Daughter of Smoke & Bone
In a nation on the brink of war, a young art student’s star-crossed love begins to bloom in the first book of the New York Times bestselling epic fantasy trilogy by award-winning author 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 otherworldly 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?
A blue-haired art student in Prague who has run mysterious errands for her chimaera foster family since childhood, unaware of who she really is.
A seraph warrior known as "Beast's Bane" for his lethal skill against the chimaera, whose chance encounter with Karou reopens a buried past.
A wolf-headed chimaera Karou encounters beneath Brimstone's shop, hostile to her presence in the world she thought she understood.
Karou's fiercely loyal best friend and fellow Prague art student, a puppeteer with a sharp wit and a taste for mischief.
A ram-headed chimaera sorcerer who raised Karou and runs an otherworldly shop, trading wishes for teeth she collects for him.
It has not won a major award outright, but it was a finalist for the 2011 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book, one of the genre's top honors for YA speculative fiction.
