Book Review – Daughter Of Smoke And Bone

by Laini Taylor (Hodder & Stoughton) ISBN: 9781444722635

Karou is the beautiful girl with the blue hair who doesn’t belong. She doesn’t know where she comes from and nobody will tell her. She lives in two worlds, ‘Elsewhere’ and Earth. She runs errands for Brimstone, who raised her, and lives as a 17-year-old art student in Prague for the rest.

Enter Akiva, the angel who wants to kill her. But he’s smitten as he observes, “It was like stepping into the pages of a book – a book alive with colour and fragrance, filth and chaos – and the blue-haired girl moved through it all like a fairy through a story, the light treating her differently than it did others, the air seeming to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place were a story about her.”

The doors to ‘Elsewhere’ are closing. Karou has to find out who she is, and what her destiny is. The novel is beautifully written. Taylor weaves words with myths with dreams. However, I found she lost me in the last third of the book when things became too unbelievable. Even for this book.