Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Days of Blood and Starlight, Dreams of Gods and Monsters

I first heard about Laini Taylor after a rave review from a fellow Fantasy.Lit commentator concerning Lips Touch: Three Times, a unique volume of three novellas that dealt with the dark side of fairy tales. The review included a sample of her prose:

“Well, okay,” Kizzy said, feigning reluctance and unwrapping one of the chocolates. It was so dark it was almost black and it melted on her tongue into an ancient flavour of seed pod, earth, shade, and sunlight, its bitterness casting just a shadow of sweet. It tasted… fine, so subtle and strange it made her feel like a novitiate into some arcanum of spice.

Sold! As soon as I saw a copy, I snagged it.

Three years later, the first book of her Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy was released, and I was first in fine. (Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But it definitely had an express trip up the length of my TBR pile). And whereas Lips Touch built its narratives on myth and fairy tale, Daughter of Smoke and Bone is best described as an urban fantasy retelling of Romeo and Juliet set against a backdrop of Paradise Lost. Kind of.

There are certainly creatures that bear a resemblance to angels and demons, and they’re most definitely at war with each other. But it’s the race that possesses feathered wings and flaming swords that poses the greater threat to those with gazelle horns, wolf muzzles, cat eyes, snake scales and other bestial characteristics. War has waged between seraphim and chimaera in the world of Eretz for generations, and it’s beginning to spill into our world.

But the story really starts with seventeen year old Karou, an art student in Prague who leads a double-life. On the one hand she attends classes, hangs out with her best friend, and tries to avoid an irritating ex-boyfriend; on the other, she’s an errand girl to a strange creature who collects teeth.

Brimstone – who has a ram’s head, a man’s torso, a reptile’s feet and crocodile eyes – lives in a realm that Karou refers to as “Elsewhere”, a shop hidden behind a perfectly innocuous-looking door where Brimstone and creatures like him sort through a seemingly endless supply of teeth.

Though Karou’s task in fetching shipments of teeth from around the world allows her to travel to various countries through a network of magical portals, she has no idea where she comes from, who her parents are, or why her unusual family collects teeth. They're not forthcoming on the subject, and as of late another mystery is popping up all over the city: black handprints appearing on a select number of doors and sightings of what can only be described as angels.

Without wanting to give too much away (though I’m probably about to do precisely that), Karou soon realizes she is intrinsically connected to the war in Eretz, especially regarding her relationship to an angel called Akiva. As she learns more about her past - as in, her past life - and her part to play in a crucial turning point of the war, she becomes increasingly divided between three opposing sides and their claim on her allegiance: her protectiveness of human beings, her loyalty to the chimaera, and her love for at least one seraph.

But Taylor doesn’t restrict herself solely to Karou’s point-of-view; she expands her vision to include various civilians, soldiers, prisoners, medics and victims in order to explore all facets of the war’s impact on Eretz. Like most good war stories, Taylor is careful to include monsters and heroes on both sides; like most fantasy epics dealing with worldwide conflict, the leaders of these sides are straightforwardly delineated as villains.

The angels are led by an Emperor who beds a concubine each night in order to father a private army known as the Misbegotten, an arrangement that’s so alienating for all involved that it’s hardly surprising when this legion becomes the first among the seraphim to turn on their maker and ally themselves with chimaera.

For their part, the chimaera are loyal to Thiago, a half-man, half-wolf warrior and bonus slime-ball who may well be the most effective character in the trilogy by sheer dint of his physicality, efficiency and unpredictability. He’s the type of leader everyone is terrified of, but who commands total devotion through absolute commitment to their cause.

Given that chimaera are the more sympathetic of the two sides (what with the angels being the conquerors and oppressors of land originally inhabited by the chimaera) it’s not hard to understand why an individual like Thiago exists, and Taylor has to compensate for his otherwise noble intentions in saving his race from extinction by depicting him as an unwanted suitor, bloodthirsty commander, and eventual attempted rapist.  

Both Emperor Jael and Thiago are representative of power, greed and conflict for its own sake, existing largely to establish the point that it is war itself, and not the individuals who fight in it, that is the real enemy. As another character says early on: “It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry “monster!” and looked behind him.”

It’s an interesting analogy to make, as throughout the entirety of the trilogy there are no “poor misunderstood villains” on display. The dragon may not recognise itself as a monster, but it’s still described as “devouring maidens” rather than innocently minding its own business, and similarly the likes of Emperor Jael and the White Wolf have no ability to recognise their own depravity, each mired so deeply in their own personal justification for waging war that the idea of peace is completely inconceivable to them.

