Show Your Face? (Sometimes a Pose Is Just a Pose Part 1)

So I came across an interesting article about book cover trends a little while back and read through it, and one of the points sort of surprised and actually disturbed me.

Now, one of the first things that attracts someone to a book usually is the cover. Does the cover look interesting? And of course we have a lot of covers with pictures of people on them. The Once Upon a Time YA novel series from Simon and Schuster actually revamped their covers from illustrated to photographic, rereleasing every book in the series so far except two (Scarlet Moon and Spirited) and I actually like these covers a lot better. They're beautiful. I'm a big fan of photographic covers.

But the point that was made by this article was that a certain trend in photographic covers is having a negative impact on feminine identity among teens. This trend is the image of a girl whose face is hidden in some way from the camera. You see this in the Matched Trilogy by Ally Condie (Cassia is always looking away from the reader), in The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer (you see Cinder's foot, Scarlet's arm and part of her upper body but no face, Cress's back and her hair), The Mortal Instruments (hard to see any faces), and in a lot of other books. Then there are the books where only part of the face is revealed (Kiera Cass's The Selection, where part of America Singer's face is hidden by her arm).

According to this article, the trend of hiding a girl's face from view somehow takes away from her strength, from the strength of her identity as a strong character, and from her ability to be viewed as a role model by the reader. I find this interesting, since a lot of novels with strong female leads (The Hunger Games, Divergent, etc.) don't even have images of their stars on the cover at all.

This reminds me of something my sister once told me. Now, I'm biracial. My father is African-American, my mother is Caucasian. When I was little, I had this idea (not because of my parents) that I couldn’t do anything that a biracial person hadn’t done before. As an example, I would play A Little Princess with a friend of mine from down the street, and I was always Sara and she was always Becky, because I had lighter skin than she did and I thought that was how it was supposed to be (in the 1993 film, Sara is white and Becky is black). It wasn’t until I got older (say, eight or nine instead of four or five) that I realized that wasn’t necessarily the way things had to be, and I learned it was acceptable to put myself in the shoes of a character who didn’t necessarily look like me.

What does this have to do with this book cover trend?

A lot of readers will take in the text description of the main character when they first come across it, but then they'll push it aside and put themselves in the situation instead. It's one of the fun things about reading. This lack of facial imagery on the cover is actually rather conducive to doing that, since the reader isn't stuck with a fully realized image of what the main character is supposed to look like.

I know that when I'm reading a really good book, I have a hard time slowing down enough to visualize everything, so if I don't have an established picture in my head, the MC looks like me, even if she's black or Greek or blond or red-headed or a green Martian with no hair. It's just easier to insert yourself into that character because the physical characteristics are less prominent. Which is probably one of the reasons the publishing companies do it so often.

The other reason? It looks pretty. One of the most beautiful trio of book covers I've seen is for the Matched Trilogy and what the poses tell us about the state of mind of the main character. They're gorgeous. Sometimes a pose is just a pose. Sometimes it's purely aesthetic.

But I doubt the industry is trying to weaken the feminine identity of the female teen masses. At least not most of them. I'm not worried, and I hope that when I'm published, I can have a cover as beautiful as the ones I've listed here.

- LA Knight

Vortex - SJ Kincaid

 

S. J. Kincaid has created a fascinating dystopian world for Insignia, her futuristic science-fiction adventure series perfect for fans of Ender's Game. Earth is in the middle of WWIII, a war to determine which governments and corporations will control the resources of the solar system.

 

Teen Tom Raines grew up with nothing—some days without even a roof over his head. Then his exceptional gaming skills earned him a spot in the Intrasolar Forces, the country's elite military training program, and his life completely changed.

 

Now in Vortex, the second book in the series, Tom discovers that the Pentagonal Spire, where he and his friends are being trained as superhuman weapons, is filled with corruption. He is asked to betray his friends—the first real friends he's ever had—for the sake of his country.

 

Will he sacrifice his new life to do what he believes is right?

So I recently read this book called Insignia by SJ Kincaid, and I loved it sooo much that I checked out the sequel, Vortex, from the library and read it in like, a day. I love this writer SO MUCH! So much, in fact, that I'm willing to download a Kindle app to my computer so I can read the prequel novella, Allies.

But that's not what this review is about. This review is about Vortex! Very rarely does an author maintain the same level of epic with her second book that he/she began with their first, but SJ Kincaid did it! Tom is now fifteen, not fourteen, but he still has that adorkable mid-teenage-boy-ness to him that I love. He's on his way to graduating from the Plebe Class of the Combatant Training Facility (basically the freshmen) to becoming a middle-classman. Progress is being made with his training and everything's great…

Except that some of the things Tom has done in book one are now coming back to bite him. See, I love it when authors take a character's actions and then actually bring down realistic consequences for that action. Not because I don't like the character, but because I get tired of characters in books who do dumb things—either on purpose or by accident—and then don't realize that actions have actual consequences. One of the big themes of this book is that Tom is beginning to realize that.

1 - He has to fix a ruined friendship/romance with the girl he loves.

2 - He has to get sponsors in order to move up to the rank he wants.

3 - He has to deal with new enemies wearing the masks of friendship and try to figure out just what his current enemies are willing to do to get back at him.

4 - And he's not done training yet, either. =)

Now that Tom has graduated from Plebe Class to level one of Middle Company, he has new things to worry about. Passing his classes isn't the be-all/end-all of his world anymore. Now, if he wants to become a Combatant (which he does), he needs to graduate to CamCo—Camelot Company, the best of the best, and the only trainees who become actual combatants. Everyone else gets other jobs, like with the military and stuff. He doesn’t want that. But in order to be a part of CamCo, he also needs sponsors—one of the major plotlines of this book. And in order to get sponsors, Tom has to learn how to schmooze people.

