Review summary: The stunning originality that YA often promises but mostly doesn't deliver
Official summary
“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?”
Review
Wow, what a book. When it comes to popular YA books “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” is a title I’d heard so many times over the years (it was released in 2011) that when I finally decided to dive in to that long, long list of titles, I don’t think I even read the summary. And I’m glad I didn’t, because going in to this book totally blind, with no preconceived notions of what to expect, made it all the more thrilling a journey. In a genre of fiction rife with recycled, uninspired, and underdeveloped premises, plots, and worlds - Daughter of Smoke and Bone creates a totally unique and intricate world and meticulously renders it to the reader with detail and care. So much so, that I don’t want to even slightly spoil any more of it than you may already know from the summary, if you haven’t read this book. The rest of this review is all spoilers, so go read the book and then come back, if you feel so inclined.
Mild spoilers follow. Major spoilers are inside spoiler tags.
I loved everything about the world-building and characters. Even after my warning above I still feel the need to be as unspoliery as possible on these two fronts, among the most original and fantastic I have read in fiction, and I feel that I don’t have anything unique enough to say about them that warrants listing all of their secrets here.
On the setting, I will say: I love stories set in our world but with magical elements, rather than being plunged headfirst into a fantasy world and trying to get a grip on that brand new setting at the same time you’re learning the plot and characters. So while I was mildly disappointed this novel didn’t stay as a story set in our world with magical elements, the progression from our world with magic to the land of Eretz filled with Chimera and Angels was well-handled, taking what we expected and twisting it into something else entirely.
Helping to bring such interesting and unique characters and settings to life was Taylor’s gorgeous prose. Taylor writes in such a descriptive and emotional way that no moment felt dull or pointless. It made her characters accessible, her fantastic creations believable, the relationships deep and moving. The only time I had any problem with the prose was during fight scenes, intentionally written in short bursts of sentences to create a sense of action that I instead found stilted and repetitive.
The book often teeters on the line between original and quirky~. If you have a decent familiarity with the Young Adult genre you’ll know what I mean by “quirky~”. If not...count yourself lucky. The quirky~ aspect of this novel is, at least, not of the standard variety where the protagonist actually tells us how quirky~ they are and that they have no friends because of it - they’re just too unique for other people (high probability it’s actually because they’re insufferable). Rather, Taylor wants to create something unique, something with original details, its very own atmosphere that sets it apart. If you want your novel to be different then straying into cringe territory is just a risk you have to run. I’d rather author’s take that risk and create something unique, though a little cringey every now and then, than create something that plays it safe and, as a result, is something we’ve all seen before.
So if you find yourself rolling your eyes at how different and mysterious~ Karou is in the first couple of chapters, push on; there’s a good reason for all of it.
As delightfully original as Daughter of Smoke and Bone is, it does fall into cliche in one very major area. And the fall is, unfortunately, a very hard one.
The grand romance of Karou and Akiva is just...well, here’s a brief summary of what it had me thinking a lot of the time:
Karou or Akiva: *says they love the other*
Me: “Ya’ll just met!!!”
The scourge of the Young Adult genre…instalove.
Everyone has their own time period in which two characters falling in love is considered “instalove”, based on your perceptions and experiences with love. If they fall in love the very first time they meet - it doesn’t get any quicker than that: definitely instalove. The second time: hardly any better. A week: I hardly even notice one passing. A month: I’ve procrastinated making phone calls longer than that, that ain’t enough time to fall in love! Personally anything less than seeing each other regularly for like...6 months is too soon for me, but I can recognize that a novel has certain time constraints and make allowances.
Unfortunately for Karou and Akiva, love was in the air literally the second time they met, which I absolutely cannot make allowances for.
There is, however, a twist to this relationship.
If the narrative had just eased up on the perfect, all consuming, world-altering nature of their love based on a relationship without much substance, I wouldn’t have minded so much. I do actually like them together, after all. Although they’re an angel and a ‘devil’ and therefore operating on a grander plane than we mere mortals, and there’s a destiny~ element to their love emphasized throughout not just this novel, but the rest of the series - a boy and a girl meeting and falling in love immediately and going to drastic lengths for each other is one of the oldest tales there is, and so many of us are just BORED of it. BORED!!! It honestly pains me to lower the rating of this book purely because of the romance, because that’s how much I loved it anyway. But all that creativity and originality just serves to make such a cliche standout and disappoint even more. I recently found out that Taylor even does the exact same thing in her next novel series, that is otherwise spectacular. Why, Laini? WHY???
As an added bonus, not only is “X of Y and Z” such an overdone title construction by now, but many authors also use this and similar constructions with a bunch of flowery words that don’t actually mean anything important to the story, world, or characters. I fully expected that to be the case here, so when Karou turned out to LITERALLY be the daughter of smoke and bone I was STOKED for a title that actually had significance.
While I don’t want to go into them in depth and they weren’t major sources of trouble for me, I did have a few issues with issues that affect female characters. The attitudes towards virginity were very “old-fashioned”, and I found the scenes of Madrigal, being forced into sexualised clothing a situations she was deeply uncomfortable with being portrayed as okay because her “friends” were the ones forcing her, also very uncomfortable for me reading them.
Overall this review is useless, but the book is amazing. For all the YA books that claim to do something new and amazing but do nothing of the sort, this one certainly fulfills its promise. I greatly look forward to finishing the series and reading Taylor’s future work.
Weaker points:
Romance
Corniness (slight)
Problematic elements (slight)
Pacing (slight)
Stronger points:
Character
Plot
Prose
World building
Originality
Atmosphere
Settings
Content/age appropriateness warnings: character death, non-explicit torture, implied/non-explicit sex, war, injury/blood etc, and lots and lots of teeth (I’ve come across more than a few people entirely grossed out by them lol)
“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?”
