Daughter of Smoke & Bone

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor
Hachette Book Group - September 27, 2011
432 pages

Karou is a seventeen-year-old Prague art student that hasn't exactly led a normal life. Blue hair sprouts from her head, no dye required, and she's sent around the world to collect teeth for a group of chimaera, or creatures with attributes of both humans and animals. She has bullets in her stomach that she doesn't remember, as well as tattoos of eyes on the palms of her hands. She speaks nearly all human languages there are to offer. One one of her missions she finds an angel named Akiva, and the two of them help her discover a past life that has been long forgotten.

There is one major problem that I have with the book: it destroys Roman Catholicism and basicially all other religions with a concept of angels and/or devils. Basically, there are chimaera (devils) and seraphs (angels) that have no ties to God or Satan or any other deity because there are no deities outside of the goddesses Nitid and Ellai. Now, I'm fine with a nice pantheon or whatnot set in another world, but this actually tears apart true religion and labels it as wrong. That being said, the pace built wonderfully and the characters were rich. There were a few awkward one-sentence chapters, though, that some may enjoy but others, such as myself, found jarring.

Grade: B