Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Around the world, black handprints 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 speak 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.

-book jacket

When this book started, I was excited to read about monsters and angels. It started out really good and then slowly became bad-ish. I’m not saying it’s not a TERRIBLE book, I enjoyed it. It’s just that once I got into the middle, I kind of became uninterested.

The author developed the world Karou was in very well. It isn’t that original, but the rest of the story (the ending) pretty much made up for it. I was so glad that she didn’t have an information dump where she spent paragraphs explaining everything.

It wasn’t like those fantasy books where the character finds out about their super powers or whatever and then those “professional” people explain everything (I count that as information dumps BTW).

Things became more interesting when the angel people (I’m pretty sure they had names but I forgot.) began putting their hand print mark to “stop the war”. I expected the author to go a little deeper into this, but I was disappointed. The author did somewhat go into it, but not as much as I would have liked.

Instead, the story was more about Akiva and Karou feeling those feelings. Most of the book I feel, was about them. Yeah, romance and stuff whatever. Now where is my war and death and fighting?  Where is the deep pain and emotion?

I feel that even the romance was kind of, whoa…random. Sure they had their little connection because Karou is Madrigal and Akiva loved her. BUT when Akiva and Madrigal meet at that ball, they start kissing each other? They only met ONCE before that and I’m pretty sure they met months ago? Talk about love at first sight….literally… (Give us some development here!!)

Now this book is a series and I feel like the next book is going to be all: agony, I want him, I can’t have her, you’re all I think about, blah blah blah. I HAVE ALREADY SUFFERED THROUGH THIS TOO MANY TIMES IN YA NOVELS. (*cough cough* City of Ashes especially)

AND LOVE TRIANGLE THING. They go find their new love or whatever but they’re not really into it. YEAH PLEASE DON’T MAKE THIS HAPPEN IN THE NEXT BOOK.

It was actually an okay story. I know I talk a lot about the bad things, but I did enjoy reading it.

4/5.