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| Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1) by Laini Taylor |
"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?"
Rating:
I had to pause after the first part of it and read another book because I felt like the book wasn’t getting anywhere. Karou’s life just felt so plain and uneventful then comes Akiva talking about a girl named Madrigal where I just found him to be a grieving-and-now-heartless, dark angel-ish guy, since his stance didn’t seem so angelic to me. I don’t find anything interesting with their lives except the inhuman creatures that raised Karou. And that didn’t even suffice to let me find this a gripping book.
So when I finally picked it up again, that’s when I realized that the good parts begin in the middle. So I regretted the fact that I thought this was boring and I managed to breeze off through the pages since then.
But then I got to the part where Madrigal came into picture. It was a touching story and it sums up all the things that happened with Karou and Akiva, but again, it was just too long. Yes I cried a bit and empathized but the story could’ve been contained into a few pages or so but not THAT much pages to nearly eat up the rest of the book so close to the ending. It was just too many pages wasted for a… flashback (sorry for the spoiler but I couldn’t find any other word for it).
I’m a little disappointed about not exactly finding this book as awesome as I thought it would be from how others raved off about it. I just feel like the writing has gone over the top. The story was simple enough to understand, and I think there were just too many stopovers before it got to the point of it all.
But I’d have say that the story is praiseworthy. Its otherworldly-ness (for the lack of a better word) is fascinating; and the idea of a never-ending war between two worlds and how deeply Karou and Akiva have been tangled within it feels like an ethereal Romeo and Juliet tragedy with an even deeper twist and misfortune.
