So, guess what time it is?  That’s right, time for more romance drama!  Jordan and Maia are up in his room at the Praetor house, because even though he has his own apartment…for some reason he also has a room here?  The two of them are all awkward, pretty much exactly as if they hadn’t made out in the truck an hour ago.  Where did all this unexpected tension come from?  I mean, I’m pretty full of rage over their relationship, but they were pretty happy about it while macking.  And nothing’s happened to throw a wrench in to things.

Maia sits on her bed and mopes for a while about all of the people who have died over the past four books and this…makes her horny?  While Jordan is in the shower, she strips down and joins him so they can have wet, naked kissy times.  Really, there’s no progression from A to B.  I know it’s possible to get there, and moderately common to want sexual contact when depressed, but it would be nice to have at least some bit of connecting thought between the two.  Not just “Oh, yeah, Max was only nine when he died.  I am le sad.  Hey, sex now.”

Especially don’t have that when there’s that whole bit about how OH YEAH, JORDAN ATTACKED HER AND RIPPED HER THROAT OUT.  No, I do not care that he’s sorry and didn’t mean it and will never do it again.  That whole fucked up line is for when I finally get back to CoFA.  For right now we’re going to roll along with forgiving him, for the sake of complaining about something else.  IT DOESN’T MATTER IF IT WASN’T HIS FAULT, HE STILL HURT HER.  That’s something that can be worked through, but it needs to be worked through.  Maia does not magically get over her pain and issues just because it turns out it wasn’t Jordan’s fault.  I mean, if she’d been…I don’t know, hit by lightning, no one would think it’s the weather’s fault, but at the same time no one would blame her for being afraid of thunderstorms for a while.

Now, it’s fully possible for her to be acting like this.  Heck, maybe there’s some people who get hit by lightning and run out into the next storm they see, because they just lack fear or whatever.  It does happen, and I can’t dictate how anyone reacts to trauma.  But there is a huge, heaping pile of difference between “not affected” or “not affected very much” and “acting like it never happened.”  This narrative right here is treating their relationship as if it never happened.  They’ll talk about it now and then, but the emotional development is going along as if it never happened.  Whenever they do talk about the issues, those issues aren’t addressed very deeply.  It’s come up, I think, twice, and both times Maia has felt guilty for rejecting him, and that is not a message we want to be sending to young teenage girls.

Enough of that, back to Simon and the others.  He explains where Clary went, and Jocelyn is naturally upset.

Jocelyn, your daughter isn’t stupid, and she does what she thinks is right. You can’t stop her. No one can stop her. She is a great deal like her mother.”

First of all, it’s very easy to stop Clary.  Just tell her Jace is dead/doesn’t love her anymore and she’ll curl up in a ball in her room and practically forget to breathe.  (Actually, the biggest issue in these books isn’t getting her to stop doing something, but getting her to start doing something, so it’s rather a moot point.)

Second, Jocelyn’s daughter just ran off into crazy danger with her crazy boyfriend and now no one can find her or go to help her.  What if Clary’s next message to Simon is “oh no, turns out Jonathan likes to axe murder people, come help me” and no one can get to her?  She’s more than within her rights to freak out right now, so stop treating her like she’s stupid for being worried.

Really, the rest of this scene is just people yelling at Jocelyn for wanting to keep her daughter out of harm’s way.  The girl is sixteen: keeping her locked in her room might seem cruel, but when the alternative is “run face-first into death because she wants to bone a boy,” I’m on the mother’s side.

And don’t try to tell me it’s not about the boning.  These two will make out at the drop of a hat.  Their priorities are 1. Make out; 2. Snark; 3. Angst; 4. More Make out; 5. Meaningful conversation (but only if there’s no other choice and also something really over the top just happened).  99% of Clary’s inner narration is just what Jace looks like.  This is relationship built on good looks and a mutual desire to fuck each other senseless, all held together with duct tape and contrived angst. 

Speaking of their relationship, we skip over to their ‘date.’  These two have so little chemistry when they aren’t sucking face that the book would rather tell us about Venice than about what they do.  Apparently they just wander around and name-drop. 

Venice shared with Alicante the sense of being a place out of time, torn from the past, as if she had stepped into a painting or the pages of a book.

