Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
Goodreads | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble
YA, Fantasy/Paranormal Romance, 418 pages, Little, Brown & Company

• Series: 1st in Daughter of Smoke and Bone series
• Pub date: September 27 2011
• Why I read it: Artsy girls are artsy, old fairy tales and new stories, the dark side of angels
• Disclosure: Won a copy from Forever Young Adult. Thanks! 

Goodreads blurb:

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?

The Long...

Looking over my to-review list, I feel like I've tackled a lot of books I hated lately, or at least ones I wasn't crazy about. And I've got a few more negative reviews to come. It's times like these where I turn to reviewing the books that knocked my socks off for comfort, and it's hard to imagine a book that better fits the description of knocker-offer-of-socks than Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

(Sometimes I'm really happy I'm a book blogger and can describe books as knocker-offers-of-socks without a trace of irony.)

To put it in other terms? This book is the most imaginative, atmospheric, and gorgeous story I've read all year; exactly the qualities that put it at the top of my best-of fantasy list. From the streets of Prague where the story opens, to Marrakesh, to the otherworld of angels and demons, to the dozens of other places Karou travels without batting an eyelash, the word that comes to mind is luscious.

Taylor doesn't skimp on her character development or plotting either, with every twist evolving so naturally from every moment before it that once you've read it, it feels like the only logical place the story could have gone. Karou is an unusual YA heroine in that, even as she quests for her identity, she never seems to angst or dither about it: she is as much of an enigma to us as she is to those around her. She is competent, talented, envied, beautiful, and knows it, and yet we see just enough vulnerability in her to keep us reading. Her love for her demon family is heartrending, and her relationship with Akiva is by turns fiery and tender.

The last thing of note is its mythology, which is complex and real and difficult to trace to any real world myths. Sure, it's an angels-and-demons story, but it has a much wilder, pagan feel than you might think. The war is brutal, yet the moments between the war are delicate and beautiful. Taylor has a keen sense of the pointlessness of the labels of "good" and "evil," and at times, we're as much on the side of the villains as the heroes.

I could gush on, but that would be boring. Suffice to say that it was easily in my top three reads of 2011, and that I'm breathless for the sequel.

...and the Short:

Gorgeous, wild, and mysterious, Daughter of Smoke and Bone left me breathless. A sequel, please!

The Final Word: Loved it!