Daughter of Smoke & Bone

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...