Just to warn you, this review is full of SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!

So, Tom doesn't want to schmooze people. Why? Because he's fifteen, not naturally manipulative, and doesn’t want to sacrifice his dignity and pride by being polite to people he would rather punch in the face. Thing is, as the reader, I can totally sympathize with that! While at the same time, I'm busy begging him to just suck it up one time so he can get a sponsor. It's nice to have a character I can totally root for without reservations. I'm in the middle of another book right now where I'm having reservations about cheering for them and I hate that. But I gotta admire a kid who's so "skilled" that he manages to tick off every single possible sponsor out there within an hour of meeting each of them. Lol!

Of course all five or six of them are basically horrible people, rich CEO types who look down on everyone, and Tom's such an idealist he can't possibly condone the thought of working with them. Like, one lady is the CEO of a company that has overseas factories and condones those horrible conditions where workers are beaten, get paid fifty cents an hour, get no breaks, no air conditioning or heat in the buildings, etc. Being fifteen and having a temper, he tells her everyone in power in her company should throw a party and then go blow themselves up.

That doesn’t end well. Sigh.

The only time Tom's pride-thing gets annoying (it's only one time) is when he meets this oil sheik or whatever and refuses to bow to him. I'm like, "Okay, I get it, you don't want to bow to someone because you don't believe they're superior to you. I get it. Really. Except one thing—they ARE superior to you! They have more money, more authority, and they can make or break your career. Deal with it!"

But he doesn’t. Sigh. Instead he gives the guy the thumbs-up sign, which in America is cool but in the sheik's country is like flipping someone the bird. Tom didn't know that, but everyone got so in-his-face about it that he got mad and refused to apologize.

So basically his pride holds him back with the sponsors. UNTIL! The end. But let's back up a step first. This book makes me so happy I end up jumping all over the place about it.

So aside from the sponsor thing, there are a few other plot points I adore. One is the relationship between Yuri and Wyatt. I was worried that was going to blow up in their faces, which detracted from the rating I gave Insignia, but it didn't blow up! It's fine! Yay! Thank you, Ms. Kincaid, 'cause that would've made me so sad if it hadn’t worked out. I love Yuri.

One thing does make me sad, though. The adults all thought Yuri, our favorite Russian hottie, was a spy. All the kids thought they were full of it. Unfortunately, the grownups were right. Because of the neural processor chip that gets put into every combatant trainee, it's also possible to introduce malware and spyware into their neural processors and control them. You see it in the first book when someone does it to Tom (though it gets fixed in that book). Well, someone's doing it to Yuri. So he's not a spy, but the person controlling the malware in his neural processor is using him to spy. Boo. Tom, Vik, and Wyatt figure that out and manage to fix the problem, but not before Yuri almost ends up brain-dead. =(

But he's not a bad guy! So I'm happy about that. He's good, and he loves Wyatt very much, and eventually things will get resolved because he's a good guy and the good guys always win except in sucky books where everything falls apart.

Also a nice, complicated, wonderful plot point—Medusa. Now, I didn’t really talk about the combatant known as Medusa in my review of Insignia except briefly. In the first book, Medusa is the heretofore unbeatable combatant from the enemy nation, who Tom defeats near the end of Insignia. She and Tom are also best friends online throughout most of book one and spend a lot of time fighting each other in VR simulations because they're both warriors and they love that sort of thing and they bond with each other and slowly begin to fall in love (though they don't realize it then).

But the thing is, Tom has never seen Medusa's face. She always appears in different guises (for example, the very first time she and Tom face off against each other, she's wearing a sim-image of Achilles at a VR-simulation of the Battle of Troy). In Insignia, Tom used his neural processor and hacked into the security cameras where Medusa lives to see her face during the big fight near the end of the book, and discovers she's horribly disfigured. He uses that knowledge (and the emotional trauma that hits her because now he knows what she looks like) against her to win, which causes a HUGE rift between them. It takes half of book two, which spans several months, for Tom to make up for it.

And that's one of the plotlines I love from Vortex—Tom trying to re-woo Medusa through combat. It's just fun to watch, because Tom's adorkable, and he feels so bad for hurting Medusa (that's not her real name, btw—it's her call-sign; his is Mordred), and he just wants things to go back to the way they were between them, but he realizes they can't because he screwed up. So then he tries to regain her trust. And it's just sweet and cute and fun to read, and it's like…one of the best romantic subplots I've ever seen, and the way it's done is brilliant. I love it.

Going back to consequences of actions, by the way, one of the CamCo kids is murdered by one of their teachers during all of this. And it's like, "OMG WHAT?!" But then if you think about WHY the teacher killed her, it's actually more like, "Never mind, she deserved it." Because Tom can do this thing called interfacing (mentally controlling a machine NOT built for the neural processor), which only one other person in the world can do—Medusa. And it's considered a BIG deal. And it could get Tom killed if anyone but his teacher and Medusa find out.

So then this girl finds out, and she tells the teacher she's going to go blab it to the bad guy. And he keeps telling her, "You don't want to do that. People's lives are at stake. I can't let you. Don't make me do something drastic to stop you." And she's like, "Screw you, it's not like you can call the cops or anything, I'm doing it," so he kills her. It's like, "Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been screwing around with people's lives." And I like that because it's something you don't see a lot in books—that some secrets are actually worth killing for, to protect people.

