The Daughter of Smoke and Bone

by Laini Taylor
YAFic Tayl

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 otherworldly war.

I really liked the first part of the summary, which is the paragraph above, so I decided to give the book a shot after it appeared on several end of the year best lists. And there is a lot to love in this book which is the first book in a planned series. There isn't to many books that deal with a fantasy world of angels and demons, called chimera here, and those worlds are rather engaging. Other than that it is a book by numbers in the new vein of young adult literature.

The protagonist is a teenage girl named Karou, with pale skin and bright blue hair, she probably models a lot of the core readers who love this book. She is a talented artist, recently heartbroken, and lives a dangerous life fencing items for her caretaker. I would think most teens would relish the independence of living alone in a foreign city. The main problem with the book, which plagues many YA books, is that there is no rhyme or reason to the relationship that develops. Most of the feelings described are spent on how beautiful the characters are which gives the relationship a shallow depth and with the star crossed lovers aspect of the story comes into play, I had little feeling for their relationship or the final reveal at the end. For fans of Twilight and other books in the Paranormal Romance section at your local bookstore.