Some Epically Star-Crossed Romancey Shit

And, of course, by "shit" I mean "awesome things I have been waiting for months for and immediately dropped everything to read the minute they were released," because we are talking about a Laini Taylor book and I lurve her.

So a while ago I read Daughter of Smoke and Bone, which is about angels and chimaera and stuff, and it was pretty awesome, and also some lady with a blog took a fantastic photo inspired by it, which you can view here. Last month, the sequel was published; it's called Days of Blood and Starlight.

First of all, can we just take a moment to drool over how beautiful this cover is? It's just as gorgeous as the last one.



So, at the end of the last book, Karou and Akiva, our extremely unlucky main romantic pairing, have once again been tragically parted, and when I say "tragically" I don't mean that they are both very sad about it, I mean Akiva has made a Very Big Mistake and now he does not even know if Karou is alive or what world she is in but she really doesn't want to see him anyway because she is busy being grief-stricken over the Very Big Mistake and does not want to see him ever again, and things are Not Okay. The thousand-year war between the seraphim and the chimaera has escalated from a war between two armies to two separate terrorism campaigns, where each side send their armies to hunt down and slaughter the other side's civilian bases. Akiva is one hundred and ten percent capital-A Angsty but I give him a pass on this since he has some serious reason to be--I may give approximately no shits about his and Madrigal/Karou's romance but at least I don't think he's being self-indulgent here. And as angsty as he is, he isn't idle--Akiva's got himself a whole pile of Angsty Desperate Repentant Plans by which he is going to try and set things right-ish when he can. These are plans of the sort that involve mutiny, assassination, and fomenting rebellion, so that is all actually interesting.

Karou starts this story off being more or less trapped, using her mad necromancer skillz to reincarnate her chimera friends into bigger and scarier and more powerful bodies. She is doing this under the direction of Thiago, the White Wolf, whose name totally has "Iago" in it deliberately because he is a slimy, untrustworthy motherfucker. There is quite a bit of court-intrigue-y conspiracy type stuff going on in the chimaera camp, even though it is not really a court, it is a makeshift terrorist base in an abandoned castle in Morocco, but it has all the spying and wariness and trying to figure out who is lying to Karou and who is her friend and who is actually trying to kill her and what is Thiago's Real Actual Plan and how much does it resemble the plan Karou thinks she is helping with, all that sort of thing. Karou is mostly just focused on resurrecting and not dying and trying to keep away from Thiago until a few different plot things happen--one is a special delivery thurible (the things they keep souls in) from Akiva (she does not know this) containing a very important friend; the second is some secret information about Thiago's real plans; and the third (although not chronologically; I just kept it for last because it's the awesomest) is a surprise rescue visit from the indomitable Zuzana and her awesome violin-playing boyfriend Mik! YOU GUYS I LOVE ZUZANA AND I WANT TO READ A BOOK THAT IS JUST ENTIRELY ABOUT HER KICKING AROUND MAKING FRIENDS WITH DEMONS, IT WOULD BE THE BEST. Anyway, this all kicks Karou a bit into agency-having-mode so Akiva doesn't have to carry the whole plot.

My favorite thing about this book is probably how much more it gets into the real politicking of the war--we get to see so much more of the people who are running it and who are dedicated to keeping it going as long as possible because that is how they get their jollies. You guys, Laini Taylor makes up REALLY SCARY BAD GUYS. They are creepy and egotistical and rapey and the rapeyness doesn't even come off as a cheap way of marking them as bad guys because by the time they get around to being rapey you are already viscerally disgusted every time you see their names on the page, they are already people who just take what they want and are constitutionally incapable of thinking of other people as anything other than "what"s. I also really liked the secondary character development, particularly Akiva's foster brother and sister, particularly his icy sister Liraz. Liraz was portrayed as being the more unsympathetic-to-Akiva's-idealism-and-therefore-unreasonable one in the first book; in this one, you really get to see that Liraz' deal is mostly that she is deeply suspicous and distrustful, and that she has absolutely every reason to be. By the end of the book I had concluded that Liraz is pretty much the awesomest, just in a less fun way than Zuzana.

This book continues to explore very serious themes of cycles of violence and how war is terrible and *most* people hate it but it can still be ridiculously difficult to stop, and the ethics of being a good person if you're in the army on the wrong side of a war (particularly if you cannot get out of the army), and a lot of other uncomfortable stuff about good and evil and violence, but mostly it is about How Many Intricate Plots And Conspiracies Can Get Crammed Into One War Before It Gets Silly, and I think (although other opinions may differ) that this one does stop short of getting silly, so that's good (I feel like conspiracies have been very big lately and they do not always manage to avoid getting silly).

Want book three! WANT MOAR ZUZANA.