Review: "Daughter of Smoke and Bone" by Laini Taylor

Hodder, 2011. 418 pages.
Rating: ★★★★ (4 stars)
Source: Uckfield Library

I finished Daughter of Smoke and Bone at about quarter to midnight last night. This book has held me captive all week and is a beautiful, breath-taking read from start to finish. It is a tale of hope, love and betrayal, wishes and war. The writing is delightful and the plot is wonderfully paced and fascinating, set within a stunningly original world.

The central character is Karou, a seventeen-year-old art student living in Prague. Leading a secret "hither-and-tither girl" existence, running errands for the wishmonger Brimstone, Karou is a mystery even to herself. She is filled with questions: Who is she and where did she come from? Why is she "plagued by the sensation that she isn't whole"? As a result, a feeling of haunting loneliness is built up around Karou...

"More than ever, she was the hollow girl, the emptiness seeming like an entity, malicious, taunting her with all the things she would never know." (pg. 175)

This loneliness, manages not to descend into the realm of the mopey, however. When she finds herself cut off from "Elsewhere" and the only family she has ever known, Karou fights to find her way back. She is always seeking, always pushing for answers, even when the the truths she finds are full of pain. The discovery of her true identity is both beautiful and heart-breaking. I really liked the way this part of the book was written, as a slow unfolding of a hidden past and lost love.

At the same time, we are also immersed further into the strange world of Eretz, ravaged by a centuries-long war between the seraphim and the fascinating, beast-like chimaera. I loved exploring this world, which sprang from the pages feeling fully-formed, with its own mythology, magic and a very bloody history. The love story in this book is set against this backdrop of war, pain and impossible hopes. It is bitter-sweet, very "star-crossed lovers". While romance isn't normally my cup of tea, in this tale it is entangled with something epically larger than just two people in love, which gave it an extra sprinkling of tragedy.
I read this book oblivious to any hype surrounding it, for which I am glad. That way, I could slip into this world without the hindrance of preconceptions. The edition of the book I read includes a short essay from Laini Taylor entitled Why I Wrote Daughter of Smoke and Bone, in which she states:

"The books I love are still the ones that... make me want to climb inside them and live in them. Those are the kind of books I try to write."

On the whole, I feel that she certainly achieved that sensation with this book. The pages drip with wonder and Karou's world sparkles with enticement. This is the kind of book in which the reader can journey into other worlds and other lives. It has left me wanting to explore further, and I will certainly be hunting down a copy of the second book in this trilogy (Days of Blood and Starlight) very soon.