A really interesting piece of character development in this book also is Vikram (Vik), Tom's best friend. Normally he's right up in the mayhem with Tom, but after stuff goes down with Yuri and the spy-thing and Yuri almost becoming brain-dead because the mayhem got them all in trouble, he starts putting distance between himself and Tom. He's shaken to learn just how serious things can get in the world he's entered into right now. But the thing I love is that when Tom really needs him, Vik puts aside his "holy crap" feelings and steps up to the plate again, and doesn't desert—unlike that little punk, Steven Beamer, from Insignia. I loathe that little twerp. I hope he gets eaten by a shark.

My only issues with this book are, it's shorter than book one, and…oh, wait. That's it. Well, and it sort of ends on a cliffhanger, but that's more me as the reader dying of a heart attack than an actual flaw. The characterization and character development of Vortex blows Insignia out of the water, and Insignia wasn’t bad to begin with. I also love the realism of the situations, the feelings about those situations, and the realism of the consequences of everyone's actions. I love it. LOVE this book!

Which is why I got both of them for Christmas!! WOOT!!

Happy holidays,

LA Knight

PS — The funny quotient in this book is pitch-perfect. Well done, SJ Kincaid!

Divergent - Veronica Roth

 

One choice can transform you...

 

In Beatrice Prior's dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue--Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is--she can't have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really are--and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes exasperating boy fits into the life she's chosen.

But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threaten to unravel her seemingly perfect society, Tris also learns that her secret might help her save the ones she loves . . . or it might destroy her.

I'm so excited! Why am I excited? I will tell you why! Because Divergent the movie is coming out in less than six months! Now, does that mean I'll get to see it in theatres? Doubtful. But maybe in the cheap theatre. Who knows?

In the meantime, I'm finally writing a review for the novel Divergent, by Veronica Roth, which I actually read over a year ago but recently reread aloud to my roommate. This is one of my favorite novels ever because of the main character, Tris, and her motivating credo. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the novel Divergent, the city of Chicago has become its own standalone community after a lot of apocalyptic events like World War III or what-have-you. In this city, the people are divided up into five (technically six) factions or clans that take care of different parts of the society:

- Abnegation, the Selfless: these guys are basically like the Amish or the Mennonites. They believe in serving others, in doing charitable works, etc. Their whole thing is selflessness and service. In order to become a member of Abnegation, you do a month of community service. They run the government side of things because everyone wants selfless people in office, right?

- Amity, the Peaceful: this is the faction in charge of farming and whatnot. They're basically hippies. I have no idea what their initiation is. They're generally nice people…but you find out how strict they are about the whole peaceful thing in book two. If you get in a physical confrontation with another person, both you and that person have to talk to a counselor and get put on happy pills. And I think they drug their water with happiness juice.

- Candor, the Honest: this faction is made up of lawyers and law-makers and whatnot, and their whole thing is honesty. It can get a little obnoxious, though, because in Candor you're raised to take that filter between your mouth and your brain and go stick it in a hole somewhere. One of the secondary characters, Christina, is from Candor and she has some trouble adjusting at first to another faction where blabbing is discouraged. Their initiation is to undergo a public truth test where they dope you up and ask really personal questions because there are apparently no secrets in Candor.

- Dauntless, the Brave: the warrior clan of this society, made up of fighters. A majority of the book is Dauntless initiation, which focuses on learning to control and/or confront your fears so they don't cause problems in the field, as well as learning how to fight (but also, Tris learns how to have fun). But, like every club, there's some corruption here. It's actually the worst here and in Erudite, unfortunately.

But I love Dauntless because one of their basic principles, the one Tris loves and believes in, states: we believe in everyday ordinary acts of bravery. That might seem small, but it's not. It's pretty cool, actually. Because to quote another book* I love, "It's more than being brave. It's about good against evil, right against wrong. Of doing what you know to be right even when no one else will help you."

* The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald; this is actually a direct quote from the movie, paraphrased from the book

- Erudite, the Intelligent: or something like that. These are the scientists and researchers. Their main problem (and the biggest issue regarding corruption) is their clinical detachment from human emotions to pursue logic and information. The main bad guy of books one and two is so evil because she wants to figure out how this one group of people work…by torturing, experimenting, and dissecting them, because it's the most convenient way to work.

And the thing I like is, it's not everybody in Erudite who has this problem. And not all the bad guys are from Erudite, either. Some are in Dauntless, one's in Abnegation, and I think there's one in Amity. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Veronica Roth to be like, "Oh, well…see, ALL of Erudite's bad. The end." But she didn’t—which is good, because that would be sloppy writing. Thank you, Ms. Roth, for this lack of sloppy. Happiness abounds in me because I'm tired of slacker writers. Boo. But she's not a slacker, so yay!

- and then there are the factionless. These are the homeless, the mostly-jobless (some of them work as janitors, city bus drivers, etc), those without health care or anything like that. Abnegation tries to take care of them, but Abnegation is fairly small in population compared to the factionless.

Being factionless is considered the worst thing, short of losing everyone you love to death or losing your own life, that could happen to someone in this world, because it's basically a death sentence. Most of the factionless don't live to old or even middle-age unless they're something special (kids who've washed out of Dauntless training, for example).

We actually don't see much of the factionless in Divergent, but we see enough to know that I, personally, would rather live the nun-ish life of an Abnegation woman than live factionless.

