Tori's Review: Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor
Series: Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1
Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult, Paranormal
Rating: ★★★★
Pages: 418
Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on September 27, 2011
Date Read: September 11, 2013
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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 grown dangerously low.
And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal other wordly 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?

Karou, a girl with blue hair that grows out of her head that color, doesn't know exactly who she is. She has no family other than the chimaera that raised her, and they don't exactly answer any of her questions. Running errands for Brimstone, her adoptive chimaera father figure, she wasn't allowed too disclose any information with anyone other than chimaera. At first she believed that the chimaera were the only chimaera she knew, so when she meets the angel Akiva her life changes forever.

To put it simply, Karou is a complex girl. Always running off on errands that Brimstone asks her to do, it's hard for her to not be able to tell her best friend Zuzanna about all of her crazy adventures, but she persists. This is one of the things that I like about Karou. For me, it's difficult for me to keep my "adventures" from spilling out of my mouth and to my friends. I wish I had as much restraint as Karou does. And maybe that's why I liked her as a main character so much--she possessed what I didn't.

And I'm not talking about the hot angel boy that's following her around everywhere. *cough* Akiva *cough* I loved Akiva, too. At first, when Akiva and Karou first met, I could've sworn that it was instalove, and I was about to cry because how can Taylor ruin this book by putting in instalove, but she didn't and I was so happy. So, so happy. Akiva had a legitimate reason for being drawn to Karou and vice versa. Like I said, at first I didn't know his reason, but the last 1/4 of the book cleared everything up, and I just loved it so much.

I have to admit that the last 1/4 was sort of boring until the last few chapters. When you read the book (because you will. It's well worth the read) and you get the end, you may feel different. This is just my opinion. I mean, the ending wasn't so boring that I fell asleep while reading, but it wasn't action packed. It was just a lot of description. 

That's basically what Taylor's writing is. Descriptive. I mean, yeah, that's great, being descriptive and all, but at times I just really want to read dialogue. At times I get real lazy and just glaze over the description. Again, just my opinion, but the descriptiveness could've been downplayed a bit. 

Other than that, her writing. Wow. It's so different from what I've ever read before. It was sort of refreshing, but it took a while to be used to. Taylor utilized her senses and turned them into writing, and I wasn't sure how to feel about that. Her style is so different from fluffy young adult romance novels, and it's just so strange to read such in depth writing. That doesn't mean that I didn't like it though. I liked it just fine. I just didn't love it. 

But what I did love was the characters. All of them. Every. Single. One. Even Karou's crazy hot ex-boyfriend Kaz. I loved him. Taylor just put so much life into all of her characters. They had reasons to do everything that they did, and I loved that. I know I'm contradicting what I just previously said, but the only character that didn't seemed to be lacking was Thiago. He just seemed to fall sort of flat, and I just had to look up his name on Goodreads, because I didn't remember it. I really hope that his personality and background is elaborated on in the next two books, because I feel that he has a lot of potential! 

To wrap this review up, I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed this book, and I have already gotten the second in the series. So I'm excited to read that, woo!