Daughter of Smoke and Bone

      Ah, the beauty of luscious and poetic writing. The most noticeable flaw is the writing is too good, it distracts me from the beauty of the characters.  

THE PLOT: 

      Daughter of Smoke and Bone is about a blue-haired teenage girl who's having a teenage crisis because her "parents" are taking chores to the extreme. And what I mean by extreme is collecting teeth, and not knowing what the hell would her "father" do with them. Her family isn't an ordinary family, they're called Chimera and they're basically hybrids of animals and humans. So, as all Young Adult novels go, she meets this dashing young man with unusual features that work along with his physique and assets. Akiva, the dashing young man, is also an angel.

What bothered me about this story is it slowed down drastically on the middle of the story, but it's a forgivable mistake.

THE CHARACTERS: 

       At first I thought Karou would be usually like the normal teen artist girl who draws her characters on a moleskin sketchpad, but boy was I wrong. Karou had more layers to her character than I thought she would. She's funny, she's sassy, she's sweet, she's everything I would want in a girl. But she's also unforgiving, spiteful, and she had an unyielding love for anyone she's attached to, and god knows what she'll do to you if you hurt anyone of them.

Akiva is a weird character. I had to say it. I love his character, but he's amazingly weird because no one uses the vulnerable archetype character as one of the main leads. It's usually the mysterious badass, but in this case, it isn't. It's a guy who shows his vulnerability to anyone he cares about. He's one of the most damaged male leads I've ever encountered in a YA novel. And he's also incredibly smart.

The rest of the supporting cast worked well with the story; Mik and Zuzanna were the perfect comic relief for such a broodingly dark story, Brimstone and the other characters were beautifully made, Liraz and Hazael were what the kind of angels the book promised from the point wherein they showed up in the story.

What I had a problem with is the villain. Thiago wasn't exactly a compelling villain, I can't find any reason for him to be murderous aside from his pride the size of Loramendi. He bores me, and I hate him in a negative way.

THE SETTING: 

Do I need to say more? 

THE WRITING: 

Like I said earlier, it was perfect. Too perfect and often it distracts me from the point of the story. 

OVERALL: 

It had a few innovative elements, but I find it amazing because of the characters, and the twists and turns. Ms. Taylor needs to work on her pacing a little more.