Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is about a beautiful, mysterious, blue haired, art student name Karou. In addition to being all of that, she also runs errands for monsters. Things are already pretty crazy in Karou's life, and things start to get even crazier when Karou crosses path with a mysterious and deadly winged man.

Laini Taylor is a dream. Her writing is flawless!

Now lets get into the book.

Writing:
Like I said, flawless! There were many times when I would just get lost in all of the pretty. Taylor is thrusting all of this information onto me, and I just keep getting sidetracked by "the shiny stuff".

Characters:
Karou is one of the coolest female protagonists that I have ever read about. Why? Simple, she is the only female protagonist that I just wanted to be. Like, I just want to be as cool as this mysterious, bad-assed, blue-haired chick. I have loved female protagonists before, but never have I just wanted to be them.

I am a bit iffy on Akiva. It is his fault that the story moves from an acceptable moderately slow pace to just rushing at my face, leaving me no time to breath. I mean seriously, One moment he is trying to kill Karou, and the next moment he is so in love with her that he is acting like a love sick idiot! I understand why, now, but at the time, it was all just going ridiculously fast. Don't get me wrong, I love his character, It just sort of felt like I was on one page, and he was a total hard ass, and I flip the page, and suddenly he is full of sap. But the sap was of a tasty flavor, so I forgive him.

Supporting characters, Love Love Love! Even before understanding Brimstone, every time he appeared, I just wanted to climb that beast and attack him with a bear hug. No matter how cold he could be or how much of a monster he looked, I just always saw this immense love behind everything he said and did. All the other supporting characters, I just fell in love with them, even if they had small parts, they had such big personalities.

Story & Plot:
Fantastic world building! Fast paced and fun to read. My only problem was that, about half way through the book, the story got a bit muddled because of the sudden romance, and then it just shot off without me. It was very jarring, and I couldn't help but wonder why things were happening so fast. But it did have me flipping the pages like a mad woman until the end. I also think that the first part of the book was cooler than the last part, even though the last part was much more exciting.

Basically:
I enjoyed reading this book a lot. It was fun and exciting and cool! I definitely recommend it to people who want a solid fantasy novel, but also want some romance. I loved it because it is a character driven story, with a bunch of awesome and cheesy things happening in between some mind blowing prose.

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