If you missed my review of book one of this trilogy, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, you should probably go check that out before reading this one. This’ll be nice and spoiler-free for Days of Blood and Starlight, but there are spoilers for its prequel.
Once upon a time, an angel and a devil held a wishbone between them.
And its snap split the world in two.
Laini Taylor’s writing sweeps me off my feet, every single time I pick up one of her books. This must be the sixth time I’ve read Days of Blood and Starlight, but from the very moment I opened the pages and slipped back into Eretz with a broken-hearted Akiva I felt like I was experiencing the story again for the first time. It’s not purely a delightful place to be. This book, this world, these characters are all tangled up in complex webs of misery and regret. In other hands, this story would be an angst-fest, an exercise in drudgery. But, even as it tears you to pieces, Days of Blood and Starlight never entirely loses the sense of wonder that made Daughter of Smoke and Bone such a joy.
I do have a small bone to pick, and I’ll get it out the way now before I go back to talking about what I love about this book. My only issue is with the magic system, the exploration of which in this book seems to confuse or outright contradict some of the things we learned in Daughter of Smoke and Bone. The wishes have disappeared. The point of the teeth was ostensibly the pain, but now the pain seems to have to come from the caster and the teeth are for making new bodies. The hamsas are conjured from the pain of the bearer’s last death, but it isn’t really addressed that this pain can’t be used for the rest of the conjuring—it seems strange that the pain of death wouldn’t be more significant than the pain caused by the clamps the resurrectionist uses. And then there’s also the implication later that pain needs to be used as it’s felt so that it doesn’t go to waste, which would seem to make the explanation for the hamsas impossible? It’s not a major issue, and the most important elements of a good magic system are clear: the aim, the method and the price. That said, it is always a minor distraction for me as I try to piece together the new information with the old, and I don’t think the story or the inherent mystique of resurrection would have been diminished by a little more consistency in what we were told.
Our main characters tread a fine line in this book. Both are carrying with them extreme weights of guilt and self-loathing, both are trying to muddle through to some kind of hope for the future, both have to work out to what extent their beliefs and values align with those of the groups they have found themselves in. That’s a lot to process! Also, the conflict is huge; it’s a war between two species, and the helplessness our protagonists feel in the face of it is totally justified. They are also uniquely positioned, especially in the aftermath of the first book, to have some influence over the situation, if they can only hold on to the hope of change. That tension, between the enormity of the problem and the need for some kernel of optimism, runs through the book in a way that I found really engaging.
Everything in this story defies easy answers, defies simplification. The victories, when they come, are hard-won scraps snatched from the grasp of opposing forces who frequently seem to be one step ahead. The failures on the other hand are vast and far-reaching. The tiny fragments of success characters achieve are simultaneously enormously satisfying and absolutely crushing, and you feel your hopes raised and dashed with the characters’ at every turn of the story.
There are more characters introduced in Days of Blood and Starlight, and every one of them feels like a whole and complex person (or chimaera). It’s incredibly difficult to pick favourites from these new introductions when all of them are so interesting, but I particularly fell in love with kind-hearted Ziri, a chimaera soldier with fond memories of Karou from her former life as Madrigal. We also get to see more of some of the characters we started to become acquainted with in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, including Zuzana and Mik (Karou’s closest friend and her boyfriend) and Hazael and Liraz (Akiva’s half siblings and closest allies). All of the characters are people you can imagine knowing in real life, even if you might not really want to know all of them, and every opportunity for new character interactions throughout the story sparked a flash of joy and curiosity akin to the feeling of introducing two friends from separate social circles. There is less romance in this book than there was in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and the tone in general is considerably more bleak, however the lack of a romantic sub-plot leaves more room for development of other characters and their various relationships, and Taylor absolutely makes the most of this.
Days of Blood and Starlight is, even more than its predecessor, truly set in two worlds. Earth as we know it, and Eretz. Laini Taylor makes them feel so equally real that it’s hard sometimes not to believe that you might stumble across a portal one stormy night and step through it to see the twin moons of this other world lighting the sky. Everything feels vivid and alive, even the unpleasant things which you might rather weren’t so incredibly present. If you read to be transported, I don’t think I can recommend a more effective story than this one!
This is my Review of the Month for the review collection on LovelyAudiobooks.info
Great post😀