Review - Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

Holy shit you guys, this book is crazy. It’s like a literary fun house full of wacky mirrors and all that other creepy weird shit.

Honestly, Taylor be messing with your mind.

Here’s the crack – Karou is your average girl. If your average girl lives in Prague, is faux adopted by Chimaera (half human half animal creatures) and is an art student with blue hair. She is kind of an errand girl, in the sense that she opens doors in one country and walks through to another. She is an artist, in the sense that she likes to draw monsters that are real but not, depending on whom you ask. Her dad aka the scarylicious Brimstone, owns a shop that deals in teeth and wishes. And he’s not a dentist before you ask (nope, not a tooth fairy either, he’s called Brimstone people). Karou doesn’t know what daddy’o does with the teeth or why he needs them so badly or why she lives in a shop with an array of weird and wonderful peoplecreatures. Then, if all this teeth and wishes business wasn’t enough, Akiva decides to rock into the joint. And he’s about to cause a big kerfuffle since he’s a seraph soilder who knows WAY too much about Karou and her past than even she does. DRAMA!

Okay, that’s enough on the plotline. Don’t want to be spoiling what is for sure possibly one of the best books I have EVER read. I KNOW! Let me tell you, Taylor has honed her craft so much it’s a bit hard to wrap my floaty little head around. The word building is INTENSE. Her descriptions are so vivid and lush, so mind bendingly atmospheric and just so serene and lovely. Like a holiday to exotic places all in the pages of one book. It was in a word; electrifying.

Taylor works the prose better than I work the cocktail shaker on a Saturday night. Honestly, it was powerful stuff (not unlike my cocktails!) and so lovely and rather peaceful, because even though the story was a bit freaky and intense, it was SO lovely to read something so gorgeously written that the pages melted away and it all became this one giant love-fest of good writing and weird peoplecreatures. And she deals with this complex storyline in a way that was so seamless yet forceful at the same time. It also has the forbidden romance y’all and it reaches “wear your old pants in case they start a-melting” hotness levels.

Taylor is a genius. A word ninja. For sure.