32 Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Laini Taylor’s novel Daughter of Smoke and Bone is the first in a trilogy that will knock your socks off. Read it! Read it before you listen to this! There are SECRETS that I will give away and ruin things for you, oh no!

It’s a series that is literary high fantasy science fiction young adult romance. This series has everything! There are a few things I’d do differently, but Taylor is brilliant at high stakes and making us care—making the characters utterly sympathetic. Brilliant!

Some discussion of Liar, but mostly I stuck to wrangling the enormous task of discussing this complex world-building and who knows what when (seriously, it’s a complicated situation—one character doesn’t know she used to be someone else) and all of the ways things work.

They make people out of necklaces. It’s a whole thing.

But even though elements like that make me wild, I love these books beyond all reason. That tells you something. I almost never read fantasy anyway because of the excessive hand-waving, but I adore these. Even with the people necklaces, I’m fully on board.

Sacred cheese of life!