea what to do next.  He should have at least a little experience to draw on. 

As Alec is storming out of the apartment, some mystery person comes up and tells him he’s got a message from Camille. 

So, now that that bit finally got actually interesting, the book decides to cut away from it and talk about how Jordan and Maia are bored instead.  Because…yeah, I didn’t pick up a book to be excited or nothing, thank god we switched right over to the bored people.

(Jordan is Maia’s ex-boyfriend who turned her into a werewolf.  …yeah, I’m going to rage about that in Fallen Angels and just glance around it in this book, for the sake of staying sane.)

(Unless we get a whole bunch of lines like this.)

Of course, not thinking about the ex-boyfriend who had broken your heart and turned you into a werewolf was a lot easier when he wasn’t standing right in front of you, wearing a green shirt that hugged his leanly muscled body in all the right places and brought out the hazel color of his eyes.

Because as long as he’s hot, that makes it easy to ignore all the throat-ripping-out-ness from before.  It’s not even sounding like she’s willing to forgive him in this passage, but more like his yummy, yummy body is just blotting out every other consideration.  And that’s not a good way to be thinking or a good message to put in a YA book, considering we’ve already got enough teens fangirling over horrible villains just because they happen to be ripped.  (In complete seriousness, that is.  I like me a few villain characters, but I still acknowledge that they are villains.)

“I thought they were canceling the patrol searches for Jace,”

…is that all the Clave was doing?  Just walking around in circles and poking noses in dark corners going “Jace, are you in there?”  No wonder they couldn’t find him.  Does no one in this universe understand the concept of gathering intelligence?

Maia shoved her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket. She felt as if she ought to be angry, but she wasn’t. For a long time she had blamed Jordan for the fact that she’d stopped dreaming of a human future, […]  It had been her own choice to stop her life short.

OH HELL NO, BOOK.  NO.  DO NOT DO THAT.  DO NOT BLAME MAIA FOR WHAT’S HAPPENED TO HER.  NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, AND FUCK YOU WHILE YOU’RE AT IT.

For one thing, she’s 16, she hasn’t exactly ruined her chances at doing whatever she wants with her life.  For another thing, she’s 16, it’s not her fault if turning into a werewolf messed with her head for a bit.  Absolutely not.  No.  Also?  I hate you.

So Maia and Jordan have awkwardness together and it would be cute if it was anyone else and in any other book.  And…yeah, there’s no point to this scene, why did we cut away from Alec?

Let’s continue to play musical characters!  We’re with Simon, now.  He’s meeting Isabelle and the others in the park.

she began, and broke off as his pocket buzzed. Or, more accurately, the phone in his pocket buzzed.

Just in case you were confused and thought it was really his pocket going off.  Oh, you say you’ve heard that phrase a million times because we live in a society where everyone has a cell phone and thus you don’t need it explained that people keep cell phones in pockets?  Damnit, this author is getting paid by the word, and you will listen to her explain everything twice.  Or so I assume; it’s about the only thing to explain the general mess that is this book.

We get to have even more of Simon’s sister subplot, and Isabelle doesn’t say anything new that Maia and Jordan didn’t.  We could have easily cut out that earlier scene and let Isabelle do all the pushing, or just make Simon actually want to see his sister and cut out the cheering squad altogether. 

Then Alec shows up and Clary arrives via portal.  I guess doing magic doesn’t take any energy out of her and she can just make portals everywhere they go?  Do the portals close behind her or does she have a dozen random ones of these hanging around?

And, in the first book, it seemed like these portals/doors are randomly occurring places that someone build a door around.  Jocelyn picked her house based on there being one downstairs.  Was that a special portal, different from the kinds that Clary and Magnus can create?  Oh, who am I kidding, this book doesn’t care enough to think about that, much less answer it.