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Summary
Summary
Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a world free of bloodshed and war.
This is not that world.
Art student and monster's apprentice Karou finally has the answers she has always sought. She knows who she is--and what she is. But with this knowledge comes another truth she would give anything to undo: She loved the enemy and he betrayed her, and a world suffered for it.
In this stunning sequel to the highly acclaimed Daughter of Smoke & Bone , Karou must decide how far she'll go to avenge her people. Filled with heartbreak and beauty, secrets and impossible choices, Days of Blood & Starlight finds Karou and Akiva on opposing sides as an age-old war stirs back to life.
While Karou and her allies build a monstrous army in a land of dust and starlight, Akiva wages a different sort of battle: a battle for redemption. For hope .
But can any hope be salvaged from the ashes of their broken dream?
Author Notes
Laini Taylor was born in Chico, California in 1971. She received a degree in English from UC Berkeley in 1994. She also studied illustration at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a travel book editor, a bookseller, a waitress, and an illustrator/designer. Her works include Blackbringer, Silksinger, Lips Touch: Three Times, and the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series. In 2014 her title Dreams of Gods and Monsters made The New York Times Best seller list.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Taylor continues to build an irresistible fantasy world in this grim sequel to her masterful Daughter of Smoke & Bone. The war between chimaera and seraphim is in full force, with Karou reluctantly playing an essential-and painful-role. Having realized her destiny, she is now living it; feeling alone, abandoned, and betrayed, she is harder of body and of heart. Alternately focusing on Karou and her estranged love interest, the seraphim Akiva, Taylor traces their parallel discouragement at the perpetuation of bloodshed between their peoples. Since the first book is, at heart, a love story and a journey of self-discovery, its fans may be surprised to find this one is primarily a war story, filled with battle scenes, killings, anger, and hatred. The occasional scenes with Karou's Czech friends Zuzana and Mik bring welcome moments of lightheartedness and humor. Taylor's dazzling writing and skill at creating suspense are strong as ever; fantasy lovers will gobble up this book with satisfaction, even if it offers less of the cross-genre appeal that made its predecessor so extraordinary. Ages 15-up. Agent: Jane Putch, Eyebait Licensing & Literary Management. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Star-crossed lovers Karou and Akiva, torn apart by unforgivable betrayal at the end of Daughter of Smoke Bone (rev. 11/11), are now engaged in the renewed war between the chimaera and the seraphim. Both are repulsed by the escalating brutality and the callous disregard for the sanctity of life but feel powerless to effect change. Karou has taken over the position of resurrectionist from her fallen mentor Brimstone, almost singlehandedly repopulating the chimaera army under the direction of Thiago, the ruthless White Wolf. Akiva, believing Karou to be lost to him forever, reluctantly takes a lead role in the fight against the chimaera. As one of the Misbegotten, the emperor's bastard children bred solely to fight and die, nothing less is expected of him. The first half of the novel is full of rage and anger, carnage and destruction; the second half is dominated by surprises and revelations that ratchet up the suspense and forge an uneasy alliance between the chimaera and the Misbegotten for the battle against the seraphim that looms on the horizon. If Karou's journey in the first book was characterized by coming of age and falling in love, here it has taken a turn toward personal sacrifice and emerging leadership. The future of Karou, her ill-fated romance with Akiva, and the survival of both of their races await readers in the concluding volume; it promises to be a doozy. jonathan hunt (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
In this sequel to her much-lauded Daughter of Smoke and Bone (2011), Taylor continues the saga of Karou and Akiva. Karou's chimaera family, Brimstone and Issa, are dead; Akiva, her former angel lover, is now her bitter enemy; and Thiago, the evil white wolf, has secreted her away to a desert Kasbah. There she has assumed Brimstone's role of creator of new chimaera from the souls of the dead so that Thiago can continue his war against the seraphim. It's a bitter, violent story full of unrequited love, loneliness, and cruel, pointless war. Readers will be delighted at the reemergence of Zuzana and Mik, as they solve the riddle that enables them to track Karou to the Kasbah. Their presence their humanness lightens the plot, allowing a thin ray of hope to permeate this otherwise dark and brutal story. Because of its complexity, the series is best read sequentially to prepare for the promised third book, in which Karou, Akiva, and their tribes face the apocalypse.--Bradburn, Frances Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ANY book that opens with "Once upon a time" is inviting high expectations. It's a phrase that inevitably evokes fairy tales and leather-bound classics about epic adventures, setting up the anticipation that readers will discover worlds filled with magic. And it may be a cliché, but it's not necessarily an unwelcome one. In this case, the story that follows, by Laini Taylor, a 2009 National Book Award finalist ("Lips Touch: Three Times"), is a breath-catching romantic fantasy about destiny, hope and the search for one's true self that doesn't let readers down. Taylor has taken elements of mythology, religion and her own imagination and pasted them into a believably fantastical collage. Starting with 17-year-old Karou, who is far from a typical teenager, with hair that grows in a bright ultramarine, no rebellious dye required. That's not the only thing setting her apart from her fellow students at the Art Lyceum of Bohemia in Prague. The monsters Karou draws - one woman who is serpent from the waist down, another with human eyes but a parrot's beak - are not of her imagination. They are real chimeras, demons, and they are the closest thing she has to family. When Karou sees a crow with bat wings, she knows it is summoning her for yet another trip to collect animal and human teeth. What Karou doesn't know is why Brimstone, a stern, horned monster with the golden eyes of a crocodile who is a kind of father figure to her, needs the teeth. But she realizes the