Days of Blood and Starlight was always going to be a hard sell after the stark and hauntingly beautiful Daughter of Smoke and Bone. I want to address the all-important question of whether Taylor has an obsession with the letters DBS or not.Okay, fine. Not relevant. Really.party poopers.Most of us had to prepare ourselves for the fact that DoBaS, like most middle child books, was probably not going to be quite as good as its older siblings. Personally, I always hold out hope for middle child books, wanting to be pleasantly surprised!Well, the pessimistic, miserly old grinches win out this time because DoBaS isnt quite as good as its predecessor, but its certainly nothing to turn your nose up at. But, you know, if you were to turn your nose up at any Laini Taylor book then, my god, have you no soul?!Taylors books have intense and varied themes. DoSaBs themes revolved around perception, love and loss, the pain of emptiness and coming of age issues. DoBaS deals a lot with losing/regaining hope, faith in oneself, forgiveness of oneself and others.In a lot of ways DoBaS is a different creature to DoSaB. DoSaB had limited PoV changes that largely existed between Akiva and Karou (I think my memory is really dodgy) and DoSaB was really more Romantic up until the very end. And by Romantic I dont necessarily mean the relationship between Akiva and Karou because I ultimately think DoBaS was more romantic than its predecessor though it may not seem intuitively so. It was more Romantic in the sense that the characters and the story are so much bigger and more mature. Theres these two amazing, independent forces of fate building up behind Karou and Akiva. The more they come into themselves and become wiser, the more theyre drawn together.Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a naive, sweet innocent first love. Appealing to many, but I liked the relationship dynamics even more in Days of Blood and Starlight. Theyve both lost that naivette, grown as people. They have more baggage to deal with and the relationship theyre building feels stronger erected on foundations off a deeper understanding of themselves and the world and they still cant help but love each other. After all theyve seen, all theyve done, all thats been done to them theyre still drawn to each other like moths to flame.Lainis writing is beautiful. If anything she has improved and the inherent poetry to the writing has become sharper and more poignant. Where a lot of people, including myself will get tripped up at is that pacing and structure of the novel. It is very meandering with an excessive number of POV changes. Theres a lot to follow, a lot happening all at once and the cast of characters has expanded exponentially.But, over all, I loved it. Im so enthusiastic for the next book. I absolutely have to know where this series is going, whats going to happen to them and whether Im just as naive and foolish as Akiva and Karou for hoping and thinking that they will eventually have some form of happy relationship at the end of this series.TAYLOR MARRY ME I LOVES YOU!This review also appears on my blog, Cuddlebuggery Book Blog.

This book was amazing. I enjoyed the first book, but this one was leagues ahead. The one thing I really appreciated about this story was the tone. I felt that Laini Taylor expertly captured the feeling of war. Taylor painted both sides as exhausted and frustrated, the soldiers were unable to articulate why they were fighting anymore. All they knew was blood. There was this air of hopelessness, this feeling that neither side was winning, that both were destroying themselves. But even within this desolate landscape Taylor also sprinkled in small flames of hope to keep us going. This book was wonderfully written, and I cannot wait for the final book in the series coming out in April. Highly recommended.

Lets see. You know how, at the end of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet wakes up in the crypt and Romeos already dead? He thought she was dead so he killed himself right next to her?Yeah. That was awesome. A pause, followed by Ow, suggested elbow punctuation on the part of Mik.Karou ignored it. Well, imagine if she woke up and he was still alive, but She swallowed, waiting out a tremor in her voice. But he had killed her whole family. And burned her city. And killed and enslaved her people. (Days of Blood & Starlight, chapter 47)This is approximately the circumstances in which we find Karou and Akiva at the beginning of Days of Blood & Starlight. All available blurbs and summaries are a little coy and vague about what this sequel has in store for its readers. Wonder no more. This is a dark, brutal novel with a war at its core. At the opening, Akiva just gave his seraphim brotherhood all the tools to destroy chimaera, and chimaera...well, they are almost completely eradicated as a nation. Karou is chimaera's only real hope of survival. No more talk of romance and love in this story. Akiva and Karou are in different camps now, with an abyss of resentment, guilt and disappointment separating them.I have already heard a few voices upset by this almost-no-romance development. Not everyone wants to be torn away from the heavy romantic story line of Daughter of Smoke & Bone and face the ugliness of never-ending war where nobody wins. But for me this trilogy is better for it. I am not the sort of reader whose attention can be held for long by romantic angst. I love reading about love, but I am not of the opinion that just love can sustain a series of books. Something bigger than that has to be at stake. In this book, there is, and it pushes all romantic woes to the background. And understandably so, considering the nature and severity of the rift between the lovers. Can you continue loving someone who initiated genocide of your nation? Will you expect to be forgiven for killing off your beloved's entire family? Probably not.Days of Blood & Starlight also gave me more in terms of storytelling than I had anticipated. I didn't expect at all to be so deeply submerged into the world of chimaera and seraphim, to get to know it so intimately. I remember getting only a glimpse of Eretz in Days of Blood & Starlight. This sequel is an adventure through the Emperor's harem, chimaera's tribal villages, seraphim barracks, ruins of Loramendi and excesses of Astrae, and then a look at what is is BEYOND the borders of the land known to Akiva and Karou. It is such a pleasure to read something about a world that has so much depth to it, to feel like I will never know the full expanse of this world and every wonder it holds. The masterful twists at the end left me hungry for more and more, because as much as I know about Eretz now, I also know how much there is still left to explore.Days of Blood & Starlight may be not as quirky and charming as its goulash- and skuppy mischief-filled predecessor, but it's a novel that encourages you to contemplate the consequences of war for both winners and losers and futility of revenge. Even though I missed Prague and ever annoying Kaz a little in Days of Blood & Starlight, reading it was still a pleasure, albeit a pleasure of a different kind.