So those are the five (six) factions in the world of Divergent. When you turn sixteen, you take an aptitude test to see where you're best suited to go. You don't actually have to follow the results of your test, but the odds of you washing out during initiation and becoming factionless are much, much higher if you're in a faction you're not suited for.

Most kids test highest for one faction—maybe two, if they're weird. But Tris, the main character, is Divergent: she tested into three factions.

Abnegation. Erudite. Dauntless.

A little backstory of the world politics. In the last five to ten years, the leader of Erudite (the scientific sociopath we mentioned earlier) has been slandering the two highest government leaders of the city, who both belong to Abnegation, as well as slandering Abnegation itself, because she wants to be in power. Most of what she's saying actually is NOT true, but that's not the point. Point is, Tris would never join Erudite. She's unhappy in Abnegation, and she wants to learn to be brave and help people by protecting them…so she chooses Dauntless.

And then we, the reader, are launched into the fun, radical, ridiculously high-spirited, reckless, and incredibly dangerous world of Dauntless and its initiation. I gotta say, one of the things I love about reading is experience things I would never do in real life (like swimming with jellyfish or working in a circus or walking on Mars*). Divergent and the segments of Dauntless training and life give me that in spades. I will never go zip-lining, for example, or climb to the top of a Ferris wheel, or jump off a roof or a train, but I can feel the exhilaration and adrenaline of doing those things when I read Divergent.

* "Experiences" I enjoyed while reading Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz, Tiger's Curse by Colleen Houck, and A Wizard of Mars by Diane Duane.

I'll say it again: thank you, Veronica Roth.

There's more to the plot—such as why Divergents are considered so dangerous to society and Tris has to hide her Divergent status; what's really going on over at Erudite; the secrets of Tris's mother's past—and they're all fantastic, but we're going to leave that alone for now. Just know that they're genius AND I couldn’t call them, not even at the last minute. That is saying something.

Also, Four (the love interest) is hot. Like, for real. I haven’t gotten a good look at the actor who's going to play him, but the way he is in the book, he's hot. And I don't approve of getting tattoos (my personal opinion), but the reason he has tattoos of the five symbols of the five factions is a pretty good one—he wants to be selfless, loving, honest, brave, and smart, the five "virtues" as it were of the five factions. Give the boy some props, he's not just spilling random ink on his body. And Veronica Roth manages to strike the perfect balance between dangerous-bad-boy and vulnerable-scarred-boy and smexy-romantic-boy with Four, as well. His secret identity? Didn’t see that one coming either.

The final thing about this book that really impresses me is how the author cuts through the language to these beautiful, poignant thoughts and ideas…but the language is actually very, very simple. It reads like someone talking. It doesn't read like a book, which actually makes it a pretty fast read, because it feels like Tris is actually talking to me about what's going on. That's a pretty good trick.

So I now own Divergent and Insurgent and hope to get book three, Allegiant, for Christmas. Hopefully it's as brilliant as Divergent, without some of the minor flaws of Insurgent (only real flaw in book two: Four briefly turns into a moron and makes me want to slap him; Tris's reaction to his moronicity makes me want to smack her, but she has more of an excuse—she's sixteen). I loved Insurgent, don't get me wrong, but it's not the 5-star book Divergent is. Hopefully Allegiant is a 5-star, too.

And after that? The movie! Ex-CITE-ment!

- LA Knight

Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor

 

Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

So guess what, boys and girls? I have finally found a book about angels and demons that isn't ridiculous and stupid (The Mortal Instruments don't count; they were great until book four, and then things went seriously downhill super-fast). The trilogy I'm talking about is called Daughter of Smoke and Bone—named for the first book, which is being reviewed right now—by Laini Taylor. Ms. Taylor, you are a genius. I adore you.

 

First of all, I love a particular style of writing that unfortunately, most authors can't pull off. I like other styles of writing, but this is one of my favorites. It doesn’t really have a name, but it's a sort of stream-of-consciousness, lyrical, poetic way of writing that almost paints a picture in my head, like a song almost. I've heard that Jack Kerouac does it in his novel On the Road, and I know Francesca Lia Block does it beautifully (she's where I first ran into the style). And at last, at last, I have found a current, modern author—two, actually, if you count Tahereh Mafi—who do it as well. It's not the same when done by any author, either. Each author has their own way of doing it, and I like Ms. Taylor's way: sparse lyrical-ness amidst stellar wordage. Point one for Laini Taylor.

 

Second, being LDS, I tend to avoid certain things in novels—angels and demons, for one thing; reincarnation; books about killers or mean kids doing mean things and not being punished; extreme violence and whatnot. Yet Daughter of Smoke and Bone takes the whole angel/demon concept, as well as reincarnation, and gives it a spin that makes it LDS appropriate.

 

The angels in this novel are a race known as seraphim, but they're not angels sent by God. They're not divine. They don't come from Heaven. They actually say that, though a few of the nuttier bad guys are like, "Well, the humans think it's true! Maybe it is!" And everyone else is like, "Go home, seraph, you're drunk." Actually, the seraphim are another species that happen to look really cool and have wings that look like light and fire, who come from another world called Eratz. But they're mortal (long-lived, but killable), and their creation story has nothing to do with Judeo-Christian mythos. Point two for Laini Taylor.

 

The demons in DoSaB aren't demons, either. A character named Akiva (a seraph) refers to one specific chimaera as a "devil" because he hates the guy, but that's all. The so-called "demons" are actually a group of different races known collectively as chimaeras that also come from the world of Eratz. They're animalistic humanoids; Madrigal, one of the main characters, has a human face and body but antelope horns and hooves instead of feet. Another chimaera, Yassri, is a woman up top but a snake below the waist. And there are apparently a few chimaera who are just animals, like the raven-esque Kishmish.