Hm, I wonder if that’s because the closest this author has come to Venice is a page of a book?  I’m sure it’s an awesome place and all, but I bet it’s also full of people on cell phones and crappy smells and dirt and grime and florescent lights.  Yeah, it’s ancient, but it’s also full of modern people doing modern things and modern businesses and updated with modern technology.  People live there, and something tells me that not every resident of Venice is on board with turning the entire city into a tourist trap.

“The whole city is sinking,” he said. “It’ll all be under water in a hundred years. Imagine swimming down into the ocean and touching the top of Saint Mark’s Basilica.”

Yeeeeaaaah, it’s not sinking that fast, honey.

He grinned. “I was trying to remember all the deadly sins the other day,” he said. “Greed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry…”

“I’m pretty sure irony isn’t a deadly sin.”

“I’m pretty sure it is.”

“Lust,” she said. “Lust is a deadly sin.”

“And spanking.”

“I think that falls under lust.”

“I think it should have its own category,” said Jace.

Seriously.  Lust and banter.  That’s all these two have.

Rocks have more chemistry together than these two.

And…yeah, that’s all for this section.  More banter, a touch of angst, and two more descriptions of what Jace looks like in various light.  Riveting stuff.

Uhg, and I’d rather stay on that snoozer of a date than move on to Jordan and Maia making out in bed.  GOD DAMNIT, WHERE IS THE PLOT!?!  I’M SICK OF ALL THESE TEENAGERS MAKING OUT BADLY!  BLOW SOME SHIT UP ALREADY.

Nothing happens besides shoompy shit.  Next!

Oh, thank you Magnus for insisting on summoning a crazy demon and getting things back on track again!  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Too bad the book doesn’t want to stay around for more than a page, and we have to go back to Maia and Jordan.  No, really, it was less than a page.  Why are we be teased and taunted with the promise of plot, only to have it ripped cruelly from us again?

Well, at least the werewolf lovers aren’t making out again, they’re with Scott in his office.  Scott has a magic salve that will magically heal Luke with magic and some bullshit about pulling poison out of his blood.  I was not aware he was being poisoned; I thought he was being stabbed repeatedly from the inside.  But whatever, magic and shit.  While they’re in the office, Raphael magically telephones in to tell them that Maureen (a 13-year-old who was made into a vampire last book) is cutting a bloody swath through TriBeCa and needs to be stopped.  Of course, the Praetor already have someone assigned to her and looking for her, so I have no idea what Raph thinks will be accomplished by telling them what they already know.

Jordan’s mouth opened. “Simon wasn’t responsible for Turning Maureen,” he said.

Well thank you for telling us that Jordan opened his mouth to talk.  I might have gotten confused and wondered if he was speaking telepathically.

Seriously.  Half the book.  Useless shit just like this.  Half the fucking book.

Raph threatens to kill Maureen if they don’t get her in hand soon.  Because Raph sucks ass at being a leader.  He didn’t reach out to Simon when he was newly turned, just let him wander around all confused, and his first response to Maureen is murder.  He clearly doesn’t give a shit about new vamps, and he doesn’t appear to serve any leadership function.  All he does is occasionally show up and threaten to kill someone, and he could have just as easily done that if he were an independent agent.

Oh…joy.  More Jace and Clary.  Jace steals a boat.  I guess we already knew from book one that he has no respect for other people’s property.

“You can do it,” he said. “I trained you.” To demonstrate he took a step back. Now he was standing on the thin edge of the boat, just beside the oarlock.

He…trained her to bend the laws of physics? 

She wanted him, wanted him so much she felt hollow on the inside, as if desire had burned her clean through.

Yup, that’s right, desire for her boyfriend has literally hollowed her out until there’s nothing left inside her.  She’s just a lusty shell of a person.  No personal will or feelings or thoughts.  Just her boyfriend.

Feminism is so much fun!

They see the Wild Hunt go by, and it barely gets a breath of explanation.  If you know your mythological history, seeing the Wild Hunt is meant to foretell a great disaster.  (Of course, if you know that, you also would probably know that another version of the myth is that the “hunters” are all female witches who go out and fuck shit up all over the countryside in a wild, violent frenzy.)  Anyway, the whole event lasts less than a page (again; this seems to be a theme) but it’s the title of the chapter, so I’m guess these guys will show up again.

They make out some more and then the chapter ends.  STILL without any demon summoning!  It’s like she knows that once that happens, people will be reminded that there’s supposed to be a plot that goes beyond teenagers making out.  Well, sorry to break it to you, book, but I never forgot.  Get on with it already!