Skip to main content

Love Where You Left It


Days of Blood & Starlight is Laini Taylor's fantastic sequel to Daughter of Smoke & Bone. 

Akiva believes Karou is dead. He found a thurible in their meeting place with her name on a label. But this time he won't go on a murderous rampage. This time he will remember her by saving those Chimaera he can from his empire's killing spree. Meanwhile, Karou refuses to acknowledge Akiva's existence. He betrayed her. So she has taken over Brimstone's role and works for the White Wolf in bringing the dead to life. But she has added her own ideas to the project which will lead to an even ground on the killing field.

I loved this book. Taylor does a fantastic job of picking up the narrative thread. She leaves just enough time in between the books that we need to know what happened. Where did Karou and Akiva end up? How did they get there so quickly? Both Karou and Akiva have returned to their homelands, but for different purposes and with different outcomes. 

This book does a fantastic job of exploring the outcome of choices. How does their previous affair affect their new situation in life? How do they deal with being in love with each other when they cannot be together? And more importantly, how do they stop their people from killing each other constantly?

Taylor introduces several new characters in this book (Ziri was by far my favorite). She also manages to weave new problems into the old ones, making everything seem as exciting and problematic as the first book. Her prose is fantastic--lyrical and lovely, although I found this book sounded a little more realistic and less dreamy than the first. I also think that works well with the story line. Karou knows what is real now, and she has to deal with the dark side of reality now.

I cannot wait to read the next in this series. I would recommend this book for fans of fantasy and slow-build romance. 

Favorite Quotes: The goddess of assassins has tasted my blood, he thought, and he wondered if she liked it, and wanted more. Help me to see Karou safe, and you can have every drop.  

Dead souls dream only of death. Small dreams for small men. It is life that expands to fill worlds. Life is your master, or death is. You are a lord of ashes, a lord of char. You are filthy with your victory. Enjoy it, Joram, for you will never know another. You are lord of a country of ghosts, and that is all you will ever be.

Take up a weapon and you become and instrument with as pure a purpose as the weather itself: to find arteries and open them, limbs and sever them; to take what is alive and deliver it unto death. There was no other reason to hold a weapon, no other reason to be one.

These weren't her folk, but...they were, and maybe that meant that anyone could be anyone's, which was a sort of nice thing to think, with the world falling apart. 

What can a soldier do when mercy is treason, and he is alone in it?

Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breed slaughter. 

I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Blarghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Hello lovelies. I'm feeling super overwhelmed by life since I'm doing Camp Nanowrimo and trying to move and find a place to live 2600 miles away. So that's my excuse for missing last week. But now you get two weeks in a row. So this week's theme (hosted as always by The Broke and the Bookish ) is... Top Ten Favorite Movies   (And I picked Scary Movies) I have a secret. Or I guess I had a secret. And that secret is that I love  scary movies. Like anything that plays on gross special effects or melting walls or sudden appearances--I'm totally down for it. (This has only back fired on me once--when I had a panic attack watching Saw 2--I don't wanna talk about it...) So in no particular order, movies that really impressed me with their scare factors: 1. Thir13een Ghosts -- there's this scene with a glass door that is ingrained in my brain.  2. Haunting in Conneticut -- aw man, this movie is sooo good. I actu

Why Should I Trust You?

Hello Lovelies!! It's my finals week, so I'm going to make this one quick.  This week's Top Ten Tuesday (by the Broke and the Bookish ) allows us to fill in the blank! So I will be bringing you... The Top Ten Books with Characters Who are Unreliable Narrators (AKA BIG OL' LIARS). I love unreliable narrators because you never know if they're actually being unreliable or not. Occasionally they tell the truth, but occasionally they lie. So here we go... 1. Nothing by Janne Teller 2. Liar by Justine Larbalestier 3. Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman 4. Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta 5. Don't Look Back by Jennifer L. Armentrout 6. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein 7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte 8. The Princess Bride by William Goldman 9. Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas 10. I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson Many of these books feature the unreliable characters as side characters and not main charac

More Diversity in Your Book Diet

Hello Lovelies! As usual Top Ten Tuesday is brought to you by the lovely people over at The Broke and the Bookish . Today's topic is Top Ten Books for People Who Like X, and I'm going to go with... Top Ten Books for People Who Like Diversity Thanks to the efforts of groups like We Need Diverse Books, diversity is having a resurgence in young adult and children's books. For the last couple years, I have been trying to read more books with diverse characters or by diverse authors. (Diverse in this respect includes race, sexuality, gender, and disability). I haven't endeavored to challenge myself to only read a certain type of book i.e. only those by women of color or anything that isn't by a white heterosexual male, but I try to be extra aware of the characters and ask myself if they actually are white (sometimes the text doesn't say it, sometimes people just assume it!) and if being white is necessary for the character or not.  But here are my top t