Errand requiring immediate attention. Come. The note was on vellum, pierced by the talons of the almost-crow that delivered it. Karou read the message. ‘He never says please’, she sighed, but she gathered up her things. When Brimstone called, she always came. In general, Karou has managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she’s a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand-girl to a monstrous creature who is the closest thing she has to family. Raised half in our world, half in ‘Elsewhere’, she has never understood Brimstone’s dark work – buying teeth from hunters and murderers – nor how she came into his keeping. She is a secret even to herself, plagued by the sensation that she isn’t whole. Now the doors to Elsewhere are closing, and Karou must choose between the safety of her human life and the dangers of a war-ravaged world that may hold the answers she has always sought.
“Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou has no sinister premonitions about the day. It seemed like just another Monday, innocent but for its Mondayness, not to mention its Januaryness.”
So goes the opening sentence of Daughter of Smoke and Bone, immediately highlighting one of the books many flaws: its preoccupation with its own adorable quirkiness.
You know those people who go around wearing something really strange, like a bright purple fedora, and you can tell it’s a self-conscious decision to appear zany and “out-there” rather than a genuine personal preference? Daughter of Smoke and Bone is that person. It’s wearing that purple fedora and by God, it wants you to see it. Karou and her friends spend their time working on quirky art projects and they go to wacky bars where everyone wears false mustaches or the greek statues have gas masks and isn’t this just so preciously zany and wacky?
I may be over-reacting slightly here. I guess the forced quirkiness just got to me because the book otherwise starts off fairly well. Most of the hallmarks of the recent wave of Twilight clones are either absent entirely or nullified to a degree- there’s an actual plot, the supernatural elements are fairly original, there are angels but they’re kind of interesting. And the stalker boyfriend trope finally, finally gets called out in a YA novel.
When we first meet Karou she’s just broken up with her somewhat older boyfriend after discovering he was cheating on her. He’s taken to following her around and trying to beguile her back into the relationship with his diamond- chiseled cheekbones and radiant whatever, but she’s having none of it. Then it turns out he’s gotten a job as a model at her art school so he can pose naked in front of her. And he got a tattoo of a “K” over his heart. Karou calls him out for being a creepy fuck and uses her magical wish granting beads to make his crotch itch unbearably.
At this point I was in full “you go girl!” mode because I’m really tired of seeing YA heroines swoon over behavior that is clearly stalking. It’s just so refreshing for once to see a book like this that empowers its female protagonist without resorting to weird messed up gender politics and
And this, Karou thought, no longer smiling, is for the irretrievable.
For her virginity.
Well that’s… kind of strange, I guess? I mean he didn’t trick her into it, so what exactly is the implication here? The way the sentence is worded it almost seems to be slipping into hoary old “save yourself for your husband” notions, and surely
The Wishmonger’s voice was so deep it seemed almost the shadow of sound: a dark sonance that lurked in the lowest register of hearing. “I don’t know many rules to live by,” he’d said. “But here’s one. It’s simple. Don’t put anything unnecessary into yourself. No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles—drug or tattoo—and… no inessential penises, either.”
“Inessential penises?” Karou had repeated, delighted with the phrase in spite of her grief. “Is there any such thing as an essentialone?”
“When an essential one comes along, you’ll know,” he’d replied. “Stop squandering yourself, child. Wait for love.”
Oh.
So Kaz is a shithead for cheating on Karou and basically preying on her naivete for sex, and we can all get behind that just fine. But! He also committed the sin of not being Karou’s One True Eternal Love which means she ended up having sex with someone other than her husband soulmate and we can’t have that. Also that part is Karou’s fault for some reason because she should have known he wasn’t The One, somehow, even though there’s no way anyone could possibly know that even if they had been in a relationship with someone for years, even ignoring the fact that the idea of Destined True Love is complete nonsense to begin with- Karou allowed her Sacred Virginity to be defiled and therefore must feel crushing guilt and self-loathing. Kaz, the cheating boyfriend and creepy stalker? He gets away with an itchy scrotum.
What the ffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
So let’s move away from that topic for a minute and discuss the main character. My initial impression of her (apart from all the quirk) was a fairly nondescript teenage girl- a bit more cheerful and self confident than the typical YA heroine, but overall nothing that really stands out. Here’s how the book (the narrative, not another character) describes her:
Karou was, simply, lovely. Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx. Beyond merely pretty, her face was vibrantly alive, her gaze always sparking and luminous, and she had a birdlike way of cocking her head, her lips pressed together while her dark eyes danced, that hinted at secrets and mysteries.
Needless to say, none of those qualities are ever demonstrated in the text.
But wait! Karou’s drawings are so good that her fellow art students crowd around to see them! And she can fight! And she has kewl and mysterious tattoos and blue hair and mysterious missing parents and oh my God
So yeah, Karou’s a Mary Sue. That’s not as big a problem as the fact that the text insists on assigning attributes to her that haven’t actually been demonstrated yet. Later on we’re told that:
But there was no help for its real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the missingness as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough.
Which is a surprise to me, because she seemed pretty content with her life up to this point.
Well, except for the fact that sometimes she has to interact with hunters, because hunters are dirty savage barbarians named Bane who kill poor beautiful animals. Aren’t they so evil? Don’t you feel sorry for the animals? WEEP FOR THE EARTH MOTHER DAMN IT.
Now I should mention here that I’m no big fan of purely recreational hunting myself, but the Captain Planet-esque treatment of it that we get here is supremely annoying and doesn’t even make sense. If she’s been raised from an infant by a demon who collects teeth with little to no apparent influence from the outside world during her early years you’d expect Karou to be pretty unfazed by this.
The characterization problems (Karou’s love interest is an angel who also has shallow, cheap torment of the soul) prove to be the fatal flaw in the narrative, because most of the momentum of the story is generated by Karou’s quest to uncover the various mysteries surrounding her life and existence. Many of these mysteries are interesting, even fascinating, but Karou herself is such a transparent non-entity that I just had a hard time caring. It’s a shame because unlike so many YA novels released over the last five years or so there is the core of a genuinely good book here- maybe even a great book. There’s a moment about a quarter in where Karou goes through a door into another dimension, a city of demonic Chimera surrounded by iron bars under constant assault by angels, that jolted me out of the stupor the book had put me in up to that point and got me really excited about what was going to happen next. Alas, it was a false alarm.
I’ll confess up front that I didn’t finish Daughter of Smoke and Bone. A bit over halfway through I realized I knew pretty much exactly how the story was going to pan out and I didn’t really feel like slogging through another 180 pages of predictable plot twists and True Love romance to get to the finish line. Ultimately this strikes me as an author biting off more than they could chew and I kind of hope Lani Taylor gets some more experience under her belt (and stops talking about inessential penises) and comes out with something that lives up to its potential.
Doing In The Wizard 