Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
pages: 420
released: September 2011
publisher: Little Brown
cover love: ♥♥♥♥♥

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? (From Goodreads)

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 10/6/2011 ON BOOKSLIKESTARS.NET

Review:

This book will blow your mind. I’m not kidding, you will literally have to hold onto your head while reading it. Laini Taylor is an amazing story-weaver. She wasted no space, not a single chapter was spared greatness. She took a mundane theme of angel versus devil, wrapped up in a Montague/Capulet scenario, and crafted a story  filled with uniqueness and definition. You don’t just fall in the love with the characters, you fall in love with the words she uses, with the descriptions of Prague, Morocco, and Elsewhere. You can’t help but feel engaged in the past and present that’s braided through the multiple worlds and characters, keeping you intrigued by the history and of what’s to come next. It’s nothing short of brilliant.
Karou. Hope. A blue haired girl with artist’s hands, raised by a wishmonger with horns who gathers teeth and creates wishing stones. I loved her from the very beginning. She doesn’t cower, waiting for someone else to save her and make things right again. She fights for what she wants and sets out to find the answers of how she came to be among the chimaeras and how to find a way to their world and find her family. Her relationships and conversations with her friends and family are so smooth and natural, I felt like they were all real people and the chemistry between her and Akiva is well-developed and believable. He is the most beautiful man Karou (or anyone) has ever seen but he is deeply flawed, a child of war and full of vengeance.  And then there’s all the stuff at the end, the twists and mysteries solved that I won’t write about since I try to keep my reviews spoiler-free.

I don’t know what else to say except that I LOVED this book. Period. Point. Blank. If you pass on this, you will be missing out on one of the best reads of 2011. This is a such a beautifully enriched and dark novel and I don’t think many people would be disappointed by it, as long as you like meaningful characters, glorifying plots, lyrical prose, mystical beings and fantasy. Smoke and Bone is a not just a story about an angel and a devil. It’s so much more. It’s about love, hope, destiny, family, war, power and magic.

5