Giveaway: Sneak Peek of STRANGE THE DREAMER

Happy Friday Everyone!

I hope you guys have fun weekend plans, or not-plans as the case may be. Usually there's nothing I like better than parking myself on the couch and not moving for 48 hours ;-)

To help you get in the weekend spirit, I have a very special giveaway to share today! One of my all-tine favorite books is Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor, so when I heard earlier in the year that we'd be getting a new Laini series, I may or may not have done a spastic excited flail the likes of which you've never seen before. Which is for the best really, since it probably would have scarred you guys for life if you'd witnessed it ;-)

The first book, Strange the Dreamer, releases in September from Little, Brown, but today you can enter to win a sneak peak! I have a chapter sampler of the book as well as some fun buttons for one lucky winner, all put together in a pretty metallic gold bag thanks to the awesome team at the NOVL. Before we get to the actual giveaway though, here's a little more about the book!

Strange the Dreamer is the story of:

the aftermath of a war between gods and men.
a mysterious city stripped of its name.
a mythic hero with blood on his hands.
a young librarian with a singular dream.
a girl every bit as dangerous as she is in danger.
alchemy and blood candy, nightmares and godspawn, moths and monsters, friendship and treachery, love and carnage.

Welcome to Weep.

Goodreads • Amazon

Who's excited? THIS GIRL! To enter the sampler giveaway, please fill out the Rafflecopter form below. Giveaway is open to US addresses only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Review: Dreams of Gods and Monsters

DREAMS OF GODS AND MONSTERS
Daughter of Smoke and Bone #3
Laini Taylor
Paranormal Young Adult
613 pages
Little, Brown
Available Now
Source: e-ARC from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
By way of a staggering deception, Karou has taken control of the chimaera rebellion and is intent on steering its course away from dead-end vengeance. The future rests on her, if there can even be a future for the chimaera in war-ravaged Eretz.

Common enemy, common cause.

When Jael's brutal seraph army trespasses into the human world, the unthinkable becomes essential, and Karou and Akiva must ally their enemy armies against the threat. It is a twisted version of their long-ago dream, and they begin to hope that it might forge a way forward for their people.

And, perhaps, for themselves. Toward a new way of living, and maybe even love.

But there are bigger threats than Jael in the offing. A vicious queen is hunting Akiva, and, in the skies of Eretz ... something is happening. Massive stains are spreading like bruises from horizon to horizon; the great winged stormhunters are gathering as if summoned, ceaselessly circling, and a deep sense of wrong pervades the world.

What power can bruise the sky?

From the streets of Rome to the caves of the Kirin and beyond, humans, chimaera and seraphim will fight, strive, love, and die in an epic theater that transcends good and evil, right and wrong, friend and enemy.

At the very barriers of space and time, what do gods and monsters dream of? And does anything else matter?

MY THOUGHTS
Dreams of Gods and Monsters is one of those books that inspires conflicting reactions upon finishing it, the overwhelming love of the previous two books predisposing us to adore this final book as well, but even with our desire to love at its highest, we find ourselves perhaps less enthused upon finishing than we might have hoped. Reading this final book is a bit like watching a chess match without a full understanding of the rules, well aware each move on the board is leading up to either victory or defeat, but our ignorance keeps us from emotionally engaging in the epic battle of strategy.

Much the same way, Ms. Taylor spends nearly the entirety of this impressively substantial final installment moving pieces around her board, but where the first two books felt like an intimate game between she and us as readers, Gods and Monsters sees our single chessboard expanded to include so many more, and the sheer enormity of the expansion leaves us feeling slightly adrift. New players are introduced, and with them comes enormous implications for Karou, Akiva and the rest of their ragtag group. Suddenly, the final battle we were prepared to face in this last book is rendered nearly insignificant as the shadow of the new threat creeps into clarity. We’re left then with an end that is in fact a beginning–unarguably fitting given Karou and Akiva have called themselves a beginning all along, but also a bit frustrating after everything the characters have been through in this series.

