Daughter of Smoke & Bone
Ratings270
Average rating4.1
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 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?
Series
Featured Series
3 primary books4 released booksDaughter of Smoke & Bone
Daughter of Smoke & Bone is a 4-book series with 3 primary works first released in 2001 with contributions by Laini Taylor.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Iti multumesc Laini Taylor pentru ca m-ai invatat ce este un penis neesential... unii nu au ce face cu timpul lor liber.
This YA fantasy sucked me in completely.
The seraphim and chimaera (a strange hybrid of animal/humans) are at war and have been for centuries.
Karou and Akiva's romance is addictive.
And the cliffhanger ending? Guaranteed to have me reading the sequel.
Enjoyable.
It's difficult for me to understand how a book could have such deep, creative and compelling world-building and such shallow and cliche romance.
The good: The world Taylor built is really lush. The politics in the war between the angels and chimera are nuanced and interesting, and more than that, you get a feeling that there's a depth of culture to both sides much more than what you even read.
The start of this book is one of the best I've ever read – I loved the descriptions of Prague and the rapport between Karou and Zuze. I found Brimstone and Issa and the rest a compelling mystery, and I felt myself quickly caught up in the mystery of who Karou was and what the teeth were for.
For all that there are hundreds of books about the morals for and against magic, I thought that this was the first that really made doing magic feel weighty, but not objectively bad and I loved that. I liked the metaphysics of magic in general.
I love books that explore the tension between “real life” and the supernatural and for at least the first half of the book there was still classes and grades and friends that Karou was trying to balance with saving the world.
The medium: Karou is the Mary Sue to end all Mary Sues. She's slender (as we're told at least seventeen times) and The Best Draw-er and Everyone Loves Her Ideas and she has
“naturally” blue hair and never gets scared and is good at everything. But...I kind of liked her anyway. She's strong and self-contained and has a ton of agency, even once she meets up with the male romantic lead.
The ugly: Ugh, the romance. I'm not a romantic; I don't read romance and I certainly don't do paranormal romance, so clearly not the intended audience. But he's handsome and perfect and they're instantly in love and ugh, ugh, ugh. And even though they're star-crossed lovers from a past life, they were instantly in love then, too. So.... And when they're together all of the descriptions are bland and shallow and cliche.
Supposedly the sequels are more world-building, less romance. I'll check them out...
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2,773 books#2773 in What are your favorite books of all time?
When you think back on every book you've ever read, what are some of your favorites? These can be from any time of your life – books that resonated with you as a kid, ones that shaped your personal...
