A Review of Laini Taylor’s “Daughter of Smoke and Bone”
Entertainment Weakly?
Almost 10 years ago, I had a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. It was my go-to source for book reviews, back when I was writing for a mainstream pop culture webzine that doesn’t have to be named. You see, I’d scour the magazine for an interesting book that I wanted to read that got a good review, and ask my editor to go get it for me for review in turn. Simple as that. Well, the one thing that we didn’t review was young adult fiction, but when Entertainment Weekly gave an A- rating to Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone, I wanted to read it for myself. My enthusiasm was piqued when the sequel (of a trilogy) got an even rarer A grade from the magazine. So I’m wondering why I waited this long to actually read the file that was on my Kindle. I guess other books came up with the webzine and I got too busy.
It’s probably just as well, because I don’t believe the hype about this book — now that I’ve read it. To put it firmly, it’s a great book if you’re a 17-year-old white female. It’s got a sassy main character and a weepy romance angle to it. For the rest of us 44-year-old men, there’s not much that’s great about the book — until you get until its final quarter. The main problem with Daughter of Smoke and Bone (would it be mature of me to mention that I’ve been calling it Son with a Smokin’ Boner for nearly 10 years now?) is that it’s all plot and no story for the first two-thirds of the book. Set in Prague for no real reason, the plot concerns a feisty 17-year-old with blue hair named Kaoru. She’s an art student — though being an orphan, how she got a scholarship to a renowned art school is beyond me — who draws monsters in her spare time. The thing is, the monsters are real. She works for a half-man, half-beast named Brimstone who specializes in wishes. He’s paid in teeth, human or otherwise. So Kaoru is his errand girl, jumping through portals that bend space to go to exotic locales such as Paris to procure such teeth to be used in granting wishes. That’s until some angels come along and block all of the portals into Brimstone’s world. Oh yeah, and one of these angels falls in love with Kaoru.
If you’ve followed me this far, you’ll gather that this novel for young readers is rather inventive — which is, admittedly, a plus. However, the main fault that, to set up this world-building, author Laini Taylor sketches out plot points from A to B and does nothing to colour inside the lines. I mean, if you’re going to set your novel in Prague, you’d think you’d do something with the setting. But no. This book could have been set anywhere, and it still would have registered as it does. The other issue is that the book, in sketching out these plot points, is kind of boring. I didn’t give a care about Kaoru and her life and loves, because she makes the magical seem rather mundane. I sort of get what Taylor is doing here: she probably wanted to make Kaoru enough of an everygirl so that her readers would relate to her. This is not necessarily a bad thing because Kaoru’s tough outer shell serves as a good role model for youngsters. However, reading a chapter about dragging elephant tusks on the Paris Metro seemed to me to be rather blah. Couldn’t Kaoru do things that are much more interesting?
Granted, once you read the end of the book, you’ll know that Kaoru’s master has been giving her a relatively low profile for a very good reason. It’s the end of the book where things really open up, precisely because it all deals with a backstory that set in another world entirely from our own. That setting, with all of its attendant customs, makes for an intriguing read. Plus, even though I’m not a fan of soppy five hanky romantic weepies, the ending kind of won me over because it does successfully what the more recent movie Captain Marvel failed to do: introduce a plot twist that makes the bad guys suddenly turn into the good guys. Thus, if you have the patience to get through a rather routine and mundane story in the first two-thirds to three-quarters of a book, you’ll be rewarded with a rewarding ending — albeit one that ends on a cliff-hanger. All the better to make you want to read Part Two, dear.
The thing is, I’m not sure if I’m going to make it the rest of the way through the rest of the trilogy — even if Entertainment Weekly claims that its immediate sequel surpasses the original, which is a rarity. I just don’t think this series was really meant for me. It’s not that I can’t suspend disbelief or anything, but I found the writing too plain and pedestrian. The quality of the writing makes it only salable to undiscriminating teenagers. Plus, I could do without the histrionics of the romantic angle. In a way, Daughter of Smoke and Bone reminded me of Wizard and Glass from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series –a book that turned me off the series for going over the top at showing us what young love rather looks like. This book is emotional when it comes to its romantic angle that I think I’ll give the sequels a pass. Laini Taylor shouldn’t feel so bad, though. I don’t read Entertainment Weekly anymore, either, so I’m pretty certain the world won’t end if I don’t follow through this story of angels and demons at war with one another at all.
Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone was originally published by Little, Brown Books in 2011.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
