Me on Daughter of Smoke & Bone

Title: Daughter of Smoke & Bone
Author: Laini Taylor
Release Date: September 27, 2011
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

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.

In Daughter of Smoke & Bone, Laini Taylor gifts us once again with a lush, dark, and fantastically magical fairy tale, a gorgeous mixture of old world magic in a present day setting. It's impossible to not be throw into Taylor's lyrical prose, to not tumble straight into the colourful world she has crafted.

Karou is a wonderfully crafted character. Intriguing and artistic, young and mature, human and magical. I could always imagine her blue hair whenever she was in a scene, like a waterfall streaming down over her shoulders. She's complicated, but it's a wonderful kind of complicated that made reading this book a joy.

It's not just the characters that make Laini Taylor's books a joy to read, it's also her world building. It took nothing for me to feel the chill of Prague in the wintertime, to envision the stone and the narrow streets and the small apartment and the unique cafés. And Morocco. And the shop with its jars of teeth. And the cathedrals and the history, such powerful history.

Fairy tales will always be around. This book will soon join them on the shelves. I could almost taste the magic, it streamed from the page to coat my fingers. I started to think in greys and blues, in shadows and secrets, in impossible creatures and hidden worlds and horns and wings. In the ancient and the forgotten and the hidden away, waiting for one day to be revealed once again.

I think this book broke my brain. All I can think about now is the rich history of Prague, the stone buildings packed tight with secrets, portals to other worlds scarred with handprints, jars of teeth, and a lonely girl with tattoos and bright blue hair.

I implore you, read this book for the pure joy of reading. Let it sweep you off your feet and dump you right into the heart of the most imaginative and darkly gorgeous book I've read (quite possibly ever).

(I received an advance copy of this book from a fellow blogger who picked it up for me at BEA11 this past spring.)