Review: "Daughter of Smoke and Bone"

If you've never been to Prague, you need to put it on your to-do list, preferably right at the very top. It is a wonderful city. Beautiful in a gothic way that works best in autumn when the leaves turn yellow and orange and the air is crisp and sharp. It is great for Christmas markets as well and the people of Prague throw a great party for News Years... and I'm getting off track. So back to topic. 

Last night I finished "Daughter of Smoke and Bones" by Laini Taylor and it was a great paranormal adventure. One of the things that I absolutely loved about this book is how different it is to many of the other paranormal romances out there. It doesn't take place in small-town America and the protagonist is not an average-looking girl with average talents and skills. Oh now, not at all. 

Karou is fierce! Gorgeous looking with natural blue hair and she's intelligent and a talented artist on top of that. Oh yeah, one cool lady. She lives on her own in a small flat in Prague where she studies art and hangs out with her friend Zuzana. Sometimes she will disappear though, for hours or days, leaving her life in Prague behind as she sets out on mysterious errands for the man in the shop. Brimstone raised her in his shops where dodgy tradesmen and hunters trade in teeth for wishes. Sometimes, however, the tradesmen can't come to the shop and instead Karou must travel to them, walking out of the door and straight into exotic places - Marrocco, Paris, Russia. In return for her work, Brimstone grants her small wishes and being a cool chick, Karou doesn't wish for goody-two-shoes as if she was some pageant beauty, no no, Karou wishes for the eyebrows of her rivals to grow fat and dark or for her ex-boyfriend's behind to itch at unfortunate times. She rocks. 
Then one  day while she is out on one of her errands, she encounters a beautiful angel who tries to kill her and from that day, her fate is sealed. Soon she is drawn into a centuries old battle between angels and chimeara and her relatively normal life is becoming less than normal. 

If you like your paranormal romance gutsy, exotic, interesting and different, then this is for you. It is a tour-de-force through an intriguing paranormal universe where humans are just the extras. It's cool in a way that very little paranormal fiction is and which I absolutely adored. If this book was a piece of clothing, it would be a pair of skinny jeans with leather back pockets, rock'n'roll for the masses. 

Read it if: You have a love for Prague and other Eastern European cities. You like your paranormal heroines to be more of the rock star type than the beauty queen type. 

Review: "Passion"

So now the time has come to review "Passion", the third book in the series about the eternal love of Daniel and Luce which is written by Lauren Kate (btw. such a cool name for an author!). The first books "Fallen" and "Torment" had something. I loved the black school uniform in book one and the graveyard and the firsts meetings between Cam and Luce. "Torment" was good as well, it had something. The last scenes were powerful and that leads me nicely to "Passion" which starts where "Torment" began. However, the plot of this one is quite different and if you are a huge Lauren Kate fan, then please forgive me for this review. I am going to be honest (because otherwise what's the point?) and it is not really going to be nice...

The plot is ridiculous. At best. The idea is actually good but the actual story is not only unimpressive, it is downright awful. In order to understand the eternal love of Daniel and Luce and the curse that means that Luce dies whenever their love becomes to passionate, Luce travels through time. Literally. She uses the announcers to travel through her past lives and observe or even take part in her past lives and what lives, she has led... And boy has she led some interesting lives. She seems to have been in all the right places on the right times, at least in a historical context. Thinking about this in a reasonable way, one would assume that she had had maybe one exciting life and a lot of normal lives outside of the main historical events. Not so Luce. She was lady of the manor in Victorian England, a friend of Shakespeare and the reason for the fire of the Globe Theater, a slave at the court of Pharaoh, a Chinese king's fiancee, a Princess of Savoy at the court of the Sun King... She has experienced quite a bit! And I can see why otherwise this plot may have become boring quite fast because Kate doesn't take the time to really explore any of these lives, instead she seems to try to fit as many past lives into one book as possible. And feature the devil as well plus a strange dialogue featuring God... Have to say I don't like it. At all.

If you loved "Fallen" and "Torment" please don't get your expectations up... If you loved films such as "Shakespeare in Love", "Mulan" and "The English Patient" then you might like it because the author seems to have borrowed a bit from these and other movies. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that she has not done it in a very elegant way and that rather annoys me. Honestly, this book seemed to me as if it had been written in a hurry and that's really too bad. I hope that the next book, "Rapture", will be better because even though I was less than impressed with "Passion", I still have to find out what happens to Luce and Daniel.