Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Me on Days of Blood & Starlight

Title: Days of Blood & Starlight
Author: Laini Taylor
Release Date: November 6, 2012
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (Hachette Book Group imprint)

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to dream of a world free of bloodshed and war. This is not that world. Art student and monster's apprentice Karou finally has the answers she's sought. She knows who she is... and what she is. But with this knowledge comes another truth she would give anything to undo: she loved the enemy and he betrayed her, and a world suffered for it. Now she has to decide how fall she will go to avenge her people, but while she and her allies build an army out of dust and starlight, an angel wages a different sort of battle. A battle for redemption, for hope, if hope can be salvaged from the ashes of a broken dream.

Like its predecessor, Days of Blood & Starlight is darkly magical, eerie, and dangerous. Pages filled with lyrical, descriptive prose show readers the after. After the handprints on the doors. After the explosions. After a tear ripped through the sky. So many questions race through the minds of readers. Where's Karou? Where's Akiva? Where's Brimstone? What will happen now, now that Karou knows who she is, where she came from? Will the world still be the world she knows when everything ends?

For Karou, she must determine her next course of action after traveling through the rift in the sky, but that all depends on what she finds there, if it be friend or foe, if she's capable of completing the task at hand. Everything is in the balance: her love of Brimstone and the chimaera, her love of her human friends, and her love for a certain angel.

For Akiva, his search for Karou, to discover whether she's alive or dead, is hampered by a larger task at hand. War is looming, and he will be forced to rejoin his angel brother and sister and the ranks of solders, forced to march on in an age-old battle, and forced to make a choice between his people and his love.

This book is dark, mysterious, and earthy, born from complicated dreams and sweet nightmares. A fantasy where monsters are human, where angels are monsters, where humans are magic, and deep down, everyone is the same, hoping for the same thing. A world to live in free from pain and terror where one can live peacefully with the ones they love most. If such a world exists for Karou and Akiva, their battle for that world will be long and hard, and my heart weeps at the journey they must take.

(I received an e-galley of this title to review from Hachette Book Group Canada through NetGalley.)

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