 

The chimaera's relationship to the seraphim is similar to the early Native Americans to the white settlers, but with a twist. The seraphim were like, "We'll civilize you. Oh, and by the way, we need to torture you so we can harvest your pain to fuel our magic. Thanks, 'kay, bye." Obviously, rebellion was looming. Rebellion came. Now war rages.

 

Fast forward to the start of the story. We meet Karou, "the wishmonger's daughter." A seventeen-year-old art student (with a douchey ex-boyfriend who won't stop trying to win her back) in Prague by day, she runs errands for a chimaera named Brimstone (the guy who raised her) in her free time. What sorts of errands?

 

She collects teeth. No, Brimstone is not the tooth fairy. For one thing, he refuses to accept the teeth of children. Why? Read the book. But Brimstone is a trader, trading wishes (which come in denominations like money does; from scuppies at the bottom to bruxiels at the top—how creative is that?) to his suppliers for the teeth they give him. And not just human teeth, but animal teeth. As long as they're in good condition, he takes them.

 

And here's where we get into reincarnation that isn't actually reincarnation, just like we touched on demons and angels that weren’t really demons and angels.

 

The chimaeras possess the ability to take over magically created bodies. Their natural form is actually non-corporeal in a way. They have the ability, when their current body falls in battle, to take over another body made for them by sorcerers like Brimstone—from the teeth collected*. It only works with adults (it's a magical technique that requires fierce concentration and force of will) and the bodies they get are created fully mature, and they wake up with their memories intact. Hence why Brimstone doesn’t take child-teeth. So it's not reincarnation, because if there's no magical body prepped, they just die after a few days of floating around without a corporeal form to inhabit. They kind of remind me of a magical version of the Host in Stephenie Meyer's science-fiction novel, who are little aliens requiring a host-body in order to survive.

 

* Apparently every species gives off like, a magical signature. It sticks around even after you die. And sorcerers like Brimstone can extract this species-specific magical energy from the teeth, using it to form the bodies he needs for the chimaeras. So if he had the tooth of an elephant and the tooth of a walrus, the magical signatures would be different, and he could make an elephant body using the elephant energy and a walrus body using the walrus signature. But since chimaeras are mishmashes of animals, they need different teeth for one body. Like, a character in the book who's part antelope, part bat, part human would need teeth from all three of those animals. Apparently gemstones are involved for their specific energies, too, but that's not really explained and it's not really relevant, either, because Karou's job is to collect teeth.
 
 

The book Daughter of Smoke and Bone actually only spans about a week or two, but in that week a lot happens. Basic plot in a nutshell (and beware, it and the rest of this review both contain

 

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A seraph named Akiva and two others are leaving black-scorched handprints on all of Brimstone's portals around the world, closing them off so they can't be used. Brimstone is running out of teeth, but Karou doesn’t know why—and it's important. Akiva senses that he and Karou have a connection, and Karou feels like she knows him from somewhere, but neither of them knows how or why that is. Inside Brimstone's workshop are two doors, one to our world and one to another that Karou is forbidden to go through, and when she does, her entire world falls apart. Mixed into this is the history of Akiva, a seraph soldier who once fell in love with a chimaera, only to lose her. He believes wholeheartedly now that the chimaeras are monsters…but Karou may be able to change his mind.

 

I can't really describe it beyond that little paragraph without giving too much away, but it's a beautiful, entrancing, and twisty novel that made me race through it because I had to know what happened next. It's all about the power of love, how it can transform, heal, or destroy. How sometimes secrets are secret for a reason, and how love without trust can be a two-edged sword. I'm warning you guys now, the end will leave you with your hands over your mouth, making squeaky noises of disbelief.

 

Bonus for this book—the insults you learn from Karou and her friends and family. "Rodent-loaf," for example, is something Yassri the snake-woman says about jerky men. And for the most part, instead of calling guys "a**holes," Karou and her best friend call them "orifices." Though most of the funny insults come from the next bonus (see the paragraph below).

 

Big bonus for the book, as well—Karou's best friend Zuzana is HIGH-larious (“Hey! My body may be small, but my soul is large. It’s why I wear platforms. So I can reach the top of my soul.”). Karou calls her "tiny violent one" because she's short, and she's just a riot. She's also a gifted dancer and artist. Hence why her short story is called "Night of Cake and Puppets," which I want! But it's only available for the Kindle…grrr…

 

So for now, I have Daughter of Smoke and Bone coming in the mail and Days of Blood and Starlight, the second book in the trilogy, from the library and I can't wait until I have a few moments to sit down and get through it, but at the same time, the last book doesn’t come out until April! Funnily enough, it comes out on my birthday. So I won't die a horrible death languishing for the last book to come out, since it'll be here in about three months and two weeks (unlike Oblivion by Kelly Creagh, which doesn’t come out until August!) but I might drag my feet a little with book two just so I don't have such a long wait until book three.

 

All in all, I give Daughter of Smoke and Bone 4.5 out of 5 stars. The only reason I don't give it a full 5 stars is because of the relationship between Karou and Akiva. I want a happily ever after and I don't have one yet! Ms. Taylor, this is not acceptable. Please rectify by book three, if you would be so kind. But that is my only complaint about the entire book. The characterization is impressive and believable, the few bad things done by the good characters are understandable and don't make them evil, the worlds are beautifully crafted, she's clearly done her research about all the different locations in our world, and the whole teeth-wish-bodies thing is waaay creative. Kudos to Ms. Laini Taylor for creating a book series I'm going to love forever!

