sawyl | Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Reply)

Something current, in the form of Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone which I bought on a whim (and Eric Brown's positive review in the Guardian), and which I really, really enjoyed.

Karou is living a double life. Most of the time she's a blue-haired student with a best friend and an ex-boyfriend, but the rest of the time she is assistant to Brimstone, her sorcererous foster father who lives in a magical shop whose door seems to opens on every city in the world. Everything seems to be going well until someone starts burning hand prints on the doors of Brimstone's shops. Then, while on a mission to pick up some teeth in Marrakesh, Karou is attacked by a mysterious angelic creature, triggering a series of events that end up leaving her stuck in the everyday world and forced to fight to find a way back to the nearest thing to a family she has ever known.

The opening sections in Prague are a sheer delight and Karou's exchanges with her tiny but ferocious best friend Zuzana zing with energy and humour. Karou herself is charming and slightly ambivalent about her own existence: frivolous and flighty, uncertain about her relationship with the stoic Brimstone, struggling with her own feelings of emptiness — her motto alludes to a desire to be an independent cat, one who doesn't really care whether it's petted or not — and, when confronted with Akiva, completely out of her depth. The supporting cast, especially Akiva and Madrigal, are well drawn, while the inscrutable Brimstone is only ever seen through the reflections of others — something that makes far more sense once the big secrets of the novel are finally revealed.

The second part of the book plays out against a more traditional fantasy backdrop: an eternal war between the angels and the demons. But in this cause it isn't so much a war between good and evil as a war between two evils: the slave owning seraphs and the genocidal, class obsessed chimaera seem just as bad as each other. The other world is beautifully drawn: all romantic temples, mighty fortresses, masquerade balls, secret trysts, grand jealousies and deadly betrayals. It's a world where the most powerful magic doesn't come from a bruxis — a wish given out in exchange for all the seller's own teeth — but from hope for a better world.

Delightful.