Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Karou leads an interesting life. She has blue hair, and tattoos of eyes on her hands that's she had ever since she remembers. She's an art student in Prague, but her family, so to speak, is in a shop that no one else can get into. It is manned by a fellow named Brimstone, who has the body of a man and the head of a ram.

In Daughter of Smoke and Bone, a young adult novel by Laini Taylor, Karou will eventually learn her origins, and discover that there has been a war waged for centuries between Brimstone and his kind, called the Chimerae, and angels, or Seraphim. In a development out of Romeo and Juliet, she will fall in love with an angel named Akiva, though when they first meet they battle each other.

The novel, though clearly intended for teenage girls, was a nice read, full of imagination. Brimstone is a wishmonger--people come to his shop to get wishes by exchanging teeth, and Karou doesn't know what he does with all those teeth. She runs errands for him, since the shop, which is in an otherworld, leads to several different cities.

Karou, being seventeen, has to deal with worldly problems like boys, and as the book begins has told no one about her foster family: "Karou was mysterious. she had no apparent family, she never talked about herself, and she was expert at evading questions--for all that her friends knew of her background, she might have sprung whole from the head of Zeus."

The first half of the book, when Karou and Akiva meet, is more interesting, as the payoff, which takes place in the Chimarae's world and reveals Karou's origins, doesn't quite meet expectations. The world is lovingly created, and we meet a Chimarae named Madrigal who has wings, the hooves and horns of a gazelle, but is also beautiful.

Taylor creates some lovely prose, though, and reading this book makes me want to go to Prague: "The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century--or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod with carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels."