Throughout the beginning of the first semester of the year, all students that were enrolled in a current English class had to pick out and independent reading book by doing speed dating on several books.  The schools librarian, Dr. Tina Ward, set up many tables of different genre books. Students had to go to each table and write a mini review of the book based on the inside cover or the first few pages, then rate how much they would like to read the book or seem interested.

    Out of all the books that I rated, what seemed to catch my eye was Daughter of Smoke and Bone by author Laini Taylor.  The book genre is Fantasy.  After finishing reading the book, I rated it three out of five stars.  My favorite character was actually the main character, Karou, because she had a strong roll in the book and the way Laini Taylor wrote her was amazing.  

    One of the best things that I really liked about the book would probably be that each chapter always had a new setting somewhere in it.  One of my favorite settings was when Karou was in an alley and an angel’s portal opened. It was really interesting because that was Karou’s first portal.  Other interesting settings that I loved in the book were such as in a church, an abandoned building, and in an attic. The setting change was one of my favorite things in the book.  

    I also found that the book was somewhat confusing to me. When the author was skipping around and it made it look like each chapter was a new point of view from a different character, which made it seem more difficult to catch up with what was going on in the chapter.  That was probably one of the worst things in the book that didn’t make sense to me. One of the chapters would start out with a character, then switch to the next character would be the next chapter. The final chapter would be repeating the first character but at different times when it was left off with a whole other character.

     I liked the book, but I didn’t love it.  I have read other books from the author, Laini Taylor, and I loved them.  I will not be reading the rest of the series unless I have time to really comprehend the first book.