In short, this is not a trilogy about angels versus demons, or even seraphs versus chimaera, but love versus hatred and violence. It’s made clear early on that resolution will not be found in a definitive battle, or even in cutting off the heads of each army, but in both sides finding a reason to call a ceasefire. As such Karou and Akiva are committed not to any form of victory, but in preventing further bloodshed, all the while acutely aware that they might well be making matters worse by stymying their own side.

Karou in particular finds herself in an interesting moral conundrum: having realized that she is one of the few individuals who can perform the art of resurrection (that is, creating new bodies for fallen chimaera and reviving their gleaned souls within them) she’s commissioned by Thiago to do precisely this for the depleted chimaera armies. With the power of life and death quite literally in her hands, she essentially becomes an arms manufacturer, deciding regularly who it is that should be returned to life, and what body they will inhabit when they do.

***

The strength of the trilogy lies in Taylor’s imaginative world-building and beautiful poetic-prose. Here you’ll find birds the size of jet planes, single doors that can lead to hundreds of locations, a ranking system of wishes that manifest as coins, and souls that can be resurrected into entirely different bodies. Taylor’s gift is not just in creating an elaborate system of magic, but in knowing that once they've been established, her rules can be played with in imaginative ways.

The wishes for example, ranging in power from scuppies to gavriels, when in the hands of a resourceful girl like Karou, can be used to do anything from giving an ex-boyfriend an embarrassing itch to the permanent gift of flight. The rules are only as restrictive as the limits of Karou’s imagination, and since the source of the trilogy’s conflict lies in negotiating peace between two warring factions, Taylor can revel in the super-powers she grants her heroine without endangering the plot:

She was floating. She gave a delighted hoot and put her arms out for balance, sculling at the air as if she were floating in the sea, but... it wasn’t the sea. It was the air. She was flying. Well, maybe not quite flying – yet – but floating at the threshold of the whole freaking sky. Which happened to wrap around the whole freaking world. Above her, night was huge and everywhere, full of stars and wild things – an infinitely deep, infinitely penetrable sphere, and she rose up higher and higher, claiming it.

One of the other pleasure of the trilogy is Taylor’s poetic-prose, and her seemingly effortless ability to spin an elegant turn of phrase. Her style is somewhere between Catherynne M. Valente and Patricia McKillip (the former is darker, the latter daintier than Taylor), and though I’m always afraid she’s going to tip into purple prose, she consistently manages to toe the line. In describing the wings of the angels she reports that “every feather was its own lick of fire” and that the after-effects of a nightmare were “still perched on her shoulder like a carrion bird”. Here’s her take on Prague:

The first time she’d come to Prague, she’d gotten so lost exploring these streets. She’d passed an art gallery and a few blocks later doubled back to find it, and... couldn’t. They city had swallowed it. In fact, she had never found it. There was a deceptive tangling of alleys that gave the impression of a map that shifted behind you, gargoyles tiptoeing away, stones like puzzle pieces rearranging themselves into new configurations while you weren’t looking.

And an underground cavern:

It seemed she was in a cathedral – if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone. It was a massive natural cavern that soared overhead to a near-perfect Gothic arch. Stalagmites as old as the world were carved into pillars in the shapes of beasts, and candelabras hung so high they were like clusters of stars. A scent was heavy in the air, herbs and sulphur, and smoke wreathed among the pillars, teased into wisps by breezes emanating from unseen openings in carven walls.

Throughout the trilogy, the epic backdrop of the war is grounded by Karou’s sardonic internal commentary and banter with her best friend Zuzana that wouldn’t feel out of place in Juno. Here’s dialogue between them that makes only marginally more sense in context:

“Oh, yay, airport! You’re coming home, aren’t you? You didn’t forget. I knew you wouldn’t forget.”

“Please. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks. You don’t even know. It’s like, gross hunter, gross hunter, gross hunter, puppet show!”

“How do the gross hunters go, anyway?”

“Grossly. But forget them. Are you all ready?”

“Yep. Freaked. Ready. The puppet’s done and magnificent, if I do say so myself. Now I just need you to work your magic. I mean, your non-magical magic. Your ordinary Karou wizardry. When will you be back?”

“Friday, I think. I just have to stop in Paris real quick –”

“Stop in Paris real quick. You know, a smaller soul than I might end our friendship on the grounds of you saying obnoxious things like “I just have to stop in Paris really quick.”

“There are smaller souls than you?”

“Hey! My body may be small, but my soul is large. It’s why I wear platforms. So I can reach the top of my soul.”

Whether you’re charmed or annoyed by this exchange is probably a good indicator of where you’d stand on actually reading the trilogy in its entirety.

