review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

pub date: September 27, 2011
publisher: Little, Brown and Company
pages: 418
source: Christmas gift
appeals: angels, magic, contemporary, romance
content: sex (not descriptive), some swearing?


thoughts:
Odd. Strange. Original. Bizarre. Exciting. Surprising. Odd...very Odd. Romantic. Enjoyable. And lets not forget, Odd.

There were a lot of aspects of this book that I normally don't like in books I read. And yet in this story, all together, they worked.

For one example, angels. I find the idea of fallen angels ridiculous and I have a hard time taking angels seriously in my fiction. But in Karou's world, angels aren't fallen from heaven, they're a race of people (creatures? folk?) from a different world. And that works. I liked that.

There were other aspects that I would normally avoid, but really liked here, but I don't want to spoil anything so I'm not going to mention them. Just know, this is a really cool, original, exciting, and odd book.

I'm excited for the next in the series. I'm worried about how things were left at the end of Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and how I'll find things with Days of Blood and Starlight. I will say that I thought it was a non-ending. Just a break in the continuing story without a conclusion. Another thing that usually bugs...but not so much here.


summary:
Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages—not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

When one of the strangers—beautiful, haunted Akiva—fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?