Books: Daughter of Smoke & Bone series

Daughter of Smoke & Bone
By Laini Taylor
Copyright 2011
418 pages

Days of Blood & Starlight
By Laini Taylor
Copyright 2012
513 pages

Dreams of Gods & Monsters
By Laini Taylor
Copyright 2014
613 pages


This is a trilogy by Laini Taylor that I recently finished. I read the first one in September and I've read the last two since Christmas, as they were presents from a friend.

While these are long, fat books, they read quickly.

There may be spoilers in this, so don't read it if you don't want to know anything about the series.

Basic premise: a race of humanoids who are called angels and a race of chimera, also called demons, live on a planet named Ertz. At one time there were portals through to earth, but those were lost to time. However, the chimera found a way into Earth and went back and forth between the planets. The angels and chimera were constantly at war.

Our heroine is Karou, who initially starts out as a very far-out young woman who loves art and lives in Prague. She was raised by the chimera who live in Earth, and frequently runs errands for them. She has a bit of super strength, stealth, and speed, and has been trained in many types of fighting. Her main errand is to collect teeth and take them to Brimstone, who is described very much like the archetypical devil.

However, the ways in and out of the world that Brimstone has created have been found out by angels, and they are destroyed. Karou attempts to find Brimstone but instead is confronted by an angel, Akiva, who means to kill her but finds something about her reminds him of an old love.

For he had once been in love with a chimera, but she was killed.

As the story unfolds over the books, we learn that chimera are revived many, many times, brought back to life magically into new bodies and sent forth to fight. Angels are bred by one man with many concubines, so that they are all half-brothers and sisters trained only to fight. They aren't allowed to have a life or anything, just fight chimera.

It's a Romeo and Juliet kind of thing. Akiva realizes Karou is his love of 18 years ago, only she was remade as a baby and then raised up by Brimstone, instead of being instantly put back into a body to fight. This was to hide her from the head Chimera wolf-like dude, who wanted her for his mate.

Akiva and Karou feel like they have a destiny to stop this long, long war between angels and chimera. The story revolves around their efforts to accomplish this, although like any story, they go the long way around. Of course, it takes a lot of convincing to have angels and demons on the same side, I suppose.

And as with any romance, whether it's fantasy or main stream literature, the characters have trouble being together and finding their true love.

The last book was what I expected except the author brought in a MacGuffin character whom I could have done without. I thought that took away from the story and ultimately added nothing, really.

All in all, though, good reads and very helpful for recovering from my upper respiratory infection. I will look up this author again.

5 stars for books 1 & 2
4 stars for book 3