Daughter of Smoke & 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 grown dangerously low.
And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly 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 one of the strangers—beautiful, haunted Akiva—fixes his fire-colored 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?
- Release Date: September 27th 2011
- Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
- Author's web site
*Spoilers ahead, beware!
I feel very conflicted about this book; there were parts that I loved
and parts that I really didn’t like AT ALL.
The story kicks off pretty good Karou is an art student living in Prague
and she does all the things the young people do, she goes to school, she goes
out to lunch, she tries to have fun and somewhere along the way she gets
heart-broken. But Karou is leading a double life and although she is filling
her friends’ ears with lies nobody seems to notice or mind.
Karou has been raised by a chimaera family, the head of the family is
Brimstone (a.k.a the Whishmonger) and she is running errands for him,
collecting teeth from all over the world. While she is in Marrackesh she runs
into serious trouble….with the name Akiva!!!
“A furious energy built up in her, and more than ever before she was
plagued by that phantom sense that she was meant to be doing something else.
Something else. Something else. Something else.”
Akiva is a seraphim soldier, an avenging angel who is trying to close
Brimstone’s shop. He is a closed up instrument of death with not a drop of
comparison for the chimaera or their friends.
“I exist only because of war- a war that began a thousand years ago with
a massacre of my people. Babies, elders, no one spared. In Astrae, the capital
of the Empire, the Chimaera rose up to massacre the seraphim. We are enemies
because the chimaera are monsters. My life is blood because my world is
beasts.”
When Karou and Akiva meet sparks fly all over the place!!!! ….and that’s
about the point were, in my opinion, everything went wrong.
The world building gets very complicated and very detailed, Akiva has a
big change of heard and Karou is Karou-no-more!!!! I got lost in POV’s, I got
lost in flashbacks and I definitely didn’t want to know all of Thiego’s kinks!!!!
But my absolutely least favorite moment is the Chimaera masked ball…….I have no
words, really!
I must admit that I’m no big fan of YA but because I’ve read some really
awesome reviews I was willing to compromise for this book but what sealed the
deal was the CLIFFHANGER ENDING.
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