All of that being said however, Dreams of Gods and Monsters is as gorgeous a story as its predecessors, Ms. Taylor’s writing achingly beautiful and her characters the stuff of cherished memories. The core characters of Karou, Akiva, Zuze, Mik, Ziri and Liraz carry this tale even when the tying together of disparate plot threads slows the pace to a near crawl, the six of them acting as emotional anchors who keep us tethered to this world and its questionable fate. Overall, beloved fans of the series will undoubtedly be pleased with some of the truly stunning moments Ms. Taylor paints on page, and I certainly can’t wait to see what her astoundingly imaginative mind has in store for us next.

Rating: 3.5/5

Find Dreams of Gods and Monsters:

Amazon • Goodreads • B&N

Find the Daughter of Smoke and Bone Trilogy

Tumblr • Facebook • Re-Read Project • Tour Dates • NOVL

*If you haven't had a chance already, be sure and check out my Karou artwork and enter to win a copy of Dreams of Gods and Monsters!

This book was sent to me by the publisher free of charge for the purpose of a review. 

I received no other compensation and the above is my honest opinion.

Review: Days of Blood and Starlight

DAYS OF BLOOD AND STARLIGHT
Daughter of Smoke and Bone #2
Laini Taylor
Paranormal Young Adult
517 pages
Little, Brown BFYR
Available Now
Received from publisher for review

THE STORY
Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a world free of bloodshed and war.

This is not that world.

Art student and monster's apprentice Karou finally has the answers she has always sought. She knows who she is—and what she is. But with this knowledge comes another truth she would give anything to undo: She loved the enemy and he betrayed her, and a world suffered for it.

In this stunning sequel to the highly acclaimed Daughter of Smoke & Bone, Karou must decide how far she'll go to avenge her people. Filled with heartbreak and beauty, secrets and impossible choices, Days of Blood & Starlight finds Karou and Akiva on opposing sides as an age-old war stirs back to life.

While Karou and her allies build a monstrous army in a land of dust and starlight, Akiva wages a different sort of battle: a battle for redemption. For hope.

But can any hope be salvaged from the ashes of their broken dream?

MY THOUGHTS 
Days of Blood and Starlight is one of those books we pick up knowing what we’ll find on its pages will not be the stuff of fairytales and happily-ever-afters where a wistful smile will linger on our faces as we set it aside, but rather the stuff of nightmares, tear tracks scarring our cheeks as our hearts pound out a melancholic tune on a broken instrument. Simply holding this sequel in our laps prior to cracking the spine, we might swear we can hear the painful echo of what awaits us with Karou and Akiva, and as we begin to read a haunting rattle accompanies the quiet wisp of the page turning, becoming increasingly louder as we realize the sound is a result of the shattered pieces of a heart clattering together as its owner draws a deep breath, leaving us only to wonder if the owner of that agonizing noise is in fact Karou, or us.

Karou is a changed young woman from the vibrant artist we met in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, now in full possession of her memories–both beautiful and torturous–as they collide with a life already in progress. For the first half of this installment, she’s simply going through the motions, her emptiness a seemingly crushing weight despite its physical nothingness, and we approach the start of each new chapter with the naïve hope that we’ve seen and experienced the worst of her hurt, only to be proven wrong again and again. Her fire returns with the arrival of Zuze and Mik to her desert resurrectionist laboratory though, and while her pain is a constant shadow that absorbs and consumes any small flicker of light that tries to beat it back, she slowly begins to question, defy, and fight against the dark thrall of an all-consuming vengeance.

Akiva begins his defiance of what’s expected of him long before Karou, but while he finds purpose sooner, he’s as empty as she, the little light he had left in him burnt out by the fire in her despairing gaze as she learned of what she lost with the snap of a small wishbone at the end of book one. Though for almost all of this story the two of them find themselves beaten and bloodied by a love that’s led them to do monstrous things in its name, we can’t help but feel the connection that still thrums between them; sharp, vivid, and unquestionable. Theirs is not a relationship that exists quietly and beautifully in the night, a star burning brightly that draws the gaze of many before fading silently and unnoticed, but rather a glacier that as it moves carves out their existence on the face of humanity, an indelible reminder that they lived and loved and left their mark on the world itself.

