Days of Blood & Starlight - Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #2)

I was so excited to read this sequel to Daughter of Smoke and Bone after devouring that first book.  Taylor had built up such a wonderous world and conflict, and I loved the reincarnation premise that the romance revolved around.  It was all right up my alley.  But with so much deliciousness in the first book, I was apprehensive that the second volume would fall victim to the dreaded "second book syndrome."  Did it?

Well...kind of.  This is a book in which not a heck of a lot actually happens, at least on one half the book.  Karou has found a place for the surviving chimera to live, a kasbah in Morocco, and has taken up Brimstone's mantel as a resurrectionist in hopes of reviving her shattered people.  On the other side, Akiva has returned to Eretz and the other seraphim, convinced that Karou is dead after finding a thurible with her name on it in his search for her.  Meanwhile, Karou's friend Zuzana and her boyfriend Mik are in search of Karou themselves, following what they think is a string of clues Karou left in a single email she sent letting them know she was still alive.

There's not a lot of forward motion in this book.  Karou never really leaves the kasbah, and Akiva spends a lot of time pining and talking about revolution before he decides to actually do anything.  The thing is, that didn't seem to actually matter in this book.  Taylor's writing remains so lush and riveting that even though the forward motion was minimal, I kept reading because I wanted to know more about these characters.  And their inner struggles also progressed here; for Karou, she wants to help bring her people back and turn the tide against the seraphim, but becomes increasingly aware of the price that might bear.  For Akiva, it's pretty much the same thing--and so, once again, Karou and Akiva are facing exile from their peoples.  It's a tale as old as time, Romeo and Juliet on steroids, except...well, Karou gets into that "except" herself.  And while this book was a bit slow in overall pace, it was still evenly paced, unlike the first book which had a good first two-thirds and then a lopsided and slow final third.  I was glad to see that more even pacing throughout, and felt that, even though this wasn't a "fast" book, it didn't fall prey to the typical symptoms of second book syndrome.  Of course, everything is still ultimately set up for the third book, which is the fate of all second books in trilogies, and at the end everything has truly gone to hell in a handbasket--but that's for the next installment to deal with.

Overall, absolutely lovely still.  Not quite as vibrant as the first, but with better pacing and still a very solid story, and with a great setup for the third book.

4 stars out of 5.

Dreams of Gods & Monsters - Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3)

I was so excited to dive in to the last book of this trilogy, but also apprehensive, because the second book was not as magical as the first, and I was concerned about the third following in that path.  And there's the rub: I was right to be apprehensive.

With seraphim invading the human world, our heroine Karou and hero Akiva find themselves trying to force the remaining Misbegotten seraphim and a paltry bunch of chimaera to get along long enough to save both Earth and Eretz.  But here's the thing...Taylor can't seem to be satisfied with that as a plot.  Instead, she starts throwing in new ones, like a looming cataclysm and a backstory that hasn't been mentioned until now and worlds-threatening monsters that don't ever actually end up getting resolved.  And while some of this is cushioned by another burgeoning romance between Liraz and Ziri (THANK GOD, because I couldn't put up with any more of his pining) and of course Karou and Akiva trying to come together once again, it just felt like too much, especially because the story didn't really just end, it just kind of trailed off.

I'm not really sure there's that much more to say about this.  There were some excellent moments in here--the confrontation in the Vatican comes to mind, Eliza's return to her true self, Mik and Zuze and the stormhunters as well--but overall I'm not sure they could really redeem a book that felt kind of scattered.  It definitely didn't have the magic of the first book, the snap and sizzle and all of the tropes made over and new again; instead, it felt much more like a generic fantasy story, and one that didn't come to a soaring or even a crashing conclusion, but instead just sort of petered out.  While Karou and Akiva were wonderful and even Liraz got some redemption (but what the heck was up with Haxaya?  Something else that was never explained) there were just too many holes and dropped strings here to make me really like it as a book.  Ultimately, the first book was the best of this series, and it was a bit of a downhill slide from there.  I'm interested in Taylor's more recent book, but this series ultimately didn't deliver what I had really hoped it would.  It read a lot like the upwards-of-a-million-word-long RP a friend and I have had going off and on for years--and while it might be fun to write your own melodrama and jump from plot to plot and have things dropped, there's the potential of it all coming back together again later.  I kept hoping things would come together here, but they never did, and that was a disappointment.

2 stars out of 5.

Daughter of Smoke & Bone - Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1)

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love.

It did not end well. 

Wow.  Why did I not read this book before now?  It's so cliche, so trope-y, and yet Taylor has a way of writing and bringing everything together that turns what could have very easily been trite into something truly beautiful.

The story here is about Karou, a teenage girl living in Prague and attending art school when she's not running errands collecting teeth for a chimera named Brimstone, who pays her in wishes.  Raised by Brimstone and a band of compatriots, Karou has always felt out of place both in their presence and in the human world.  But one day, while on an errand in Marrakesh, Karou is attacked by an honest-to-goodness angel--and while she escapes, she soon finds herself cut off from Brimstone and the only family she's ever known.

Overall, I found this to be an amazing book.  The magic doors that can open to different locations, Karou's background, the art, the lush descriptions of Prague, her apartment, all of it.  The sizzling chemistry between Karou and Akiva, with a dynamic of "meant to be" that I love to see in books--yes, it's basically love at first sight, but there's a reason behind it.  And I adore the idea of wishes as payment, with the different denominations and such.  For the first two-thirds of the book, I adored this story.  And then Karou found out who she really was, and...the plot just sloooowed.

The last third of the book completely changes tone and pace from the first two-thirds because Taylor suddenly jumps back in time to a "how we got to this point" perspective with Madrigal.  While the insight into chimera society was fascinating, but it just didn't seem to fit with this point in the story and read like a very well-written and rich info-dump rather than as something to propel the plot forward, which is what really should have been at this point in the book structure-wise.  I wouldn't have minded this story line about Madrigal, but I feel like it might have been better peppered throughout the rest of the book rather than dropped in a lump at the end.  It goes back to the "present day" story for the very last bit, of course, and while you can see what's coming, it's kind of this dread sense of hoping it's not what you think it is...but it is, of course.  A terrible ending but also a magnificent one because it sets up the rest of the series for plots of redemption and vengeance and romance, all of which are perfectly delicious in conjunction with each other.

So, yes.  Some pacing problems with how it was structured, but overall a wonderful book.  I can't wait to read the other two.

4 stars out of 5.