Daughter of Smoke and Bone
2001
- chimera (greek mythology)
- juvenile fiction
- boarding schools
- greek mythology
- paranormal fiction
- fiction
- supernatural
- artists
- schools
- angels
The story
Seventeen-year-old Karou, a lovely, enigmatic art student in a Prague boarding school, carries a sketchbook of hideous, frightening monsters--the chimaerae who form the only family she has ever known.
What it’s like
Lush, sensory prose that lingers on wet cobbles, candle smoke, the inky smell of a well-worn sketchbook, and the blue-gold haze of an old European city in late afternoon sun. The voice is confiding and wry, dense with striking images and odd, specific details, so reading it feels like leafing through a treasured, slightly macabre notebook. The mood is romantic melancholy with a whimsical edge: dreamy and velvet-dark, suited to a rainy weekend, a long-haul flight, or a late night with a mug going cold. The early chapters unfold slowly and then widen into a sweeping, quest-driven middle as a young artist, always half-hidden from the world, begins to learn where she came from. Her arc moves from guarded solitude toward trust and longing. Violence is present and sometimes graphic, with battles, wounds, and a bloody war in the backstory, but it stays mostly in the background. The romance is tender, with brief kisses and no explicit sex. It suits readers who love gothic, painterly fantasy with a love story at its heart and don't mind some blood between the tender moments.
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