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Laini Taylor writes like a fever dream given editorial structure. Her prose is lush to a degree that would be excessive in lesser hands and is, in her hands, exactly right — the world of Daughter of Smoke and Bone demands language that feels heightened, strange, and beautiful, and Taylor provides it on every page.
This is one of those books I finished and then sat with for a while before doing anything else. It earned the pause.
What’s It About?
Karou is a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague with blue hair, an unusual network of international acquaintances, and a second life that she keeps completely separate from her art school existence. She runs errands for Brimstone — a chimera, a creature assembled from mismatched animal and human parts — collecting teeth from around the world without knowing what they’re for.
She falls in love with Akiva, an angel. This is complicated.
The novel is a romance, an origin story, and a mythology-construction project simultaneously. What Brimstone actually is, what the teeth are for, what Karou’s real history is — these questions are answered progressively, and each answer opens onto a larger and darker story than the one before.
The World-Building
Taylor has invented something genuinely original. The chimaera — Brimstone and his family of mismatched creatures — are not analogues of familiar fantasy races. They’re assembled, specific, grotesque and sympathetic in equal measure. The world behind Brimstone’s door (which opens onto different locations depending on which handle you use) has its own history, its own war, its own mythology that Taylor reveals with real patience.
The magic system — wishes powered by teeth, with pain as the underlying currency — is elegant and has moral implications the novel takes seriously. The wish-economy means every piece of magic has a cost visible in human suffering somewhere, which is a more interesting underpinning for fantasy power than most.
Prague
The real-world setting is as carefully rendered as the fantasy one. Taylor’s Prague is vivid — the cobblestones, the art school, the specific light of different seasons — and Karou’s life there is genuinely appealing. The combination of the mundane (art school, friends, a complicated ex-boyfriend) with the supernatural (doors to other worlds, chimera families) is balanced with a lightness that keeps the novel moving.
The Romance
Akiva arrives as an enemy and becomes more than that. The romance is the engine of the plot and it’s handled with more intelligence than the premise suggests. Taylor uses the love story to explore the cost of hatred between peoples, the question of whether individual love can survive collective enmity, and the way the past shapes what feels possible in the present. Heavy stuff, delivered in a novel that reads as pleasurably as a thriller.
The Trilogy
The Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy continues with Days of Blood and Starlight and Dreams of Gods and Monsters, both of which are worth reading. The second book is significantly darker than the first. The trilogy is complete.
Rating: 4.5/5
Rated 4.4 Stars on Amazon. Buy Daughter of Smoke and Bone here.
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Check out Sunset In the East — a mind-bending short story collection from Ben Luxon.
