I sit in awe.
Jul. 17th, 2014 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaile“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. This made a lot of people very angry and has widely been regarded as a bad move.”
No, wait. I’m mixing my quotes.
“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love.
It did not end well.” –Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone
“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” –Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The angel and the devil falling in love, however, did make a lot of people very angry, and there were times when they themselves did regard it as a bad move, particularly when a lot of people died.
This is the basic premise of Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, the third installment of which, Dreams of Gods and Monsters, released in April. (There was a book tour where the author came to Boston, but I had elected to be in Paris at that time. I’m very bummed I missed the chance to meet her, but I regret nothing, because Paris. I’m sure she’d understand.)
So, on the one hand, this trilogy is a YA romance between a blue-haired teenage art student and a warrior angel from another world, or at least, that’s how one would describe it if one were trying to be as simplistic as possible in order to dismiss it in some clickbaity article about how Kids These Days are only reading fluff instead of srs bsns literature. In actuality, while the series is indeed a romance between Karou (the art student) and Akiva (the warrior angel), it’s also a sprawling epic about love and war, about hatred and hope, about genocide and terrorism and political mythmaking, about the duties of soldiers, about the dangers of partial knowledge and of hubris, about the power of friendship, about truth and betrayal and the ends of worlds. It’s about a lot of things, basically. It’s a romance not because it’s cute and fluffy but because it’s a story about the power of love to overcome everything, and I mean everything. It’s got a body count that makes Game of Thrones look like Goodnight Moon, not least because some of the characters can die multiple times, and it’s also got a lot of jokes about cake.
In this third installment, the story, already spanning two worlds, expands exponentially to encompass a multiverse of parallel universes—many of which are dead—including the home world of the seraphim tribes before they came to Eretz and began colonizing the chimaera. We learn more about the mysterious and powerful (and scary) Stelian seraphim and what it is that they do instead of fighting chimaera. We learn about the Beasts—the actual Beasts, not the chimaera, but the devouring monsters vast as worlds that swim in the darkness beyond the sky. We meet some awesome new characters, most notably Eliza Jones, a biology doctoral student who escaped from a family cult that claimed to be the descendants of the fallen angel Elazeal. Eliza is a thoroughly awesome character. Despite having a very tortured background (literally, because cults) and being a being of such immeasurable power and knowledge that the human mind cannot comprehend it (including her own, briefly, before it gets started out), she’s also very human—concerned with doing well and being taken seriously at work, spending a lot of time being annoyed at the douchey racist sexist white boy in her lab for being a douchey smug bigot, and she has a grumpy snarky sense of humor that endears her to Zuzana but is still a fundamentally nice person (unless you’re the douchey lab boy). She also seems to be starting something with Scarab, the young Stelian warrior queen, at the end of the book, so YAY for the multiverse being saved by lesbian WOC angels of unimaginable power! You don’t see that in a book every day, unfortunately. (I would read all the books about lesbian WOC angels saving the multiverse.)
Zuzana and Mik, in addition to remaining cute and funny, get to do some pretty awesome stuff that I cannot talk about because spoilers, although they are also traumatized by getting caught in their first battle. Zuzana, being Zuzana, is concerned that everyone knows about it when they do epic stuff.
Tying with Zuzana for my favorite cranky POV character is Liraz, ice queen killing machine, the most deadly of the bastard seraphim warrior regiment, the Misbegotten. Liraz’ personal motto is “Feelings are stupid,” which makes her the stiffest, most awkward dork in two worlds when she starts having them anyway.
Akiva gets progressively less boring (sorry, I am bored by male love interests on principle, he’s really a pretty decent one) as the series goes on, and in this book he really becomes interesting, spending most of his time fucking around with magic he doesn’t understand and trying to pull off brilliant but monumentally-unlikely-to-work feats of military strategy, such as creating an alliance between the remaining chimaera and the rebel Misbegotten, or trying to recruit the Second Legion, or trying to talk the bloodthirsty Emperor Jael out of his quest to acquire nuclear weapons. I like Magical Rebel Leader Akiva a lot, actually.