***

A word on Karou. There are plenty of reviews out there that disparage Karou as a Mary Sue, and in rebuttal I can only provide this link to Feminist Fiction’s We Need More Mary Sues. Karou ticks a lot of boxes in the Mary Sue litmus test: hair that grows naturally blue, tattoos on her palms that never fade, mastery of martial arts, fluency in dozens of languages, an aura of desirability that practically drives the plot, the power of flight, and astounding physical beauty.

So is she a Mary Sue? No, she’s a wish-fulfilment character, something that Laini Taylor is quite open about admitting, which serves a very different purpose than a Mary Sue in any given narrative.

Most of Karou specialized skills/attributes not only have a basis in the plot (either something she learnt in her previous life or which were granted to her by a literal wish) but she’s a dynamic and sympathetic character who consistently strives to do the right thing, often doubts her own judgment, and is regularly covered in sweat, blood and tears.

Then there’s the romance. I’ve spoken at length about my feelings on the Love at First Sight trope, concluding that it is a perfectly viable storytelling device, provided that it’s handled with care. As it happens, the love story of Karou and Akiva adheres to one of my rules (using a Romeo and Juliet template) but breaks another (basing their immediate connection on “reincarnation recognisability”), which left me less invested in their struggle to be together as I was in their individual happiness.

That their story is based on Romeo and Juliet is obvious; they’re important figures on opposite sides of a war and prominent individuals among their people. Akiva has a trace of Romeo’s hot-headedness (though is mostly melancholic in temperament) whilst Karou must deal with an unwanted suitor that everyone else thinks is totally perfect for her. The lovers even meet at a masquerade ball, though a temple takes the place of a balcony for their first secret rendezvous.

They’re in love because they’re in love, and despite the history of war crimes and the fact that Akiva’s hands are tattooed with markings to denote all the chimaera he’s killed over the years, their immediate attraction proves to be enough to overcome these otherwise insurmountable obstacles.

Taylor also captures the physicality of Romeo and Juliet, their exorbitant declarations of love, and their pain (oh god, the pain) of never being together. There are analogies of spinning, collusions, dizziness, hunger, aching and so forth, but what sets Akiva and Karou apart from the usual star-crossed lovers shtick is that each one is acutely aware of their personal responsibilities to their own people.

This Romeo and Juliet know that there’s more at stake than just the two of them, and right from the start they’re devising ways of making their relationship a microcosmic example of peace. It is Brimstone, here playing the part of Father Laurence, who endorses their union in the hopes it will prove to be a fairly literal case of love conquers all, and in a nice case of demonstrating their commitment to others before themselves, their union does not immediately follow the conclusion of the war.

However insular most Romeo and Juliet retellings are, Taylor is careful to keep just as much focus on the world as she does on the lovers. In any other book the protagonist’s best friend would either be kept in the dark as to the reality of the circumstances or end up dead; here not only is Zuzana let in on the secret, but she becomes a crucial component in the story-arc.

But perhaps Taylor’s most enjoyable innovation is when she blows the lid on the seraphim/chimaera war that’s been happening “just next door” as it were, with legions of angels flying out of a portal in the sky to take advantage of humankind’s faith and artillery. The world’s population is riveted on live footage of thousands of angels sweeping through the skies and descending upon Vatican City, and the riots, vigils, baptisms, suicides and mass panic immediately commence on a scale that goes far beyond the "new mutiny" that fills the streets of Verona.

***

As I said earlier, the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy is Romeo and Juliet set against a backdrop of Paradise Lost – or perhaps an inversion of the latter considering the angels are a hierarchical tyranny of oppressive conquerors, and the horned and fanged bestial humanoids are the victims of mass genocide. The traditional iconography of angels and demons is summed up in the phrase: “like mould on books, grow myths on history”.

At times Taylor can be obtuse on the details of the war that has defined the opposing sides of her conflict – Akiva for example has tattoos that mark the amount of chimaera he’s killed, but we get no real sense of his victims. Likewise, when a group of chimaera isolate Akiva’s sister Liraz with the intent to cut off her arms as retribution for her brutality in a famous battle, she dutifully submits in recognition of her war crimes, without any further light shed on what exactly she’s being punished for.

Throughout the trilogy war is portrayed not so much as the inevitable outcome of greed or expansion or even misunderstanding, but a creature of destruction and grief that’s pitted against the hope and will-power of romantic love. The scope is impressive and the prose is wonderful; though I have to admit being more invested in the mysteries and conflicts that Taylor sows throughout the trilogy than I ever was in the sorrow of the parted lovers.

I've read it twice now; the first time as each separate book was released, and the second as one complete trilogy. Doing this made it apparent just how carefully plotted each instalment is, both by itself and as a three-part arc, with Taylor keeping impeccable control over her myriad of subplots and characters.

At this point I eagerly await the filmic adaptation. If nothing else, it will be a feast for the eyes.