Review: Daughter of Smoke And Bone by Laini Taylor

Book: Daughter of Smoke And Bone by Laini Taylor

Pages: 418

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy

Source: Library

Summary:

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?

--From Goodreads.

My Thoughts: I originally wasn't going to pick up this novel, because it seemed like a fantasy/science fiction novel, which if many of you have been following my blog, already know that I can't stand. But this book was going around like wildfire in the blogosphere that it was kind of hard to ignore, so I decided to see what the fuss was all about, and to try to expand from my comfort zone.

Unfortunately, about 35 pages into the novel, I had to call it quits. One of my major pet peeves is authors that make up weird names, or names that don't look quite right due to spelling, and weird names being popped up more than once, which was one of the main reasons I couldn't get into this novel. Names like Zuzana, Karou, and Kazimir, immediately through me off. Weird names aside, I tried to trudge on reading, giving the author the benefit of the doubt, but alas, I was sorely disappointed.

It didn't really make sense that Karou had a necklace that could "grant a wish" that could make people do things they didn't want to do, and that Karou had a world all to herself with more characters with more weird names and was able to travel all around the world with a blink of an eye. When these type of stories start to unravel, maybe I just don't have the imagination it requires, but my eyes just seem to glaze over and can't really complete the story.

The only thing that seemed mildly entertaining to me was the relationship between Karou and her ex-boyfriend Kazimir. And I don't know if it's just me, but Taylor seemed to have copied a bit from another author, Gabrielle Zevin, with "All These Things I've Done" with the whole boyfriend scene and the male character taking over the art class as a model. Though rather amusing, both scenes seemed creepily familiar. Over all, I would not recommend this book for readers who can't get into the fantasy genre.

Rating: I give this book a DNF.