Dreams of Gods and Monsters

Sometimes writing reviews are much harder than reading. Sometimes you have to figure out how to write a review for a book that you just hated, or a book that you loved so much that it’s hard to see past your own enjoyment to write something remotely intelligible. Other times, you’re stumped because the book hit you in a strange place and it just wasn’t what you were expecting. All three books in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone Sage fall into the category of “I have no idea what to say about this, but I liked it.” In fact, back when I read the first two books in this series during my year off from the cannonball last year, I remember breathing a sigh of relief that I didn’t need to write a review. Just summing up the plot without making the story sound incredibly silly is borderline impossible. And now, all of my 2014 reviews have been held up by the third book in the series, one that I immensely enjoyed but that I can’t seem to find the words to explain what exactly I liked. It’s not that the series said anything deep or sophisticated about the world we all live in, or that the characters were so unique that I just couldn’t help but fall in love. There were, in fact, aspects to the whole series that are familiar from other young adult fantasy lit. Star-crossed lovers. Civil war. Entrenched opposite parties. But something was just so different about this one. Something about the imagination of the author was just so different and so compelling that I really fell in love with this series. More…