 

Much love (and brush your teeth!),

 

LA Knight

 

PS — Rather, I'm gonna love it forever unless Karou and Akive don't get together at the end. In which case then I might set my copy of the trilogy on fire and then go die in a hole.

 

Warning — there's brief nudity and off-screen sex.

 

The sex is between Akiva and Madrigal, who are married by chimaera law (if chimaera law applied to seraphs, anyway) because they make love in this one moon-goddess temple for "secret lovers" and that's basically how that works. Which makes it even sadder when the bad guy, Thiago, kills her in front of him. ='(


In Karou's backstory (also off-screen), she gave her virginity to her ex, but now regrets it a lot. Poor thing.

 

As for the nudity, Karou is an art student, and for her life-drawing class, her douchey ex shows up to be the nude model during the first day of the timeline. It's not so much sexual as it is annoying, and she attacks him with scuppies and he runs out after about half an hour. Hehehe.

 

Some beautiful quotes from Daughter of Smoke and Bone

 

Karou wished she could be the kind of girl who was complete unto herself, comfortable in solitude, serene. But she wasn't. She was lonely, and she feared the missingness within her as if it might expand and... cancel her. She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust.”

 

--

 

“Love is a luxury."
"No. Love is an element."
An element. Like air to breathe, earth to stand on.

 

--

 

The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century—or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet.

 

--

 

She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

 

--

 

Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star. 

 

--

 

“She had a sadness that was so deep, but it still could turn to light in a second,and when I saw her smile I wondered what it would be like to make her smile. I thought...I thought it would be like the discovery of smiling.”  - Akiva

 

--

 

Until a few days ago, humans had been little more than legend to him, and now here he was in their world. It was like stepping into the pages of a book -- a book alive with color and fragrance, filth and chaos -- and the blue-haired girl moved through it all like a fairy through a story, the light treating her differently than it did others, the air seemed to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place was a story about her.

 

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Other covers for Daughter of Smoke and Bone (and the cover for "Night of Cake and Puppets")!

 

 

Sayuri 3 - Words on a Screen

"The łyzør'vÿnðe told the humans that the Nĵörðunn were a cruel race; warned by our friends, humans were ready when the wicked aliens attacked our ships. Fighting by our side were the æsÿn'jähär, refugees from the Nĵörðunn home-world who'd fled a life of pain and fear to find peace on Terra. With them were the clever, powerful bÿrn'aĵärł who could sense impending danger, even when the Nĵörðunn's shields hid them from sight. "

A Young Child's History of the Nĵörðunn War
Dr. Alexis Scholl

ØØØ

When he was pretty sure his legs wouldn’t buckle, Eric gripped the handle of the truck door and slammed his shoulder in it so it popped open. Stupid thing always stuck. Clambering out of the truck, he staggered around the hood of the Chevy to stare at the place where the—meteor? asteroid?—had hit the ground. The dusty fog still hid most of the desert from view.

"What just happened?" He muttered.

Suddenly barking madly, Wendy leapt out of the truck, racing past Eric, and squirming under the barbed wire out into the desert. He quickly lost sight of her in the haze. He could still hear her barking, though.

"Wendy!" Eric yelled, slamming the truck door and racing toward the barrier of barbed wire. "Wendy, get back here! Wendy! Stupid dog!"

Pausing at the wire, he tried to figure out how to get past it without ripping himself to shreds. At least it wasn’t barbed razor wire. Carefully he ducked beneath one of the strings of wire and tried to slip through. A hook caught on his shirt, digging into his skin, and gouged a chunk of flesh. He jerked instinctively and got caught on another hook. By the time he managed to wrest free of the wire, blood ran in tiny rivulets down his cheek and soaked his shirt in a dozen different places.

"Wendy!"

Grateful for the hiking boots he always wore to work, he set off across the stretch of desert and into the clearing haze of grit. Eric swore under his breath as cholla thorns snagged his shirtsleeves, but was grateful when they didn’t catch in his skin. Dodging around mesquite and acacia trees and carefully avoiding the paddle cacti, he stopped at the edge of the still-swirling but slowly calming storm. Putting two fingers to his lips, he whistled for his dog. Wendy barked in the depths of the dust.

"I'm going to kill that dog when I get her out of there," Eric muttered. Yanking his t-shirt over the lower half of his face, he squinted and stepped into the wind and grit. Dust stung his eyes and coated his mouth despite the shirt. He choked and coughed, yelling, "Wendy!" The dog continued barking. There was something about it…she sounded panicked. Afraid. "Wendy! Here, girl!" More barking.

A low grinding whine, so low it made his teeth ache, began building at the heart of the impenetrable dust cloud. The temperature, already uncomfortably warm, ratcheted up. Sweat dripped off Eric's face, mingling with dust and blood. From far off he heard a shrill beep. Then the dust began to clear. A shadow barreled out of the haze and rammed into his legs, knocking him to the dirt. Sharp stones bit into his hands as he landed.

"Ow! Jeez, Wendy!" Eric wiped his hands on his jeans and reached for his dog, but she danced back from him, barking frantically. It was panic he was hearing, he realized. She was upset about something. "Whoa, what?" He asked, getting to his feet. "Wendy, what?"

She bounced and lunged toward the clearing dust, barking and whining, before racing back to Eric. She planted her head hard against the back of his knees and shoved with her whole body, propelling him across the scrub and dirt. Then she darted back in front of him. Barked again.

