Title: Days of Blood & Starlight
Author: Laini Taylor
Publisher: Little Brown & Co
Rating: worthy
Days of Blood & Starlight starts out with Zuzana resentfully dropping a balloon filled with perfume and sodium bicarbonate onto the puffed-up head of Kaz, who is milking every ounce he can from Karou's fame. He was lucky. Zuze had wanted it to be urine, but Mik wouldn’t cooperate.
Sadly, we don’t remain with Zuze, which is a mistake on Taylor's part, because she's the best thing going for this novel so far. Instead, we move to the whiny-assed Akiva, agonizing boringly over how much he's lost, and here the novel is nothing but depressing. For some unexplained reason, he believes that Karou is dead (as does Zuzana, for that matter, but at least she doesn’t squeal like a stick piglet like Akiva does).
He returns to heaven (aka Eretz, as in Eretz Israel) which is exactly like medieval Earth and wherein the so-called angels have pretty much concluded their Nazi extermination plan with the chimera. Akiva meets with Hazael and Liraz, who fight him but don’t kill him (!), and then they welcome him (but not with open arms) back into the military. Why they still need a military if indeed the chimera are wiped out, is a mystery, but they discover that someone is very effectively killing angels. Still.
Zuze, meanwhile is sending hilarious emails to Karou and receiving no response until Mik calls her attention to a news item concerning a theft at the Field Museum in Chicago - an excellent museum which has nothing whatsoever to do with preserving the meadows of antiquity.... The thief is stealing teeth. And it’s a girl. A teeth thief. Relief! Finally Zuze gets an email from Karou quoting Monty Python ("I'm not dead yet!", "I feel happy!"), which I found hilarious. At last, in chapter 13 yet, we get back to Karou.
She evidently found Thiago, the chimera leader, still alive in the shattered ruins of Loramendi, and they now lived, she upstairs from him, in an apartment block somewhere; somewhere on Earth, where Karou now resurrects chimera using the teeth she steals. So after Karou's been ranting on about how godawful Akiva is, and how much she detests him, Taylor makes a huge mistake in giving us a flashback to the time right before Karou (in her Madrigal form) and Akiva were captured. Taking us from Karou's revulsion and rejection of Akiva for his betrayal - whereby she let him live but he destroyed her people - to a time when she was hopelessly (quite literally hopelessly) in love with him, was foolish move. It’s too much of a contradiction, of a gut-wrench, of a discontinuous illogical jump, to accept. It threw me right out of my suspension of disbelief.
It's especially apropos a little later in the story where he returns the soul of Issa, and Karou fails to kill him despite all she's vowed, despite all he's done to wipe out her people and to kill Brimstone, who she had thought of as her father. I was in fear of this relationship and now I'm further in fear of it, because it's way too much of a trope. if she goes back to Akiva after all that's gone on, I will feel that Taylor has betrayed us all.
While we’re on the topic of whining and disbelief, let me say a few words about teeth, and about angel weaponry! I was able to accept that the variety of fresh teeth were needed in vol 1, because a variety of chimera were needed, as was fresh DNA (I assumed!) although I never understood even remotely why they were created in the variations they were. Surely if they were at war, especially for so long a period, then the chimera which were created needed to be exclusively smart, strong, tough, agile, and fierce, but we didn’t see this. That made little sense to me, but I was willing to let it go for the quality of the story in general. Having said that, there was no room for a body type like Madrigal, so how did she ever become what she was? And what was she before? Was she simply vastly old, and had always been that way? We haven’t learned anything of this so far.
Next, the weapons they use. If they're at war and are fighting so ferociously, each side intent upon the complete destruction of the other, then why the medieval weapons? Seriously, how improbable is it that they use swords when they could perfectly well use a machine gun? In the human world, weaponry advanced at a rapid rate, even historically. As soon as a new weapon was discovered or invented, it spread with lightening speed, and people improved on it rapidly. The rate of weapons development accelerated geometrically with the size of the conflict. World War 1 brought tanks and advances in rapid-fire weapons. It brought chemical weapons. World War 2 saw all of these weapons advance, and it brought massive aerial warfare and the nuclear bomb. Yet these angels and chimera are stuck in the middle ages, and they've been glued there for centuries, if not for millennia. It makes no sense except as a trope for stories of angels and demons which of course brings you right out of the suspension of disbelief.