Karou also starts doing all the things, after spending much of Days of Blood and Starlight passively resurrecting people but sort of… being forced to snap out of it in the most traumatizing way possible. But in this book, she is again a fount of resourcefulness, awesome magic, and crafty outside-the-box thinking. Sneaky, sneaky Karou comes up with the plan that saves the Earth from falling for Jael’s plan and sends Jael back to Eretz sans weapons.
While Karou and the other awesome characters come up with many brilliant plans that work and save the day, they also have lots of plans that turn out to be terrible ideas, or that fall apart horribly and with great loss of life (or the threat of great loss of life, if they can’t stop it fast enough), because the worlds Laini Taylor has built here are bitterly violent, run by unmitigatedly terrible people, poisoned by centuries of warfare and bad blood even among the people who aren’t fundamentally bad, and governed by Murphy’s Law.
One very interesting choice that Laini Taylor makes in this book is that it ends before they save the multiverse. It actually mostly works, though—for starters, the book is already six hundred pages long, so it was probably time to end it. Second, the conflicts we’ve been following throughout the series—the ones with characters on both sides, when the good guys were fighting bad guys with names and motivations and personalities that we got to know—are wrapped up, and those are the kinds of story that is more exciting and visceral to read, like, actual action and dialogue scenes about then the sort of indescribably cosmic threat of Devouring Beasts with no names or personalities, so I wonder if trying to have a proper story climax about them would just be weird. Thirdly, due to the particular roles of prophecy, myth, and seraph genetic manipulation, while that last battle hasn’t happened yet, we know basically how it’s going to happen, so I guess there’s not a lot of tension there. I’d love to see a short story or novella about that fighting-the-monsters campaign someday, though—I want more crazy angel fights! And I already miss these characters! And we know that Laini Taylor can write a great novella because Night of Cake and Puppets was completely kick-ass.
In case you’ve missed the point here, I really love Laini Taylor and everyone should go read all of her books immediately.
No, wait. I’m mixing my quotes.
“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love.
It did not end well.” –Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone
“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” –Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The angel and the devil falling in love, however, did make a lot of people very angry, and there were times when they themselves did regard it as a bad move, particularly when a lot of people died.
This is the basic premise of Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, the third installment of which, Dreams of Gods and Monsters, released in April. (There was a book tour where the author came to Boston, but I had elected to be in Paris at that time. I’m very bummed I missed the chance to meet her, but I regret nothing, because Paris. I’m sure she’d understand.)
So, on the one hand, this trilogy is a YA romance between a blue-haired teenage art student and a warrior angel from another world, or at least, that’s how one would describe it if one were trying to be as simplistic as possible in order to dismiss it in some clickbaity article about how Kids These Days are only reading fluff instead of srs bsns literature. In actuality, while the series is indeed a romance between Karou (the art student) and Akiva (the warrior angel), it’s also a sprawling epic about love and war, about hatred and hope, about genocide and terrorism and political mythmaking, about the duties of soldiers, about the dangers of partial knowledge and of hubris, about the power of friendship, about truth and betrayal and the ends of worlds. It’s about a lot of things, basically. It’s a romance not because it’s cute and fluffy but because it’s a story about the power of love to overcome everything, and I mean everything. It’s got a body count that makes Game of Thrones look like Goodnight Moon, not least because some of the characters can die multiple times, and it’s also got a lot of jokes about cake.
