Taylor, Laini: Days of Blood & Starlight
Days of Blood & Starlight (2012)
Written by: Laini Taylor
Genre: YA/Fantasy
Pages: 528 (Hardcover)
Series: Book Two (Daughter of Smoke & Bone)
Why I Read It: If you've been reading this blog for a year or so, you'll know that Daughter of Smoke & Bone was one of my favoritest titles from 2011. It ranked #2 on my annual top ten list (yes, I know, I'm late with 2012's), and I was so enchanted with the book, the writing, the world-building that pre-ordering the sequel was a no-brainer. I've had this book since November, and the only reason I waited this long was because the dust jacket needed doctoring, and I've had this book rest under a pile of VERY HEAVY books in order to accomplish this. At any rate, I've waited long enough, and it's time to see what the sequel has in store.
The premise: ganked from BN.com: Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a world free of bloodshed and war.
This is not that world.
Art student and monster's apprentice Karou finally has the answers she has always sought. She knows who she is--and what she is. But with this knowledge comes another truth she would give anything to undo: She loved the enemy and he betrayed her, and a world suffered for it.
In this stunning sequel to the highly acclaimed Daughter of Smoke & Bone, Karou must decide how far she'll go to avenge her people. Filled with heartbreak and beauty, secrets and impossible choices, Days of Blood & Starlight finds Karou and Akiva on opposing sides as an age-old war stirs back to life.
While Karou and her allies build a monstrous army in a land of dust and starlight, Akiva wages a different sort of battle: a battle for redemption. For hope.
But can any hope be salvaged from the ashes of their broken dream?
Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. It's weird in that it's such a thick book and yet I don't feel I have much to talk about, but it's also for that very reason I want to talk about the very things that spoil the book. So if you're trying to remain spoiler-free, please skip to "My Rating" and you'll be fine. Everyone else, onward!
Discussion: Ah, the joys of the sophomore slump. Middle-book syndrome. Whatever you want to call it, there's a lot going into sharp decrease between books one and two in a series.
Consider: as a reader, you're coming to the world for the first time with book one. Everything is new, getting-to-know-you, and your expectations are limited to what reviews and hype have allowed.
Or, if you're the author, you've been slaving away on this bastard, haven't you? Whether or not it's your debut, it's still a FIRST in something, which means you've probably had to put more time and more hours into polishing it and promoting it to your agent/editor in order to get a contract for it and its sequels.
Now, consider those sequels: from the reader's POV, we already know the world, the characters. We have EXPECTATIONS that stem from our own experience with the first book.
From an author's POV, I imagine you've been pushed to do a book a year, which means you likely have far less time to write book two than you did book one. You may or may not have an outline for the whole series/trilogy, and you may be shooting from the hip, and you've got all this PRESSURE to perform, because the first book was SO well received.
I've talked about sophomore slumps before, focusing on urban fantasy and how I'll love the first book in the series, rush out to get the rest, and find myself totally unhappy with book two. But this isn't a genre-centric issue. It happens anytime a series involved and the market is chomping at the bit for more. I suspect we may see it more with UF and YA simply because those are the genres that are super popular now, and publishers want to push out those copies as fast as possible.
I'm not saying every sequel or follow-up will suck. I'm just saying it seems to be happening more and more. And not that they suck, really, so much as there's a great letdown after the awesomeness of the first book.
And so, if you haven't figured it out yet, Days of Blood & Starlight just didn't measure up to the enchanting promise of Daughter of Smoke & Bone. And that, of course, is disappointing. I was braced for it, however, since it took me a few months to get around to this and I'd seen other reviews respond rather lukewarmly to this sequel.
I consider the problems of Days of Blood & Starlight to be more of a middle-book syndrome rather than a sophomore slump. Taylor published a few books before Daughter of Smoke & Bone hit the shelves, so it stands to reason that, if we assume that we're reading a trilogy, we're getting the Empire Strikes Back installment: dark, gritty, and ending on a dark, cliffhanger-ish, hopeless note.