Now a word about those teeth! Like I mentioned, I’d assumed that reasonably fresh teeth were needed (why, when one cell would contain the requisite DNA?!), but vol 2 shows that's not the case, since Karou is working with museum specimens, so then why all the rigmarole of acquiring the teeth in the way they were in vol 1? Why did Brimstone not simply use a wish or magic, to bring him all the teeth from every grave across the world, including the literal billions of teeth from fossils? Talk of weapons of mass destruction! What kind of chimera could he have created using dinosaur teeth for goodness sakes?! If he'd had that many teeth and had some assistance, he could have created sufficient chimera to completely overwhelm the so-called angels!
Okay, bitch mode off, on with the tale! So Karou resurrects Issa without any authority from the White Wolf (whom Karou know knows plans to betray her). She gets away with this by telling him that now her production rate for new Chimera will double, and it does. Issa helps, as does Zuzana, who has shown up with Mik on spec. Mik also helps, so the White Wolf's plan to train his bitch called Ten - which wouldn't have worked anyway, is now scuppered, as is his plan to use Ten to replace Karou and thereby be rid of her. So he comes up with a new plan, which is that he can use Zuze and Mik as leverage against Karou, to keep her tightly under his control, but she vows she will not let this happen. But Zuze and Mik have made such a favorable impression on the chimera that my guess is that they won't have any truck with any plan which might bring harm to the two humans.
Karou also makes an ally of the only other Kirin in the encampment, and he vows to help her. Meanwhile, on the other side, Akiva has won over Hazael and Liraz to his side, but they are called into the emperors palace - which is probably a trap for Akiva (good!). However, Akiva is already aware of this possibility and he has decided he wants to kill Joram anyway, so this but might be interesting. Hazael and Liraz want the same thing, and that's why they go with him. But with Taylor juxtaposing Liraz's internal feelings of hopelessness against the story of Karou's relationship with her fellow Kirin, I'm guessing that Liraz is going to be paired off with him before this trilogy is over. OTOH, you know how lousy my guesses are, if you've been following my blog!
So it's time to wrap this up. Finally Akiva, at the mention of his mother's name, Festival, feels some weird calming power overtake him, and he comes through and does something good: he stabs his father who was ordering him to go alone to meet the Stelians - another angelic race who are as distant as they are mysterious. Every envoy so far sent to them has disappeared without a trace. Joram dies, Jael escapes to become Angelic Villain 2.0. Akiva finds he has some weird magical power which completely destroys Joram's palace, but Hazael dies. Akiva and Liraz escape.
Karou has less success in confronting Thiago. He merely turns around her revelation that there are scores upon scores of chimera waiting to be resurrected in the catacombs under Loramendi, and steals her fire. Later he kills her only three supporters, and when he demands that everyone leave himself and Karou there alone, he tries to rape her, but Karou, using only the little knife in her boot, slays him. Then she resurrects his body but with her friend Ziri the Kirin's soul. How the hell he escaped from the party of six who were going to kill him during their mission with him is really completely glossed over. Thiago's buddy Ten is also killed and her body resurrected with the soul of one of Karou's allies, so now they control the chimera without anyone knowing!
When Akiva and Liraz show up begging Karou to resurrect Hazael, they bring the body but no thurible containing his soul, so she can do nothing to help them. The two of them burn Hazael's body and they depart, intent upon closing the last two portals between the two worlds, but Jael and his five thousand Dominion angels have already come through them, and the Earthlings believe they're angels from heaven!
So we end up with an uneasy truce between the two warring sides, the chimera on the one side, and the "Misbegottens" - angels who are loyal to Akiva - as they realize they have an enemy which worse than either of them: a greater threat than either of them, to face down.
I'm rating this one as worthy because it was a good read, although it became a bit too melodramatic at the end with one switcheroo after another. It reminded me of the hilarious comedy movie Soapdish, but that one was intentionally funny. I don't think Taylor was planning on having me laugh at these switches and then become annoyed with them. But that wasn't the worst part, The worst part was seeing Karou, who was without question a super-cool and kick-ass female protagonist descend from her pedestal to become pedestrian in the sequel. Her anguishing, and her dichotomic feelings about Akiva were truly tiresome.
It's obvious (at least it seems obvious to me - but then if you've read my reviews you'll know how sucky my prognostications are) that Taylor is going to pair them off at the end of vol 3, so there goes the drama. I'll be truly impressed if she doesn't, but it's YA, after all, so why would I even imagine something like that could happen? I'll probably have to rate vol 3 as warty if it descends to those levels, but let's wait and see!
