Laini Taylor: Daughter of Smoke and Bone

            Karou seems to be a perfectly normal art student in Prague, but in the course of Daughter of Smoke and Bone first she reveals some startling facts about herself, and then she finds out two completely earth-shattering truths. I always love it when a character is in the dark about herself, but this book carries that to a wonderful extreme. It’s fantastic to watch a character learn absolutely world-changing things while we learn them at the same time. This is one of my favorite iterations of what we know and when we know it, so effective and powerful.

            The key to all of the secrets lies with Brimstone, the chimaera monster who raised Karou. Brimstone sends Karou all around the world to collect teeth, using his workshop door, which can open into many different places all over the planet. Karou can go where Brimstone cannot because she looks like anyone else on Earth, though with blue hair. Brimstone is a chimaera, a mix of various species, as are the other three monsters that work with him, a group that raised Karou, a group she thinks of as family. Karou has no idea what he does with all these teeth, but that’s just the merest fraction of what she doesn’t know about Brimstone and his world, despite growing up in that workshop.

            The workshop itself is a wonderful physical manifestation of this information embargo. The doorway from Prague into the workshop can only be opened from the inside, from the workshop. If anyone opens the door from the outside, they find something else entirely, something local, belonging to Prague. Once inside the workshop, there’s another door that is never, ever opened, not once in Karou’s entire life. Clearly there are secrets. There are dishes of wishes like beads and coins. She asks questions and never gets answers. And her friends are used to Karou disappearing on Brimstone’s errands any hour of day or night.

            Karou’s sketchbook is another beautiful example, like the workshop, of something that looks both ways, into both worlds, but can only be understood within certain limits. Karou draws her monster family and shows her human friends, saying with an ironic quirk that they’re all real. Everyone knows they can’t possibly be, so it’s perfectly safe to show the pictures to others. Karou draws her human friends and shows them to her monster family, but they know humans are real. Both sides enjoy the same sketchbook, but like us as readers, the humans are in the dark about the reality of this other world.

            Clearly this sets up a situation where that ignorance must be breached. An angel appears in a town where Karou is meeting someone to buy teeth. We have had small hints about angels before this, since Karou made giant angel wings as an art school project and got a mystifying bad reaction from the monsters about them. This angel is burning handprints into every door that leads out of Brimstone’s workshop, though—and he attacks Karou on sight. He knows something about her that she doesn’t know about herself. There are whole realms of truths and history behind that interaction that only get revealed gradually.

            The layers of unknowns become richer and more complex once this angel, Akiva, joins the narrative. Instead of killing Karou, once he gets close to her he seems to find her strangely familiar and lets her go, gravely injured and very confused. Her family cleans her up and lets her sleep in Brimstone’s workshop for the first time since she was a small child. Left unattended, Karou finds that mysterious door open and makes her way through it.

            This is the first giant reveal. The monsters are building more monsters. Brimstone’s life’s work is creating bodies for chimaera soldiers to take up when they die in battle, their souls captured and brought back to inhabit the new bodies. The soldiers are at war with the angels, of course. The author hints at the second great reveal in Akiva’s reaction to Karou: although she looks human, she is a revenant, a recreated being. She carries the tattoos on her palms that all revenants do. Akiva immediately knew that this meant Karou was a chimaera, no matter that she could pass for human, and attacked her. The end of that attack, where Akiva stops himself, hints at the third great reveal, which is that Karou and Akiva knew each other before Karou died, and in fact were in love, against every possible taboo in both their cultures.

            In fact, this love got the original Karou (named Madrigal) executed for treason and Akiva tortured, though someone frees him before he can be executed. We learn all of this suddenly when Akiva and Karou finally break the wishbone that Karou has been wearing on a necklace. All of Karou’s memories of her former life come pouring back, but at the same time, she learns that Akiva has brought about the destruction of Brimstone and Karou’s whole monster family as well as their entire city.  

            So much of this novel hangs upon what we know and when we know it. It’s a Romeo and Juliet story, but Juliet doesn’t even know it, because she’s a resurrected alien in a new body with amnesia. And Romeo is a soldier angel with serious PTSD. Both are soldiers in a war that’s been going on for centuries on another world entirely. What’s more, Karou is a secret weapon and doesn’t know anything about that, either in her former life as Madrigal, or her current human existence as Karou. She has been trained to be a resurrectionist and remake chimaera bodies just like Brimstone, but she also is the one chimaera who believes that there can be peace between her people and the angels.

            We follow Karou through these bewildering and overwhelming revelations and then finally into her own rebirth, as she regains her former lifetime of memories. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an extreme and fascinating Russian doll series of layers of truth. The one example I can think of is Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, where an enslaved sewer rat of a boy on a distant planet gets chased and uprooted from each new home over and over, until he finds himself restored to the wealthy family he never knew he had. He’s able to bring all of the skills he learned in all of his various milieus to master a corporate landscape where everyone is trying to bring him down. Daughter of Smoke and Bone plays a subtler game by far, but shares that wonderful feeling that every terrible thing in our characters’ lives leads them to overcome even bigger challenges in the end. And it explores the literary trope of a secret or hidden past in the most satisfying way, as Karou was raised on Earth to hide her from all of the terrors and horrors of the war on her actual home planet.

            One of the other very useful attributes of hiding everything from the main character, of course, is that the reader gets to find things out as she does. That means we avoid all of the dreaded undigested lumps of exposition that can otherwise choke a reader. Taylor’s skill with hiding and telling the truth combines with Karou’s absolute certainty that she knows who she is—even though she’s completely wrong—to make for a tremendously satisfying story of discovery and transformation.