Daughter of Smoke & Bone

Amazon's Top 20 Books of the Year (#6)Amazon's Best Young Adult List (#1)2011 New York Times Notable Children's BookHuffington Post Top 10 YA Books of 20112011 Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year2011 Kirkus Best Books for TeensAmazon's Top 20 Books of the Year (#6)Amazon's Best Young Adult List (#1)2011 New York Times Notable Children's BookHuffington Post Top 10 YA Books of 20112011 Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year2011 Kirkus Best Books for TeensAnd there has never been a better place to say this:BELIEVE THE HYPE, PEOPLE. I can't do Daughter of Smoke and Bone justice, no matter what I write.It's going to be legen-wait for it-NO LOVE TRIANGLE! Yet another book with no love triangles! Laini Taylor writes about starcrossed insta-love and still manages to make me fall in love with her words. I take my hat off to her. (This review will sing praises of her. You've been warned.) She is a true story teller, like Homer. I think she can literally breathe life into letters on a page, like Silvertongue from [b:Inkheart 28194 Inkheart (Inkheart, #1) Cornelia Funke http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328866790s/28194.jpg 2628323]. Her lyrical prose! She writes pure magic. This woman is a abstract daydream of the writer I want to be one day. STORY:Daughter of Smoke and Bone is about, among other things: doorways to another world and wishes made out of teeth. Yes, you read that right. There is a violent war raging between the Seraphim and the Chimera as I write this, and a mysterious, seventeen-year-old girl from Prague is caught in between. KAROU: “Skip meeting him? The butterflies, the pounding heart, the blushing? The part where you enter each other's magnetic fields for the first time, and it's like invisble lines of energy are drawing you together-“ Karou, our artist and the heroine of this novel, is the daughter of smoke and bone. She collects languages and teeth. She has long (bona fide) azure hair and she lives with monsters. She isn't annoying at all, at odds with most other teen heroines. AKIVA: “By the time he was sent back to his regiment at Morwen Bay, he could have used a little more time to perfect his Chimaera accent, but he thought he was basically ready for what came next, in all its bright and shining madness.” Akiva is nothing more than gorgeous eye candy to begin with. Just one more tortured soul, I thought. Except he was a warrior. But then he changed. I fell in love with him about the time he began to fall in love with Madrigal. From DREAM-LOST and BLOOD WILL OUT, where he tells us about how he fell in love with her, I fell for him HARD. So, yes, I do end up liking Akiva a whole lot more than I should by the end.And then there's Zuzana and Brimstone, the two who made this story so much better for me.ZUZANA: The perfect best friend.BRIMSTONE: Need I say more?All I can say is, if “Hope is the real magic” . . . can I hope [b:Days of Blood and Starlight 12812550 Days of Blood and Starlight (Daughter of Smoke and Bone, #2) Laini Taylor http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1337964452s/12812550.jpg 17961723] into existence sooner then?