Review
Wow, what a book. When it comes to popular YA books “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” is a title I’d heard so many times over the years (it was released in 2011) that when I finally decided to dive in to that long, long list of titles, I don’t think I even read the summary. And I’m glad I didn’t, because going in to this book totally blind, with no preconceived notions of what to expect, made it all the more thrilling a journey. In a genre of fiction rife with recycled, uninspired, and underdeveloped premises, plots, and worlds - Daughter of Smoke and Bone creates a totally unique and intricate world and meticulously renders it to the reader with detail and care. So much so, that I don’t want to even slightly spoil any more of it than you may already know from the summary, if you haven’t read this book. The rest of this review is all spoilers, so go read the book and then come back, if you feel so inclined.
Mild spoilers follow. Major spoilers are inside spoiler tags.
I loved everything about the world-building and characters. Even after my warning above I still feel the need to be as unspoliery as possible on these two fronts, among the most original and fantastic I have read in fiction, and I feel that I don’t have anything unique enough to say about them that warrants listing all of their secrets here.
On the setting, I will say: I love stories set in our world but with magical elements, rather than being plunged headfirst into a fantasy world and trying to get a grip on that brand new setting at the same time you’re learning the plot and characters. So while I was mildly disappointed this novel didn’t stay as a story set in our world with magical elements, the progression from our world with magic to the land of Eretz filled with Chimera and Angels was well-handled, taking what we expected and twisting it into something else entirely.
Helping to bring such interesting and unique characters and settings to life was Taylor’s gorgeous prose. Taylor writes in such a descriptive and emotional way that no moment felt dull or pointless. It made her characters accessible, her fantastic creations believable, the relationships deep and moving. The only time I had any problem with the prose was during fight scenes, intentionally written in short bursts of sentences to create a sense of action that I instead found stilted and repetitive.
The book often teeters on the line between original and quirky~. If you have a decent familiarity with the Young Adult genre you’ll know what I mean by “quirky~”. If not...count yourself lucky. The quirky~ aspect of this novel is, at least, not of the standard variety where the protagonist actually tells us how quirky~ they are and that they have no friends because of it - they’re just too unique for other people (high probability it’s actually because they’re insufferable). Rather, Taylor wants to create something unique, something with original details, its very own atmosphere that sets it apart. If you want your novel to be different then straying into cringe territory is just a risk you have to run. I’d rather author’s take that risk and create something unique, though a little cringey every now and then, than create something that plays it safe and, as a result, is something we’ve all seen before.
So if you find yourself rolling your eyes at how different and mysterious~ Karou is in the first couple of chapters, push on; there’s a good reason for all of it.
As delightfully original as Daughter of Smoke and Bone is, it does fall into cliche in one very major area. And the fall is, unfortunately, a very hard one.
The grand romance of Karou and Akiva is just...well, here’s a brief summary of what it had me thinking a lot of the time:
Karou or Akiva: *says they love the other*
Me: “Ya’ll just met!!!”
The scourge of the Young Adult genre…instalove.
Everyone has their own time period in which two characters falling in love is considered “instalove”, based on your perceptions and experiences with love. If they fall in love the very first time they meet - it doesn’t get any quicker than that: definitely instalove. The second time: hardly any better. A week: I hardly even notice one passing. A month: I’ve procrastinated making phone calls longer than that, that ain’t enough time to fall in love! Personally anything less than seeing each other regularly for like...6 months is too soon for me, but I can recognize that a novel has certain time constraints and make allowances.
Unfortunately for Karou and Akiva, love was in the air literally the second time they met, which I absolutely cannot make allowances for.
There is, however, a twist to this relationship.
If the narrative had just eased up on the perfect, all consuming, world-altering nature of their love based on a relationship without much substance, I wouldn’t have minded so much. I do actually like them together, after all. Although they’re an angel and a ‘devil’ and therefore operating on a grander plane than we mere mortals, and there’s a destiny~ element to their love emphasized throughout not just this novel, but the rest of the series - a boy and a girl meeting and falling in love immediately and going to drastic lengths for each other is one of the oldest tales there is, and so many of us are just BORED of it. BORED!!! It honestly pains me to lower the rating of this book purely because of the romance, because that’s how much I loved it anyway. But all that creativity and originality just serves to make such a cliche standout and disappoint even more. I recently found out that Taylor even does the exact same thing in her next novel series, that is otherwise spectacular. Why, Laini? WHY???
As an added bonus, not only is “X of Y and Z” such an overdone title construction by now, but many authors also use this and similar constructions with a bunch of flowery words that don’t actually mean anything important to the story, world, or characters. I fully expected that to be the case here, so when Karou turned out to LITERALLY be the daughter of smoke and bone I was STOKED for a title that actually had significance.
While I don’t want to go into them in depth and they weren’t major sources of trouble for me, I did have a few issues with issues that affect female characters. The attitudes towards virginity were very “old-fashioned”, and I found the scenes of Madrigal, being forced into sexualised clothing a situations she was deeply uncomfortable with being portrayed as okay because her “friends” were the ones forcing her, also very uncomfortable for me reading them.
Overall this review is useless, but the book is amazing. For all the YA books that claim to do something new and amazing but do nothing of the sort, this one certainly fulfills its promise. I greatly look forward to finishing the series and reading Taylor’s future work.
Weaker points:
Romance
Corniness (slight)
Problematic elements (slight)
Pacing (slight)
Stronger points:
Character
Plot
Prose
World building
Originality
Atmosphere
Settings
Content/age appropriateness warnings: character death, non-explicit torture, implied/non-explicit sex, war, injury/blood etc, and lots and lots of teeth (I’ve come across more than a few people entirely grossed out by them lol)