Though Karou and Akiva’s story in Days and Blood and Starlight is no doubt a dark one, Ms. Taylor provides a supportive hand in the form of Zuze and Mik to pull our heads above water just as we begin sink. Their antics and delightful banter shock many a laugh out of us, renewing our strength just as the weight of death and betrayal begins to weaken our knees, a balm to the incessant sting and prolonged ache resulting from this five hundred page emotional assault. We’re left with the tiniest sliver of hope in the concluding pages, something we latch onto with brutal strength, and we protect it with everything we are as we prepare for the next installment.

Rating: 5/5

Review: The Daughter of Smoke and Bone

DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE
Laini Taylor
Paranormal Young Adult
432 pages
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Available TODAY
Received from publisher for review

THE STORY
Most people think Karou is just the funky girl with blue hair and the crazy imagination. They gather around her sketchbook in their art class in Prague, fawning over her realistic drawings of monstrous creatures and listen riveted as she tells them stories of those creatures' lives. They all think she's just being Karou, but what they don't know is that every word she tells them, and every drawing she shows them, is very true and very real.

Karou knows her life working for Brimstone–the horned creature who raised her and loved her as his own–is unusual, one that has her collecting teeth on his behalf from all over the world for reasons he will never tell her. Her strange world begins to become even more interesting when black hand prints begin to appear on Brimstone's portals all over the world, seared into the metal and wood as a brand.

Accompanying the hand prints are rumors of beautiful and terrifying winged beings seen leaving the scene of each marking. When Karou finds herself face to face with one such being, she feels something she never knew she was missing click into place despite the stunning young man's determination to see her dead. Soon, the reason for the markings on the doors becomes apparent, and Karou finds herself alone with no one to help her figure out what's happened save for the angel Akiva, the young man and possible enemy with the key to her past, her future, and her heart.

MY THOUGHTS
Dark and dazzling, The Daughter of Smoke and Bone reaches out and yanks us into its world from page one as we glory in the refreshing beauty of such an unique tale. Ms. Taylor has a way of writing that resonates on a soul-deep level, so that even should the feeling being described be foreign to us it still seeps beneath our skin with the comforting familiarity of an old friend recently returned and sorely missed. Her descriptions are vivid but never is she overly verbose or flowery, instead reading her words is like having lived our entire lives as a blind person only to suddenly find an individual capable of describing color to us in such lush detail that they at long last grant us the ability to truly see beyond mere imaginings. Her world is incandescent light and smoldering dark, reality and fantasy, and epic love and tragic loss all wrapped up in a story not soon forgotten.

Karou is a quirky protagonist who instantly earns our loyalty and solidarity as she humorously deals with her cheating ex-boyfriend, Ms. Taylor beautifully introducing us to her world with very human emotions before whisking us into its more whimsically sinister side. Like Karou, we don’t fully understand her relationship to surrogate father Brimstone and his team of unique misfits, and so we slowly get to learn and question the realities of her existence along with her, thus making our investment in her life all the deeper. She and best friend Zuzana have us in stitches with their antics, but the bitter tang of all we don’t know is a prominent taste we can’t swallow away–nor do we wish to–as bits and pieces of past, present, and future begin to fall around us in a torrent of possibility, just waiting for us to pluck them from the ferocious downpour and fit them together in our minds.

The way events unfold is truly brilliant, Ms. Taylor baiting us with little clues that allow us to unravel minor mysteries ourselves before expertly weaving the individual threads together to create a pattern so stunningly complex and yet gloriously simple that we sit in shocked silence at the end. To a star-crossed romance so much more is added, elevating Karou and Akiva’s story to one that cannot be accurately categorized, the richness of it too great to dilute with easily understood definitions. Their love is theirs alone, comparable to no other and haunting in its unusualness, and we are left at the last page with a gaping hole in our hearts we wish a happy ending would fill. We take comfort in the knowledge that this story is just beginning though, and while the existing hole is sure to get wider before it's repaired, we still hold out hope for the love that rivals many of the most famous fictional romances to come before it.

Rating: 5/5