A Fantasy

I have just freshly finished Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Liani Taylor. My struggles and (small) triumphs with reading teen fiction have been documented elsewhere on this blog, and I am therefore pleased to report that I have now read another teen novel and really enjoyed it!

I browsed through a few online reviews for Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and it has a very intense "best-book-EVAH" following. I wouldn't go that far, but I enjoyed it immensely. And far more than I had expected to, which was a nice bonus. It's a fantasy novel about unearthly creatures, magic, wars in other worlds and a 17 year old girl with blue hair trying to figure out who she is and what her place is in the aforementioned tangle. I loved the worlds that Taylor has created; setting the book in Prague means that even the "Earth" bits are magically escapist, dreamy and quaint.

I felt there was a certain amount of sophistication lacking in the peace/war analogies, but I think that's more a product of the book having been written for teenagers than a lack of ability on the author's part. It didn't stop me from enjoying the book, it was just something I happened to notice. All up, I would give it five stars as a teen book and three and three quarters as a grown up book.