Wow, what a great trilogy! The Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy is an older YA/NA fantasy set partly on earth and partly in a world called Eretz. Please note that the reviews for books 2 and 3 may contain spoilers for each preceding book.
Daughter of Smoke & Bone starts out from the perspective of Karou, a 17-year-old art student in Prague. She lives two lives: in one she is a normal teenage girl dealing with school, friends, and an ex-boyfriend, but in her free time she also sometimes runs errands for Brimstone, the father figure who raised her and isn’t human. These errands tend to involve collecting teeth, and Karou doesn’t know what Brimstone does with them. Karou has a lot of unanswered questions about who she is and where she came from. On one of these errands, Karous is attacked by Akiva, who looks like an angel, and this sets in motion some significant plot advancement. Some sections of the book are narrated from Akiva’s perspective, and the perspective shifts again, for a good chunk of the novel, when you learn more about how Karou really is.
Laini Taylor has beautifully evocative language, and some of the book feels like a love letter to Prague: “Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks.”
The novel starts to explore some heavy topics around colonialism and oppression, and it’s a reminder of how awesome fantasy novels are because they can examine real-world topics in a meaningful, emotional way but with some distance that might make it easier for readers to grapple with the complex material.
Days of Blood & Starlight is tonally very different from the first novel. It’s darker, more violent, and almost bleak at times, in part because “bleak” is how some of the characters seem to feel about the ongoing war between seraphim and chimaera. Karou is the new resurrectionist working for the White Wolf as the decimated chimaera try to increase their numbers again. Meanwhile, Akiva and his brethren are trying to squash chimaera uprisings but without enthusiasm and with the beginnings of empathy for their supposed foes. While the first book included the “forbidden lovers” trope, this one can’t even be called enemies to lovers or slow burn. There are limited interactions between Karou and Akiva, and the interactions they have are fraught with tension and, on Karou’s part, some animosity at least at first.
Parts of the novel are told from Zuzana and Mik’s perspective. These are much lighter than the sections spent with Karou and Akiva. While it felt jarring, it served the purpose of getting a break from the darkness, which I certainly needed. In this novel we also start to learn more a little more about the Stelians, the group (race?) of seraphim who Akiva’s mother was from.
Taylor’s excellent use of descriptive language and figurative language continues in this novel, as well. Take, for example, this passage: “Akiva’s wretchedness was a gnawing thing. It was taking him in bites and he felt every one–every moment the tearing of teeth, the chewing gut misery, the impossible waking-nightmare truth of what he had done.”
It might be expected that Dreams of Gods & Monsters would pick up where book 2 left off – after the epilogue. It actually starts before the epilogue, and a good chunk of the novel shows how the chimaera and seraphim came to be in the caves on the brink of “starting the apocalypse” before diving into the outcome of their next actions.
However, the very start of the novel introduces the new character of Eliza. She is a grad student who with her advisor is called to examine the remains of chimaera found at the kasbah that Karou and the rest abandon when they decide to join up with the seraphim. There’s a mystery to who she really is, and she ends up being an important character. We get a lot more backstory about the seraphim in general and the Stelians specifically in this novel. While in book 2 I felt conflicted about Akiva’s suddenly being able to access major magic because I was worried about it leading to handwaving problems away, it ends up getting explored in a very well-done way as we see how he is connected to the Stelians and what his magic means to them. And Taylor does not use the opportunity to take shortcuts in her plot development.
This was such a beautiful end to the trilogy. It’s not that everything gets wrapped up in a completely tidy bow, and there is betrayal and pain along the way, but there is progress and hope – both for the world of Eretz in general and for Karou and Akiva specifically. Taylor brings in the potential for a new – and major – conflict that leaves room for her to revisit this world in a future book, but nothing feels undone, and if she never comes back to this world, it’s still a highly satisfying conclusion. While I gave the first 2 books 4 stars, this one earned a 5 from me.