"Okay, okay," Eric said, trying to soothe her. "What is it? Is someone hurt? Is there somebody over there?" Wendy lurched up onto her hind legs and barked again. Eric nodded. "Okay, show me. Show me where, girl."

Wendy took off into the fading haze and Eric took off after her. Barely dodging barrel cactus and cholla, he ran deeper into the dust. Someone had to be hurt. How had Wendy known? Well, he'd read on the news lots of times about dogs knowing weird things like that. Somehow she'd known somebody needed help. Eric thought of the girl he'd saved a couple days ago. His lip was still busted from that little fight. His dad had always told him that his penchant for saving people could get him into trouble one day…but he'd never been able to walk away from someone who needed help; that was one reason he wanted to become a doctor. So he kept running.

He nearly ran face-first into a metal rod sticking straight out in the air. Only a last-minute duck kept him from breaking his nose. Wendy barked, popping up on her hind legs again to paw at the air. Eric stopped and stared at the metal…was it a pipe? It looked like a piece of studded pipe as big around as his forearm floating parallel to the ground.

Eric stared at it. It wasn’t attached to anything. It just hung there, floating about five and half feet off the ground. It didn’t look like lead. The late autumn sun caught on the silvery-white metal, giving it a pearlescent sheen faintly tinged with icy blue. Wondering if he were out of his mind, wondering if he were about to lose a finger, he poked the floating pipe.

A series of computerized beeps chirped at him. The pipe twisted in the air. Eric scrambled back from it with a startled yelp as one of the inch-tall, square studs circling part of the pipe suddenly cracked at the top. A small, circular hole opened up at the center.

Reflexively tilting his head sideways like an owl—what was this thing? What was it doing?—Eric watched as a small blue light appeared deep within the tiny tunnel that had opened up in the square stud. Before Eric could do anything except tense up, there was a brilliant flash of blue that left spots dancing across his vision. He blinked them away as Wendy came to stand next to him. She wasn’t barking anymore; she just wagged her tail. Eric rubbed his eyes to try to clear his vision.

Wendy stepped forward. Eric lunged for her and dragged her back by the collar from the floating pipe. She barked and twisted out of his grip, jumping at something on the ground. Eric frowned and stared at it. Smoke drifted up into the air. Molten sand glowed a sullen red from the sandy desert ground. It took Eric a moment to realize the cooling sand spelled something. It was upside down; he had to squint for several seconds before he could process it.

WE NEED HELP.
PLEASE HELP US.
PLEASE HELP HER.
THERE'S NOT MUCH TIME.

Eric stared at the upside-down words etched into the sand and dirt for several long seconds while his brain did a quick reboot. He blinked once, then looked at Wendy. Wendy, who'd barked as if someone was in trouble. Wendy, who always barked when someone dangerous tried to break into the apartment but wasn’t scared of…whatever this thing was.

Slowly, Eric got to his feet again. He stared at the pipe-thing, then dropped his gaze to the message scorched into the ground. "Who's 'us?'" He asked without thinking. "What is this thing?"

And then the air to the right of the pipe rippled, like movement spreading across the surface of a pond. Slowly the desert, the washed-out blue sky, everything to the right faded away, and a silvery-white thing the same color as the pipe shimmered into view. Eric stumbled back from it, swearing. His eyes bugged as he stared at the massive metallic whatever lying on the scrub grass and dirt, shining in the sun. It took him a long minute to realize the pipe was attached to the thing and that a name had been etched into the metal.

The North Wind.

"It's a ship," he gasped out. Childhood memories of watching Star Trek and Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica with his mom flooded his mind as he stared at the thing. "It's a freaking spaceship!"

A spaceship in bad shape, he realized. Rips in the hull marred the reflective surface of the metal. Carbon scorch marks made the ship look like someone had smeared soot across its once-shiny hull. Cracks and warped metal made it look that much worse. Eric let out a whistle.

"What the heck happened to you, huh? Whoa, what?"

Darkness spread in a line across the hull, appearing without warning maybe fifteen feet above Eric's head. The line of blackness widened until it was the width of a set of double-doors, then it shot downward. A metal ramp slid out of the darkness and touched the smoking ground a few feet away from Eric's boots.

"No way, man," he whispered. "You gotta be kidding me."

And then Wendy uttered a short, sharp bark and raced up the ramp. Eric growled an obscene word and took off after her. His feet clanged hard against the metal ramp as he chased his dog into the ship. The hatch shut the moment he was inside.

"Perfect," he grumbled, trying to swallow the cold lump lodged in his throat. Now he wasn’t thinking of Star Wars and Star Trek. Now he was thinking of Aliens and Predators, and hostile things that wanted to do experiments on him. "Just perfect. Wendy, wait!"

But the golden retriever hustled down one dimly lit corridor. Eric followed. What else could he do when he had no idea how to get off the stupid ship in the first place? Besides, if this was a trap or something, the aliens might have been on their way to find him. He wasn’t going to wait around by their front door.

He thought of the message again.

WE NEED HELP.
PLEASE HELP US.
PLEASE HELP HER.

THERE'S NOT MUCH TIME.

Help who? Not much time until what?

Despite the dim lighting, Eric could see that the corridor was very neat—almost military-neat. Walls of that same silvery alloy with the ice-blue undertones rose up over his head. The damage extended to the ship's interior, though. Sparks and crackles of electricity erupted from damaged panels along the walls as he made his way down the hallway.

