Mark This Book Monday: Days of Blood And Starlight!!!

For this Mark This Book Monday I'm finally reviewing another book for my 2014 Series Challenge and this one is a sequel that doesn't suffer from middle book syndrome at all! It manages to surprise, stun and break your heart a bit more with each page!

Days of Blood & Starlight by Laini Taylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


After finishing Daughter of Smoke and Bone and having to deal with that ending, I just had to start reading this one immediately! I had to stop after the first few chapters though, because it was so hard to read! Such heartbreak both on Karou's and Akiva's sides!

I will try my best to keep this review as spoiler free as possible, but you really shouldn't read it if you still haven't read the first book!

Karou finally knows who she was and it's learning to be both her blue haired self and who she was before, now that all her memories are back. It has destroyed her as much as it has made her whole and she has vowed to commit herself to do Brimstone's work to rebuild the army of the Chimaera to be able to fight back the Seraphim after being almost wiped out.

Akiva has decided to fight towards making sure the war will stop, to make sure a better future without hate and war can be possible, even if he doesn't seem to have any possibility of hope for himself. He starts slowly but keeps on finding ways to stop the slaughter, even if it's in small ways at first.

This was a very dark and very heartwrenching book, so much that despite not wanting to put it down, I had to take a break because I was getting so heartbroken page after page!

Karou is such an amazing character and she undergoes such a journey again in here, from heartbroken and full of pain and resentment and anger and fear to a much more assertive, strong and decided to make any sacrifices necessary to save those she love and to stop the war and murdering.

Thankfully we have Zuzanna and Mik to add some sense of wonder and magic in the darkness and some sense of strenght and to remind Karou of what and why she's fighting for!

The ending is quite tough and quite full of unexpect surprises and twists but it does leave us with a little bit of hope. I'm just too stunned and looking forward to the next book. It doesn't end with an awful gruelling cliffhanger, but it does leave us with a big looming menace, but Karou is left in a position where at least it seems that she'll be ready to fight!

5 stars or more to this one!



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Friday Reads: Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor!!

This week's second Friday Reads is a book that's in two of my challenges for this year, the 2014 series challenge on Read Sleep Repeat and the 2014 TBR pile challenge on Bookish, and for that one it's also the Read-Along book for January!

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


An absolutely amazing book! I have let this book settle in my mind for a while in the hope that time would allow me to write a more coherent review for this book, but I'm quite afraid that won't be as easy...

I loved this book, I really really loved this book, and read in January it's and will be one of my absolute favourite books of the whole year. I had been postponing reading it and now I feel like kicking myself for it, except that when I think the final book of this trilogy comes out this year, I think the wait was worth to save me long waits between books!

The first thing about this book that grabbed me from the first page was the writing. It is absolutely beautiful and can be lyrical and creepy and so vivid that you feel like you're walking the pages with the characters.

When I went into the book I wasn't very sure what the book was about, I had read a gorgeous novella "Night of Cake and Puppets" on the same world, but I didn't have a clue about what the plot was about, only that Karou could use a sort of magic & wishes. And wow... that is just but a grain of sand compared to what the book really packs! At some point I feared all would end up into a very trite Angels vs Demons rehash, but I should not have doubted Laini Taylor in the least because what she did was simply fantastic.

You really don't know what to expect page after page, and even though you get hints here and there, I must confess though I suspected quite a bit, I wasn't entirely sure I was right and some of the revelations did really manage to surprise me.

The book has two very distinct halves, one where we are introduced to the world, to Karou and her life and we get little glimpses of another world beyond ours, with the wishes, and Karou's blue hair and how she tries to be an art student in Prague and do the errands in search for teeth all over the world. Then winged Akiva appears and the game changes. We start getting some more flashbacks and the final part of the story is Karou trying to find what was really going on and finding out who or what she really is.

The character development was fantastic, I already was madly in love with Zuzana, the rabid fairy and Mik, the violing boy, but properly meeting Karou and going on this journey with her was fantastic and heartbreaking. Akiva was perfect kind of intriguing, dangerous, brooding and conflicted kind of character that Karou needed to push her along.

I just cannot say anymore without risking some spoilers and I don't wanna do that at all, this book is one that is going to be brilliant either way, but I feel that discovering every little nuance of it as it comes up will make it even better!

Now I must go and read the next book, even if it means I'll have the long 3 month wait till the final book comes out!

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a fantastic book, one that I can't recommend enough and that deserves 5 stars (and a few more added to it!).



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