[Review] Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor
Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1
Published September 27th, 2011
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
Young Adult Paranormal Fantasy.

Premise:
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 grows 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 beautiful, haunted Akiva fixes fiery 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?

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Review

My thoughts: 

OMG! This book was a hard one to rate for sure. I picked this one up because every book blogger on Earth was raving about how amazingly good it was and I thought I had to give it a try.

The first time I tried to read it I got 150 pages down and I had to set it aside because it was really confusing and slow and I just didn’t have the patience to keep on reading. I almost marked it as dnf, but there were so many people in love with it that I couldn’t bring myself to do it and so I said to myself that I’ll get to it eventually.

This time –the second time I picked it up- I went into it prepared to be bored and confused out of my mind but somehow I breezed through it and found myself really captivated by the relationship between Akiva and Karou. By the time I got to page 250 I was completely sold and rooting hard for both main characters.

In Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor creates a fantastic world in which seraphs and quimeras are in constant war, the war between good and evil, and somehow our protagonist finds herself in the middle of the chaos without knowing which side she truly belongs to until the very end of the story. In the first third of the book, we see the present, we get to know Karou and the whole cast of interesting characters that fill her life. From the second third on, the narration goes back and forth between present and past giving us the full scoop of what’s going on and why things have been the way they had which really helps to understand the whole story and makes you relate more to the main characters.

The characters were written beautifully and the romance was sweet and dangerous at the same time, the world building really came together through the story making of this an overall great read.

The beginning of the book makes it a little hard to get into because there’s like a thousand things going on and we know very little about the whole concept, so it can be a bit confusing but hang on to it, because everything will be explained in time.

The ending was heartbreaking and kind of shocking and I ended up really feeling for the characters.

I didn’t think I would be saying this but I really recommend this book for YA Fantasy lovers. It was great! 

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About the author

Laini Taylor is an American young-adult fantasy author. She is best known for the Karou or Daughter of Smoke and Bone series, whose third book appeared in 2014.
Taylor was born in Chico, California, and has an English degree from UC Berkeley. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and daughter