In this third installment, the story, already spanning two worlds, expands exponentially to encompass a multiverse of parallel universes—many of which are dead—including the home world of the seraphim tribes before they came to Eretz and began colonizing the chimaera. We learn more about the mysterious and powerful (and scary) Stelian seraphim and what it is that they do instead of fighting chimaera. We learn about the Beasts—the actual Beasts, not the chimaera, but the devouring monsters vast as worlds that swim in the darkness beyond the sky. We meet some awesome new characters, most notably Eliza Jones, a biology doctoral student who escaped from a family cult that claimed to be the descendants of the fallen angel Elazeal. Eliza is a thoroughly awesome character. Despite having a very tortured background (literally, because cults) and being a being of such immeasurable power and knowledge that the human mind cannot comprehend it (including her own, briefly, before it gets started out), she’s also very human—concerned with doing well and being taken seriously at work, spending a lot of time being annoyed at the douchey racist sexist white boy in her lab for being a douchey smug bigot, and she has a grumpy snarky sense of humor that endears her to Zuzana but is still a fundamentally nice person (unless you’re the douchey lab boy). She also seems to be starting something with Scarab, the young Stelian warrior queen, at the end of the book, so YAY for the multiverse being saved by lesbian WOC angels of unimaginable power! You don’t see that in a book every day, unfortunately. (I would read all the books about lesbian WOC angels saving the multiverse.)
Zuzana and Mik, in addition to remaining cute and funny, get to do some pretty awesome stuff that I cannot talk about because spoilers, although they are also traumatized by getting caught in their first battle. Zuzana, being Zuzana, is concerned that everyone knows about it when they do epic stuff.
Tying with Zuzana for my favorite cranky POV character is Liraz, ice queen killing machine, the most deadly of the bastard seraphim warrior regiment, the Misbegotten. Liraz’ personal motto is “Feelings are stupid,” which makes her the stiffest, most awkward dork in two worlds when she starts having them anyway.
Akiva gets progressively less boring (sorry, I am bored by male love interests on principle, he’s really a pretty decent one) as the series goes on, and in this book he really becomes interesting, spending most of his time fucking around with magic he doesn’t understand and trying to pull off brilliant but monumentally-unlikely-to-work feats of military strategy, such as creating an alliance between the remaining chimaera and the rebel Misbegotten, or trying to recruit the Second Legion, or trying to talk the bloodthirsty Emperor Jael out of his quest to acquire nuclear weapons. I like Magical Rebel Leader Akiva a lot, actually.
Karou also starts doing all the things, after spending much of Days of Blood and Starlight passively resurrecting people but sort of… being forced to snap out of it in the most traumatizing way possible. But in this book, she is again a fount of resourcefulness, awesome magic, and crafty outside-the-box thinking. Sneaky, sneaky Karou comes up with the plan that saves the Earth from falling for Jael’s plan and sends Jael back to Eretz sans weapons.
While Karou and the other awesome characters come up with many brilliant plans that work and save the day, they also have lots of plans that turn out to be terrible ideas, or that fall apart horribly and with great loss of life (or the threat of great loss of life, if they can’t stop it fast enough), because the worlds Laini Taylor has built here are bitterly violent, run by unmitigatedly terrible people, poisoned by centuries of warfare and bad blood even among the people who aren’t fundamentally bad, and governed by Murphy’s Law.
One very interesting choice that Laini Taylor makes in this book is that it ends before they save the multiverse. It actually mostly works, though—for starters, the book is already six hundred pages long, so it was probably time to end it. Second, the conflicts we’ve been following throughout the series—the ones with characters on both sides, when the good guys were fighting bad guys with names and motivations and personalities that we got to know—are wrapped up, and those are the kinds of story that is more exciting and visceral to read, like, actual action and dialogue scenes about then the sort of indescribably cosmic threat of Devouring Beasts with no names or personalities, so I wonder if trying to have a proper story climax about them would just be weird. Thirdly, due to the particular roles of prophecy, myth, and seraph genetic manipulation, while that last battle hasn’t happened yet, we know basically how it’s going to happen, so I guess there’s not a lot of tension there. I’d love to see a short story or novella about that fighting-the-monsters campaign someday, though—I want more crazy angel fights! And I already miss these characters! And we know that Laini Taylor can write a great novella because Night of Cake and Puppets was completely kick-ass.
In case you’ve missed the point here, I really love Laini Taylor and everyone should go read all of her books immediately.
