Review Detail

I don’t preorder books. I don’t purchase hardbacks. And I especially don’t stalk the mail lady in order to get my hands on a preordered hardback ASAP. I don’t get fangirly over authors, and I don’t get the strange urge to sleep with a book underneath my pillow and/or hug it very, very tightly. I just don’t. That’s isn’t me.

So believe me when I say that Days of Blood & Starlight killed me. This book tore me up into little pieces and ripped open my chest and stomped on my heart and gave me only one option: love it. I got this gushy feeling in my stomach while I was reading this, like it was so amazing it made my chest hurt.

Laini Taylor is flawless. She’s the real deal; her writing is mature and eloquent, the themes she deals with are relevant and tastefully portrayed, her characters are authentic, and her story is enchanting and riveting. If I were to pick one book published this year that takes the teenage reader seriously and has appeal for audiences of all ages, it would have to be Days of Blood & Starlight.

So, I do admit that I was not as enthused to pick up this book as I could have been. In my opinion, Taylor completely botched up the final hundred pages of Daughter of Smoke & Bone, so even though I really loved that book, I wasn’t enthralled. But within 50 pages of Days of Blood & Starlight, I was right back on the bandwagon, and—except for the scene were Zuze claims that in order to be a “real woman” you have to lose your virginity—Taylor never once let me down, lost my interest, or did anything but win my eternal devotion and admiration.

What I loved most about Days of Blood & Starlight was that it completely broke the “YA mold.” The majority of fiction published for teens has a huge emphasis on romance and finding “true love”—or as true as love gets when you’re a hormone-drugged 16 year-old. That was so, so far from the case in this book.

Days of Blood & Starlight is a book about war. War where there is no “good” or “bad” side. This a book about a war where civilians make up most of the deaths, on both sides; where army generals have forgotten why they’re fighting, whose only goal is to kill as many people as they can before their own death; this is a book about soldiers who are horrified by the things they’ve been ordered to do, but can’t lay aside their weapons because they’re too afraid of what their commanders would do to them. Mercy is weakness, bloodlust is king.

It’s a sickening picture, made more so by the connections readers can make to today.

And in the middle of it all is Karou, who is one of my favorite female protagonists. She’s devoted to her cause, shows remarkable strength and resourcefulness, and at the end of the day is willing to risk it all in order to do what she believes is right. She struggles with herself, with her love for an enemy solider who betrayed her, with her position as a bridge between the human world and the land of monsters.

At the end of the day, I was completely captivated and bewitched by Days of Blood & Starlight. I love this book in a way that goes beyond anything I was expecting or hoping for. Truly, I have only one problem: how do these people expect me to wait an entire year to see what happens next?