skygiants

Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone is one of those books that I can pretty easily split into Bits I Really Liked and Bits I Cared About Not At All.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is about a Prague art student named Karou who has brilliant artistic talent and natural bright blue hair and is excellent at all languages and if all this seems too good to be true, it's because she is actually the ward-and-errand-girl of a magical creature who pays her in small wishes that she can use to, you know, be magically good at languages or turn her hair naturally blue.

Karou has:
- an awesome puppetry student BFF named Zuzana who makes giant reverse puppet shows and calls her constantly on disappearing and being generally cryptic: great! ALL ABOUT THIS. Would read the book that was just Karou and Zuzana being art school bffs SO HARD
- a complicated and deep and super interesting relationship with her magical chimera family: yes! found families with complex things going on with loyalty and trust, yes, I am there
- a secret past involving an interesting fantasy world that deals with institutionalized oppression and war atrocities: can get on board with this

Karou also has:
- a DESTINED STAR-CROSSED LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT WITH THE ENEMY OF HER PEOPLE, A SEXY ANGEL WITH A TORMENTED PAST: oh, man. I tried, I really did! But I found it . . . impossible to care . . .

I also do not know how I feel about the prose, which is sort of overwrought in a way that I think is deliberate but I also found sort of distancing. I kind of want this story to be a manga. It would be an AWESOME manga. Angels and chimerae and shadowy Prague landscapes and giant puppets and lush visuals everywhere! (PAGING KAORI YUKI.)

And I did not love ( spoilers )

Still trying to decide whether to read the next one; the trouble is that mostly I just want the Zuzana Chronicles.