Daughter of Smoke & Bone

This book had a lot of steep highs and lows for me. From the beginning though I was convinced it was going to be all highs. There is an atmosphere, an energy to Laini Taylor's writing that doesn't just draw you in, it makes you want to be there. It's exceptionally rich and evocative. I like that she writes about arty kids, in all their effervescence and quirk as well as pretentiousness and tendency for appropriation (yes, I'm looking at you Mik, take off the fucking eyepatch). It might annoy some people I'm sure, but for me it reminds me of the friends I used to have and all their flighty ambitions. Taylor created an environment for the main character that felt so nostalgic yet new, shiny but still mysterious.

She also writes romance in one of the few ways I can handle it, though only just barely - completely and utterly over-the-top. Here love is not so much a story of partnership and personality, but treated almost consistently in the abstract, and its fairly upfront about that. We don't really know anything about why Karou and Akiva love eachother, other than destiny or some shit like that, but that's not really the point. Their story, their romance was, in its origin, a rebellion, an act that they hoped would sew the seeds of change. That isn't always something that works for me, but when you meet sex with defiance (and yes, people have sex in this book, huzzah!) well then I'm all ears.

But that can make getting pulled into the characters a little difficult. I didn't care about Akiva at all. It didn't matter how torrid his backstory was, or how metatextually beautiful he was, he came off whiny and brooding pretty much like every other YA love interest. At least he wasn't possessive, so that's a plus, but he did try to kill her.

When it started going into the flashbacks my interest kind of crashed. Learning about the chimaera, particularly Brimstone and his work, brought it back for a little while and then we went into the rather predictable tragic love story. A very sweet, captivating tragic love story, but still utterly cliche. I suppose its a good sign that I like Karou more than Madrigal, as she is the "older" version of her. She's more aggressive, not as afraid to be flashy and enjoy her own beauty. It's refreshing to have a heroine like that, whereas Madrigal felt like a Mary Sue with horns and wings, which is pretty Mary Sueish anyway.

And then that's pretty much it. I was a bit startled to realize that Daughter of Smoke and Bone kind of doesn't stand on its own in terms of story arc. It serves as a kind of prologue - here's your characters, here's why they're important, we'll get to actual things happening a bit later. I don't know how I feel about where the series will go my favorite aspect was Brimstone, and he's dead , but if there's some Thiago getting his furry fucking behind whipped then I will undoubtedly be compelled to continue.

The more I think about it the more I've grieving for how good the first part of this book was. The imagery alone is almost overwhelming - Karou's chimaera family, the burning doors, Akiva crashing down into the streets of Marrakesh. Even the fight scenes were pretty well done. I know the movie rights have been picked up, and I've got my fingers crossed for Guillermo del Toro to get his hands on it.

Abstracts are cool, even when it turns a character into more of a symbol. Romance with a big sweeping capital R is fun. For a little bit. And to be perfectly honest, I really kind of like purple prose, its like a comfortable blanket to me. Unfortunately, it all wasn't able to hold together all the way through, but the good stuff is definitely there. And it's certainly better than a lot of other stuff out there.