Daughter of Smoke and Bone by: Laini Taylor

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by: Laini Taylor
Published: September 27, 2011
Publisher: Little Brown
Page Count: 418 (324 on Nook)
Format: ebook
Series: Daughter of Smoke and Bone #1
Buy the Book: Amazon

Summary from Goodreads:

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?

My Review:

    I think it is beyond safe to say that this book makes my top five list of books for 2011. I kept sapping up the goodness of this book, I hardly realized I was speeding through it so fast!
   The books initial setting is in Prague, which is so awesome! I've never read a book set in such a place and it was amazing to read about it. This is only part of what hooked me from the beginning. Karou has blue hair that grows out of her head that way; awesome!
   The way Laini wrote this story really made me feel like I was watching it happen, which helped me envision the events of the story so much better. Questions blew up in my mind pretty much after the second chapter. Karou is my new favorite character name, I think. It will always remind me of how strong and resourceful she was, yet at the same time, she was concealing an emptiness inside her that no one and nothing ever seemed able to fill. She longed to know her own self, saddened that her only parent, Brimstone, wouldn't even allow her that truth. Towards the end, however, I come to admire Brimstone as one of my favorite pupils in the story.
   When Akiva enters the story, I basically knew that he was going to be the one to rid Karou of her loneliness. Still, when they met for the first time, it was amazing to behold. It was one of those moments when I saw myself three years into the future when the series has progressed a lot, and I would look back to the first book and think "Wow. They really didn't know what they were in for."
   The flashbacks to Madrigal's time kind of confused me at first, only because they were so much longer than usual flashbacks are in books. Then I began to realize what was going to happen and it made sense. The flashbacks helped me understand a lot and it was cool to see how the world of Elsewhere was outside of Karou's previous knowledge.
   I'm pretty sure I teared up a few times in this book, to be honest. There was so much deep, heavy emotion in parts and I had connected to the characters so well that I couldn't help it.