Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

title: Daughter of Smoke and Bone
written by: Laini Taylor
series: Daughter of Smoke and Bone #1
pagecount: 417
genre: young adult, urban fantasy
publication date: September 27th, 2011
publisher: Little Brown

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?

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. And it did not end well.

The extremely promising first sentence of this book was absolutely worth the book. Never before had I seen a book that got so much positive attention on blogs before. I just started reading blogs, and the whole blogosphere was buzzing about this book. Everyone read it, everyone loved it. And now I have read it too. And -not so very astonishing - I fell in love with it.


The story, set in the mysterious city of Prague and in 'Elsewhere' hypnotised me. I couldn't put it down until I had finished it. I didn't eat, drink or sleep for a couple of hours, and if breathing wasn't mandate I wouldn't have. It was interesting, beautifully written, a wonderful female protagonist and a very mysterious romance. Also, there were angels and demons, need I say more?


Karou, the main characters, belongs in my list of favorite female protagonists of all time. She has a very annoying ex-boyfriend who is 'stalking' her, but she doesn't care. Ex-boyfriend Kaz 'Jackass' will do anything to win back Karou's love. But he just might go a little bit -or way- too far. Still, Kaz was not a stereotype stalker ex-boyfriend. He was acting very humorous all the time, and was acting like a friend and jackass at the same time. All the time. And that's what makes him crazy Kaz, someone I would love to meet someday, no matter if in real life or a dream. And then there was Akiva, the wonderful angel. -Akiva, will you please marry me?- I absolutely fell in love with him and his way of thinking and acting. Still, I had a hard time figuring out him. Is he the good one or the bad one? To me, he was neither black nor white. He was gray, something in between.


Karou herself is a very complicated character. She is a helper of Brimstone, a demon who collects teeth. She collects the teeth for Brimstone, but has no idea why. For the teeth, Karou gets rewarded with wishes she can use for herself. There are small, not valuable, wishes, but there also are bigger ones, that can give you a long and healthy life, or something else. Once, she had wished for blue hair, and she got it. Never has she dyed it agian. Blue hair is one of the things that totally belongs with Karou's character. Karou is a strong, independent girl, but who is she actually? Karou is about to find out the reality about herself and the world.
The plot of this book is very complicated at the beginning. But then everything starts to unravel, and you figure it all out, sentence by sentence. The closer you come to the ending of the book, the more you understand it. I didn't have a clue about the ending of this book when I was halfway, and that's amazing. I don't like it when a book is very predictable. The setting was perfect for this book, as were the character names. They fit all of them so well!


If you haven't read this book already you totally should read it sometime -very- soon!!


I give this book 5 stars!
xo Mar