Extraits

People have a tendency to want what they can't have and want to do what people tell them they shouldn't.

When you love someone, you don't have a choice ... Loves takes your choices away.

Even if he's an adorable Jewish vampire, the best friend never gets the girl.

-Google "Kissed: Magnus and Alec's First Kiss.

Buthe Jace Wayland Morgeastern Herondale Lightwood- who, thank to his angel blood, is one of the most powerful of all Shadowhuntersizes, and has more names for seraph blades than can be found in your average baby-naming book- has one weapon that trumpshe them all.

Humor.

In fact, the non-magical humans in the Shadowhunter books are called mundaneso, a term borrow from my gameresume friends, who calls everyone who doesn't play Dongeons and Dragon a mundane.

“We Shadowhunters live by a code, and that code isn’t flexible.”

—Jace Wayland, City of Bones

Imagine that your best friend came to you one day, brimming with excitement because she’d met these superawesome new friends who suggested she come live with them, follow a bunch of arcane and unquestionable laws, and cut ties with all her old friends because they’re incapable of understanding her new super-awesome life.

If you’re a child of the ’80s like me, reared on a steady diet of Jonestown horror stories and trashy novels about brainwashed teens, you would immediately recognize the situation for what it was: Your best friend has joined a cult.

If you’re not a child of the ’80s but not completely oblivious, you’d still clue in pretty quick: definitely a cult.

And when the Clave is about to surrender to Valentine’s demands, because they’re certain they can’t win against “every demon the Mortal Sword can summon” (City of Glass), Clary is the one who insists that the fight isn’t over yet. She brings the Shadowhunters and Downworlders together by creating a rune that even Downworlders can wear: an Alliance rune that allows pairs of Shadowhunters and Downworlders to fight together and to draw on each other’s strengths. And, by insisting they team up—“if you don’t fight beside them, the runes won’t work” (City of Glass)— Clary is creating not just a temporary magical alliance but, potentially, a lasting one. She’s helping to break down the walls of misunderstanding and fear that have kept the Shadowhunters and Downworlders from being true allies.

But most of us, unless we’re lucky enough to be born into a clan of ninjas, will never be that kind of kick-ass. I know I’m not. I could hit someone with a baseball bat if I had to, but I’d probably just hurt myself if I borrowed Luke’s kindjal.

Morgenstern means "morning star" a reference to Lucifer, who fell from heaven for his sins against God.