Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor[/caption]Daughter of Smoke and Bone #1 by Laini Taylor
GOODREADS SUMMARY: 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?
Dear lord the first few pages of this book had me rolling my eyes. Apparently I missed the part where this was labeled "juvenile fiction." The main character has blue hair, speaks multiple languages, is a revered artist, and knows martial arts. Oh, did I mention she's also a teenager? The writing was overly dramatic and the author was more or less word humping her character.
Enter the girl's adoptive family -- a race of magical half-human half-animal creatures that collect human teeth -- and a gang of beautiful angels sent to destroy them. Suddenly the blue-haired, supernatural teenager started to seem rather normal.
But I'm glad I stuck with it (maybe because I was so curious what the the Chimera were doing with those teeth), because it turned out to be a pretty good book. It was difficult at first because I was treating the story as if it should abide by standards and norms of the real world, but as soon as I realized this was almost science fiction, those values fell away and things started making sense.
As a rational adult, I probably shouldn't like this book as much as I do. But when it ended rather abruptly, I was like "OH MY GOD!? IS THERE A SEQUEL YET? SHE BETTER BE WRITING ONE!"
(There is a sequel set for publication in the fall of 2012, thank God)
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