wishes he grants her are worth her troubles, allowing Karou to make her ex-boyfriend itch in unmentionable places, eradicate her own pimples and cause a rival's eyebrows to grow unattractively bushy. The teeth-collecting mystery is one of many in Karou's life. Why does she have hamsa tattoos on the palms of her hands? Why does she feel so desperately lost and lonely? And why can't she shake the feeling that there is "another life she was meant to be living?" Just as she did in her story collection, "Lips Touch: Three Times," Taylor - who, like her protagonist, is an artist with an unnatural hair color, bright pink - tackles themes of longing and self-actualization with a sympathetic understanding of her audience. Who as a teenager didn't feel like a chimera, a mix of seemingly disparate parts forming an uncertain self? As Karou runs Brimstone's increasingly frantic errands, traveling between magic portals to a black-market auction in Paris and a bazaar in Marrakesh, beautiful winged beings around the globe are burning black handprints into the portal doors, marking them for reasons that soon become violently apparent. Enter the love interest. Akiva is a seraph, an angel, and an attractive one. "Oh, thought Karou, staring at him. Oh. Angel indeed." She is immediately drawn to him: "He was the most beautiful thing Karou had ever seen. Her first thought, incongruous but overpowering, was to memorize him so she could draw him later." Akiva, likewise, finds himself captivated by Karou even though he knows she works for the chimera, the seraphim's enemies in a longstanding war. The first time they meet he nearly kills her. The second time, she him. After a series of supernatural fires causes Karou's world to collapse, her pull toward Akiva and his toward her feel powerful enough to be destiny. Each kiss is given the importance of Paris's lips meeting those of Helen of Troy. "This new thing that sprang up between them, it was ... astral. It reshaped the air, and it was in her, too - a warming and softening, a pull - and for that moment, her hands in his, Karou felt as powerless as starlight tugged toward the sun in the huge, strange warp of space." (Ah, teenagers.) And as with the lovers whose romance launched a war, love between the blue-haired girl and the angel is fraught. Secondary characters, like Karou's pixie-size human best friend, Zuzana, provide humor and wisdom. The high-stakes action scenes - I'm not giving away too much by saying there is plenty of seraphim-on-chimera combat - balance out the more contemplative moments. And the world-building descriptions and language stop your heart and then, like a defibrillator, start it up again. Prague is "a city of alchemists and dreamers," where "Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels," and new love is a "sweet tango." As I raced through the final pages, it took longer than it should have for me to realize the obvious: the ending was not coming. "Daughter of Smoke and Bone" is a series opener. I should have known better. I wanted this novel to be an epic, complete in itself. But series are hot items in teenage lit, and Taylor leaves plenty of questions unanswered for sequels. Like a woman who has waited hours for a date, I felt stood up - but like a hopeless romantic, I will be back for more. Karou's first story ends with an anguished epiphany, the promise of a new adventure and, of course, what Emily Dickinson called "the thing with feathers" and what Brimstone calls "the real magic," hope. Chelsey Philpot is a book review editor at School Library Journal.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-Rebellion foments in secret places in this complex sequel to Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Little, Brown, 2011). The battle between chimaera and seraphim moves from one world to another as estranged, star-crossed lovers Karou and Akiva struggle to stem the rising tide of annihilation embraced by their respective leaders. While Karou attempts to resurrect the chimaera army in a remote Moroccan kasbah, in a parallel world Akiva desperately seeks to atone for his past by warning civilians fleeing the advancing seraphs. Occasionally overwrought language is leavened by humor supplied by Karou's human friends, Zusana and Mik, who arrive at the kasbah and make unlikely places for themselves among the resurrected chimaera. The dream of peace cherished lives ago by Karou and Akiva achieves a shaky foothold when chimaera soldiers and seraph rebels reluctantly unite to battle the greater evil: Jael, the psychopathic new emperor of the angels, who is poised to invade the human world in his search for powerful weapons. Assassinations, betrayals, and revelations drive the plot through decoratively ornate prose that sometimes slows the pace, but deepening characterizations anchor the action, and the emotional and political stakes are higher. Multiple worlds teeter on the edge of apocalypse, unaware that a curious magic is reaching out from past exile to affect the present. The rising tension of the coming battle overtakes the unexceptional unrequited love story to make this a suspenseful, satisfying sequel.-Janice M. Del Negro, GSLIS Dominican University, River Forest, IL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
In this emotionally intense if loosely woven sequel to Daughter of Smoke and Bone (2011), Taylor puts Karou, a chimaera resurrected into the body of a blue-haired human teenager, through severe tests of both heart and soul. Sundered from her seraphic lover Akiva by rage, guilt and a huge blood debt, Karou has led charismatic chimaera leader Thiago, the White Wolf, to a refuge in the Atlas Mountains. With her magical skills, she provides him with a band of reanimated warriors to protect the remaining chimaera back in the world of Eretz. But Thiago is more bent on vengeance--even at the cost of seeing his people exterminated in reprisals. On Eretz, Akiva is driven by abhorrence of the general slaughter to plot an attempt on his cruel emperor's life. And meanwhile on Earth, to no evident purpose beyond comic relief ("What?I was starving and our hostess was passed out on the bed with a hot monster boy"), Karou's street-performer friends Zuzana and Mik show up suddenly, having tracked her to North Africa. Ultimately violent events, revelations and no few contrivances drive both the war and the central romance ("As ever when their eyes meet, it is like a lit fuse searing a path through the air between them") into new phases. Mostly about licking wounds in the wake of the opener's savage inner and outer conflicts, but well-endowed with memorable characters and turns of phrase. (Fantasy. 14 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
