Hey my lovelies, today's review is of Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor, after receiving this series for my birthday, I decided to finally pick it up whilst on a weekend break. And I have to say even though I am writing this review, I'm not exactly sure how I feel about the book. As I did not particularly love it, but I didn't dislike it either. It was simply alright. And that is never really a good thing to say in a book review, as overall I found the book meh. However, I have been told by quite a few people that they didn't find the first book all that interesting, but fell in love with the second book, so I am willing to persevere with the series.
Author: Laini Taylor
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Pub. Date: September 27th 2011
Date Read: Wednesday 1st June 2016
Pages: 418
Rating:3.5/5 stars
Summary: 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. 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 beautiful, haunted Akiva fixes fiery 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?
Overview
Daughter of Smoke and Bone follows Korou living her life as a art student and as a monsters apprentice, whilst trying to figure out how everything links in her life, as well as who and what she is. To be honest, I didn't think the book was going to go in the direction it did, I thought it was about a girl who was the daughter of a angel and demon, and it was her figuring it out and saving the world, instead it was the opposite and had nothing to do what I thought.
Writing
For me there was something missing in the writing, I am not exactly sure what it is, but there is definitely something missing. And this has nothing to do with it being in third person, as I personally like third person and prefer it over first.
Characters
Korou is our main character and has the predominant main role through out the book. She seemed very unsure of herself at the beginning, as she was not very confident when dealing with certain characters, as she almost lied to the reader and pretended like she didn't know what was going on, when she did know what was going on, if that makes sense. This made me feel very deceived as a reader and not in a good way, like some psychological thrillers made me feel that I read last year. This made me distrust the character and then throughout the novel, I disliked more and more of the choices she ended up making.
Akiva is the love interest of Karou, and has a few chapters with him in the main role. I personally found him quite annoying as I think he was made to make us sympathize with him, and even though we get to know his backstory, I felt I didn't get to know him and his personality, which I would have much preferred.
I personally thought that a few characters seemed to get dropped as soon as they were found uneccesary and then never mentioned again, which I didn't like, as I now have no idea why they were added to the book in the first place. Examples of this include the the best friend and the ex-boyfriend.
Relationships
In preparation of what to write in my review I have checked out various other reviews and most of them didn't think that what Karou and Akiva had was insta-love, but for me it definitely was, and they went from practically trying to kill each other to wanting to be together, and to me that is simply insta-love and right now, I am not a fan of it. As a lot of the books I have been reading recently have had it, and I personally love a good slow burn story, where the characters only get together later on once everything is fully developed.
Conclusion
Overall, this book is a strong 3.5 to me, mainly because I didn't dislike it or particularly love it either, so I'm going to stick it in the middle and hope for the best with the rest of the trilogy.
Would I Recommend this....
Yes, mainly because I have been told that the sequel is amazing. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys books with the classic angel vs. demon/devil story line.
Book Links
Please note that some of these opinions could change once I have read the rest of the books in the series, as these could make some of the decisions made in the book make more sense, and could cause me to enjoy the book more. Thank you for reading my lovelies, this is it for this week, if you would like to see more of what I am currently reading you can check me out on Goodreads, Instagram and Twitter.
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