Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, 418 pages
Days of Blood and Starlight, 517 pages, both by Laini Taylor (935 pages total)

Mild spoilers ahead.

With the release of the last book in the trilogy imminent, I decided to do a little re-reading. The quick, twenty second explanation for this series is that it's angels versus demons, Romeo and Juliet style. Except the demons aren't really demons but chimaera (creatures made up of parts from other creatures, but not in a Frankenstein way - click the link), and the angels are only angels because what else do you call winged human beings? The longer explanation goes like this: Karou is an art student in Prague when she isn't running errands around the world picking up teeth for Brimstone to do magic with. The only life she has ever known has been the life she has lived in Brimstone's shop; her only family being Issa, Yasri, Twiga, and Brimstone himself. She feels like something's missing, some vital part of herself that could only be discovered if she knew where she came from and how she found her way into Brimstone's shop. Akiva, an angel, is on a mission - to find and mark each of the doorways in our world that lead to Brimstone's shop. His life isn't all that great: bred to be a warrior in a never ending war between the angels and the chimaera, he once aspired to doing something greater before all hope was ripped from him. Hellbent on ending the war in his world, Eretz, by destroying Brimstone's ways into ours, he crosses paths (to put it mildly) with Karou and finds himself drawn to her, and she to him. So when the portals burn, leaving Karou cut off from Brimstone and the others, she finally finds the truth about herself, and the growing attraction between her and Akiva becomes tenuous. Roped into continuing Brimstone's work, she lives with what's left of the chimaera in a kasbah in our world. She and Akiva both, separately, have to decide if they are willing to pick up what's left of Eretz and forge it into something new, something that resembles peace.

To say that I love this series would be an understatement. There have been a few YA series that have dealt with angels, and while I haven't read many of them, I feel pretty certain in my belief that none of them have taken this tack with them. Reading Daughter of Smoke and Bone again, I found myself really struck with how closely Laini Taylor hews Karou's backstory to that of Romeo and Juliet. It's like she decided to explore what would happen next in Romeo and Juliet if Romeo had decided on revenge instead of suicide, but in an alternate world living alongside our own and with magic in it. And I love how she removed angels from their Judeo-Christian background and treated them as fantasy characters instead. She's not exactly the first to do it - Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere had the Angel Islington and Anne Rice had Ramiel and Setheus in Vittorio, the Vampire, but they still mostly retained their identity as servants of God. Here angels are presented as just another species, and the real trouble doesn't really start until we catch wind of them in our world. I'm really excited (though a bit sad!) to see how it all ends.