I think it was John Scalzi who complained that this format to trilogies is problematic, and not just because we come to expect the formula. It's because we can't conceive outside of the formula, and let me tell you, this book could've benefited from being looked at from a different angle. Because in 528 pages, hardly anything happens.
Karou angsts.
Akiva angsts.
The seraphim invade the human world.
Karou and her chimera and Akiva and his Misbegotten band together in preparation to stop them.
The end.
That really is all that happens.
Oh, there's more details than that. But Karou, I think, is the biggest disappointment. She's nothing like the girl we met in Daughter of Smoke & Bone, and yet before I say that's unforgivable, we do have a new variable: this Karou has the benefit of all of Madrigal's memories, so in essence, she is a different person. And as much as we'd like our characters to get over these transitionary hurdles and move on with it, life doesn't work like that. Yet, when it comes to fiction, it's problematic. The story needs to move forward, and it needs to move forward organically. How to do this when your main two characters are wracked with guilt and feel they deserve to be punished for the simple, tragic mistake of falling in love with each other? Sure, there are deeper implications: Karou feels she betrayed her people and led to their slaughter. And Akiva slaughtered Karou's people (though despite loving book one so much, apparently Akiva thought she'd died again? And that's when he did what he did? I remember his admission and I remember how horrifying that was, but I don't remember the misunderstanding that led to him thinking she was dead). Obviously, I don't expect them to shrug all of this off and jump back in each other's arms.
But damn, this was slow-going.
Page 7:
Akiva's wretchedness was a gnawing thing. It was taking him in bites and he felt every one -- every moment the tearing of teeth, the chewing gut misery, the impossible waking-nightmare truth of what he had done.
Page 51:
All she'd known in that moment was the ruin of Loramendi. Over that blackened landscape hung something Karou had never felt before: an emptiness so profound that the very atmosphere felt thin, it felt scraped, like an animal hide stretched on a rack and hacked at and hacked at until it was clean.
What she was feeling was the utter absence of souls.
I like these passages, mind you. It's early in the book, and I wasn't telling the characters to get on with it already. But it does give you a sense of what to expect for most of the book.
So this book, really, is all about Karou and Akiva learning how to move past their guilt and their sins and becoming the kind of people who can lead those they love into a bright new future. And I'll grant Taylor this: I'm glad that, despite how unfair I think Karou was being (to say nothing of Akiva's sins, but damn, Karou was determined to make him feel horrible, even when given a new perspective), these two characters are going to have to fall in love all over again, but on new terms. Karou, especially, needs to rediscover herself before she gives her heart away again (to Akiva, most likely, but this triangle that's popping up feels tiresome already, despite Ziri being a legitimate option before he's in the Wolf's body, which then makes Karou's choice for her, really).
What really helped this book move along was the supporting cast. Mik and Zuzana (who recovered far too quickly from heat stroke; I've had one, I know); Hazael and Liraz. What also helped this book, despite setting everything up for a seemingly hopeless future, was how Akiva and Karou both had the chance to kill their tormentors, the people they both perceive as being obstacles to a bright and war-free future. Despite how both characters' actions backfire in both expected and unexpected ways, it was strangely cathartic to see that happen. They both needed to take extreme action, and even if those actions didn't have the desired results, at least the actions shook both of them out of their stupors.
The writing didn't charm me this go around quite like it did in the first book. There may be many reasons for this: one, I'm used to Taylor's prose. Two, maybe Taylor didn't have quite the same time she needed to really make the prose shine. Whatever the case, I wasn't as enthralled. Yet that doesn't mean there weren't good moments. The above-quoted passages are good examples, as was this on page 286 (Liraz interacting with a fellow female guard who volunteered to go to the Captain's tent so that a virgin would be spared the indignity):
Loriel said she was fine. She said it was nothing -- just a man, and men wash off.
