City of Glass – Cassandra Clare

City of Glass is one of the most evocative, illustrious books in the Shadowhunter series. I say this because of the main setting of the book, and how it gets expressed in the beautiful detailing job that Cassandra Clare had to offer with this entire book, along with continuing the wonderful chemistry between Alec and Magnus, and Clary and Simon.

___

Clary Fray just found a woman named Madeline who could help her find out how to free her mom from the magical coma that she’s in. However, when she wants to go to Alicante, the capital of Idris, Jace is adamant on making sure that she doesn’t go to Alicante. Jace gets so desperate that he actually asks Simon to lie to Clary, but when Simon quickly refuses to do so, Jace goes to extra low measures for him, and tells Simon something that he couldn’t say no to (and for reasons, I’m not going to disclose that information here…)

I think that the thing in the book that stood out to me the most was probably the fact that Clary tries so hard to deny that her mother is in a coma, and she keeps using present terms to describe her mother, as she did in the first and second books, but also she cowers from her mother as soon as she sees her in the coma, and I think that she’s so afraid that her mother might actually be dead. 

Along with that, I feel like when Jace and Clary see each other, they really don’t know what to do or say to each other, because of the awkwardness that goes between them. I feel really bad and want to console them so much and tell them that they aren’t brother and sister, just to make them feel better, but then again, Valentine might poison their minds again to make each other believe that their love is forbidden, despite all of the CHEMISTRY AND TENSION between them. 

I think my understanding of the book was a little cruel to Clary, because she’s coping with her mother in an extended sleep, and Jace really wasn’t doing anything to help. On the contrary, he was making her feel horrible and regretful that she had ever joined the Shadowhunter world and kept telling her that she was precipitate and rash with her actions, and basically told her that he wished he never met her, which obviously made Clary feel so much worse that she tried to get ahold of Simon.

In this book, there are a lot of kissing scenes and a bit of Jace saying a bunch of curse words to almost everyone, and I still kind of cringe and get touchy about a lot of the topics that they discuss, including the break-up at the end of the book, so great job Cassie for now making amazingly uncomfortable scenes that literally made me close the book and take a couple of inhaling breaths.

Like I said before, try not to repeat those terms in front of other people; keep them to yourself, but if you feel weird, discuss with someone who might have also read those books. 

In this book, there are lots of discussions revolving around gay pride, and basically just the LTGBQ+ community, and if you don’t really understand the concept, or if you’re reading this book first in the series, I highly recommend you to read City of Bones first, because it’ll cover more of the content over there. I did like how Cassandra wanted a few of those characters installed into her story, because of the amount of differentiation that people feel when they have pride, but others don’t really like it. In this book, I think it’s safe to say that LTGBQ+ readers can have a chance to bond with the legendary and absolutely adorable “Malec” ship.