At the end of the hall was a double-door that zipped open with a hiss of hydraulics when he got within a couple feet of it. He stared at it, at the rows of navy blue buttons in a silver panel against the far wall, and realized it was an elevator. No way was he getting on an alien elevator when he had no idea what was waiting for—

The floor suddenly tipped, like the ship had pitched forward onto its nose. Wendy yelped and slid across the metal floor into the elevator, her nails clicking and scraping as she went. Eric cried out as he tipped into the elevator after her, slamming his bad shoulder into the wall with the control panel. He hissed as fire lanced his shoulder and spread through his arm. Wendy whined and pressed against his legs as the elevator jerked into motion.

Eric tried to take stock of the situation. They were in an elevator on an alien spaceship in the middle of the desert that clearly had somebody at the controls because someone had had to leave that message about needing help—which might or might not have been true. And he had no idea what was waiting outside the elevator doors when the thing finally decided to spit them out.

Another jerk signaled a halt to the elevator's journey. The doors swung open and Eric peered into a room illuminated by flashing red lights, a small and dying fire burning amidst a nest of wires inside a control panel, one flickering white light overhead, and a massive pale blue screen at the front of the room which gave off a dim glow. Wendy whined, took two hesitant little steps, then launched herself into the room. Eric knew, though he wasn’t sure how, that whoever needed help was in this room. So he followed his dog.

He twitched away whenever something popped or cracked or sparked. The place was a wreck! What had happened here? An alien battle in outer space? Had the ship crash-landed on Earth somehow?

All thoughts of aliens and spaceships and intergalactic battles fled Eric's mind when he saw the bleeding girl lying unconscious on the floor.

Eric ran to her, dropping to his knees next to her. She lay on the floor next to a padded metal chair. Her gunmetal-gray jacket, open to the waist, was scorched and charred in several places, spattered with blood in others. Her black shirt was torn, revealing ashen copper skin lacerated, burned, and bruised. Black hair spilled in a small halo around her head. A deep gash over her right eyebrow seeped blood. More blood oozed from a long slice across her forehead. Bruises mottled one side of her face. Her arm lay at an awkward angle. When Eric peeled back one eyelid, her pupil contracted sluggishly at the sudden influx of light. She looked very young lying there.

Wendy suddenly barked. Eric's head shot up and his mouth dropped open at the words typing out slowly across the large screen in front of him.

 

I am Boreal of the łyzør'vÿnðe.

She is my captain, Sayuri.
Can you help her?

"Uh…duh…um…uh…"

A sharp whistle emanated from somewhere in the room.

Please! She is injured.
Before our landing dislodged the spine-jack,
she lost a great deal of blood and suffered a concussion.
I think she has broken ribs and a broken arm from the impact. I can't help her. Please!

Eric swallowed and stared down at the bleeding, unconscious girl. She looked younger than him, he realized. Twenty, maybe twenty-one compared to his twenty-five. He couldn’t just leave her here.

"I…can you hear me?"

Yes. Speak.

"I can take her to a hospital. My truck's just out there. Is anyone else hurt? The rest of…of the crew?"

She and I are the crew. She is my pilot.
What year is this?

"What year?" Eric blinked, baffled, but told him.

We have come so far back…

You can't take her to a hospital.
We are not from this place or this time.
She has technology in her body that your medical
authorities do not and cannot understand.
If anyone from your government discovers
this technology, there's no way of
knowing what might happen.

"Wait, you're not from this time? What do you mean, you're not—"

Can you lift her?
If you can get her into that chair,
I can run a diagnostic on her bio-sensors.
I will know how badly hurt she is.

Eric hesitated for a fraction of a second. Explanations could wait. This girl—Sayuri, Boreal had said…typed…whatever—might be bleeding into her skull for all he knew. A diagnostic or whatever would be perfect. Scooping the girl up, he carefully deposited her in the chair. He noticed a pin in the shape of a pair of golden wings glinting on the lapel of her jacket. There was a small hiss, a snick sound, and then the girl took a deep breath. Her eyelashes fluttered. Her head lolled slightly on her slender neck before she went limp again. Eric turned to the screen.

She has four cracked ribs,
but none broken and no splinters.
Her left arm has a green fracture.
She has a concussion, but nothing fatal.
She will awaken on her own in
perhaps eleven or twelve hours;
our journey has put considerable strain
on her body. First degree burns
on her lower left arm. Various
lacerations on her face and arms.
She has lost a great deal of blood
but won't need a transfusion if the
bleeding is stopped in the next two hours.
She will be all right if you
can tend to her injuries.
Can you take her back
to your dwelling?

"To my apartment?"

Eric stared at the screen. Then he looked at the girl. So basically this Boreal was saying that if he didn’t take her back to his place and patch her up, she could bleed to death. Which of course meant Eric had only one choice. But what about…

"Where are you? Don't you need help?"

I am capable of self-repair if given a few days.
I cannot care for her in my current state.
Please, the ones who did this are tracking us
even now. They will be here in less than
three of your Terran revolutions.

Terran revolutions…the ones who did this…self-repair…his brain snagged on that last part. Wait. Wait, wait, wait. "Dude," Eric whispered. "Self-repair? Who…what are you?"

I am Boreal. I am The North Wind.

"I…I don't get it," Eric said. His mind refused to process what he thought the guy was saying.

I am the ship, and the ship is me.
Now please — will you help her?
She is my family. You must help her. Please.

Looking at the girl in the chair, Eric realized that the doctor in him wasn’t really going to give him much of a choice. And she was the guy's family? Eric knew what it was like to lose family. He nodded.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'll take care of her."