There were also several POVs. Taylor's writing voice is strong enough that I was able to overlook it, but the number of new characters whose heads I randomly got stuck in was problematic. I think it's telling too: perhaps the author didn't quite have a handle on her main characters' arcs and therefore needed to tell the story from people who had something more to offer.
Also troubling in this book was the role women seemed to play: Liraz has a fear of rape, and it's the very real threat of her being taken to be a serving girl in Jael's company that gets Hazael killed. Karou is almost raped herself (that was a vivid and nerve-wracking scene), On the non-rapey side, we still see women framed by the men around them. Part of Zuzana's story, amusing though it is, is in some ways framed by Mik's desire to marry her, so she tells him she won't consider a proposal until he completes three impossible tasks. It's sweet, and honestly, I liked it. But most of the women in this book are framed by their relationships to men, perhaps with the exception of Issa, but she's as much a prisoner in the Wolf's towers as Karou is. I don't think you can say this book passes the Bechdel test either (not that said test is the be-all and end-all of a book's quality): even when Karou talks to Zuzana or Issa, conversation often revolves around Akiva, Brimstone, the Wolf, etc. So yeah. There's that, adding to the problematic role women occupy in this book.
And what about unnecessary deception? I don't know who the author is trying to fool here but the reader, but what was the point of pretending the Wolf wasn't Ziri and Ten wasn't an ally when the angels were caught in Karou's tower? Everyone in that room was technically an ally. They could've come together and started planning then, letting Ziri-in-Wolf's clothing (ha!) perform as the Wolf later for the chimera.
What's frustrating too are the plot-points that are transparent to the reader, like how the White Wolf is just trying to get rid of Karou by having Karou teach Ten the trade of resurrection, but yet Karou, in her guilt and misery, is so oblivious.
But I will say this: more often than not, and I felt this way while reading Daughter of Smoke & Bone as well, I got the sense I was reading a fantasy not necessarily geared for teens. It's marketed to teens, yes, mostly because of the EPIC LOVE STORY and the ages of the characters. But yet the dark descriptions and violence of this book, and really the complexity of the world-building (not saying teens can't handle complexity) really make this book feel more like adult fantasy fare. It wouldn't have surprised me if this book had been published as an adult novel before the big YA boom took off. I think it would've worked just fine, and perhaps, with that audience in mind, the story may have been tightened a bit more? Not sure, just useless speculation. :)
Oh, and hey, we have Akiva's discovering magic! Real magic! And it looks like we might meet a new race of seraphim in book three. That's encouraging!
My Rating: 6 - Worth Reading, with Reservations
Let's be honest: Days of Blood & Starlight falls quite short of the expectations built up in Daughter of Smoke & Bone on so many levels. Clearly the middle book in the trilogy, it's all about transitioning its characters from one book to the other, setting up for the big battle. In the middle, there is a lot of repetitive angst, which sounds like a slog of a book, and it kind of is, especially in comparison to the first. However, what saves this book is that while the writing isn't quite as captivating as the first book, there are still some gems in the prose. The supporting cast really helps pull the reader through the book, lightening the heavy angst with some much needed humor or side stories. The developments at the end of this book are utterly important, but honestly this trilogy will be better judged once it's complete. Readers who only liked the first book may want to hold off until they hear how others respond to the final book in the trilogy, because that will put the second book in a new light. Not that this book's flaws would be erased, but it might make them far easier to swallow.
I'm tough on this title because I loved Daughter of Smoke & Bone so much. But I know how I'd reacted in the past to disappointing second books in series/trilogy, so I know, by comparison, this could've been a lot worse. I just wish it was a lot better.
Cover Commentary: Love it. It's consistent with the first cover in design, and I'm just in love with the detail surrounding the eyes. I'm a big fan of the font usage on this series too. Here's hoping book three keeps up the good work!
Next up: After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress