Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

[Alycia Bailey]

Karou is a seventeen year old artist in Prague with blue hair and tattoos who compulsively tells the truth. She will tell you, with a wry smile, that her hair grows that colour naturally, that her tattoos have always been there, that she travels the world to buy teeth from strangers and does errands for her demonic adoptive father, Brimstone, and that she can make her wishes come true.

One day a stranger catches sight of her in a middle-eastern marketplace as she haggles with a graverobber and suddenly she has the answers to all her questions at her fingertips.

 

I couldn't put this book down, and found myself almost missing several buses and bus stops. I finally finished it in my hotel room while on holidays, blankly refusing to go outside and see the sights or to sleep, until I'd finished my book.

 

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a brilliant concept that brings in some major mythology and tries to challenge your ideas of good and evil as well as beauty and war.

The images of the city of Prague made me want to visit. And the rest of the prose is magical and heartfelt:

"This, she thought, isn’t just for today. It’s for everything. For the heartache that still felt like a punch in the gut each time it struck, fresh as new, at unpredictable moments; for the smiling lies and the mental images she couldn’t shake; for the shame of having been so naive.

For the way loneliness is worse when you return to if after a reprieve – like the soul’s version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable."

 

The UK website has some pretty neat videos, so if you want to know more, go there. http://www.daughterofsmokeandbone.co.uk/