Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone (#1), by Laini Taylor

Daughter of Smoke and Bone (#1)
By Laini Taylor
Publication Date: September 27th, 2011 (Little, Brown & Company)
Hardcover, 417 pages
Genre: Fantasy; Urban Fantasy; Romance; Paranormal; YA
Source: Library

DESCRIPTION:

Around the world, black hand prints 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 grows dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly 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 lovers who's roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

—from the book's dust jacket

REVIEW:

Ooooh. Bloodchills (a word I've created myself meaning, my blood is freezing in my veins right now). This wins the metal for unlike anything I've ever read (or perhaps it was pieced together from classic literature, history, and mythology that I have never come across).

I can't get over the ideas in this. I wish I came up with them. For example, Karou's chimera father sells wishes to people in exchange for the payment of teeth, animal teeth of all kinds, and human teeth being worth the most. Karou is the errand girl who travels all over the world to get teeth from the low-life poachers who sell the teeth.

In my eyes, Daughter of Smoke and Bones seemed to ask The Hunchback of Notre Dame question, "Who is the monster and who is the man?" (And if you ever seen the Disney movie—one of my favorite Disney movies—you know that Quasimodo was never the monster people thought he was, and self-righteous Judge Claude Frollo was never the pious or generous man he thought he was.) It also seemed to challenge traditional appearance of good and evil.

At first when I started Daughter of Smoke and Bone, I was captured by the writing. I've never read anything so descriptive, with superior imagery, and truly poetic strings off words. But when I got father in I felt differently. Everything seemed overly descriptive. I was experiencing imagery overload, most repetitively when the author was describing how beautiful Madrial was or a particular environment. The poetic words seemed unnecessary. And I didn't know many of the words, words like "eidolon" (1. a phantom; apparition; 2. an ideal), "cagey" (cautious, wary, or shrewd), and "kolacky" (a sweet bun filled with jam or pulped fruit).

But a "kolacky" sure does sound good!

I adored Karou's best friend, Zuzana. Is it me or are the best friends of the protagonist more likable than the actual protagonist? She is short, but very fierce, and still she finds the capacity to be sensitive towards Karou and her boyfriend, Mik, the sweet violinist, who I also loved, but not more than Zuzana.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is basically the exposition, the set up for the next book, Days of Blood and Starlight, in a planned trilogy. There wasn't a big climax in this book—there wasn't really one at all.

Still, there was something very magnetic about Daughter of Smoke and Bone...

RATING: