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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Re-read after maybe six years.
Rating: 4/5
Pages: 448
Started: 22 January 2023
Finished: 23 January 2023
Summary:
To an outsider--her ex-boyfriend, for example--Karou is a manic pixie dream girl: vibrant blue hair, art school in Prague, constant disappearances without telling anyone where she's going or when she'll be back. But Karou's disappearances aren't unpredictable; she comes when called. She was raised by Brimstone, a part-animal, part-human creature from another world, and his assistants. Each night after school Karou walks through a door and is transported to Brimstone's workshop, where she is given an assignment to travel elsewhere to collect teeth--the key to Brimstone's resurrection magic.
One day, while on an assignment, Karou is attacked by an angel. Then, a few days later, she finds the door to Brimstone's workshop sealed, marked with a charred handprint. Enraged and afraid for her family, Karou begins to look further into the angel and his motivations. But rather than finding Brimstone, Karou instead stumbles onto a link to her past.
Thoughts:
This book annihilated my reading slump. Recently my reading has been slow and a bit listless, but I tore through this book. The last time I read it, I enjoyed but I think I was too young to get the full effect. This time, I was intimately aware of how this book was a gorgeous paradigm of 2010s YA fantasy. Karou was relatively basic and imprintable, but was also clever and interesting and motivated and made good choices. The romantic interest was really well done without being overdone, I liked the side characters, and the world-building was immersive without being overwhelming.
But this book was also super unique in a few interesting ways. First, it was weirdly genre-defying. On paper, I would probably categorize it as Urban Fantasy, but it had elements of science fiction, mythology (angels, demons, God) and high fantasy. It was also both decidedly YA and weirdly older; the romance was almost closer to NA. The weirdest part of this book was the pacing. Not that it was bad--I thought it was very interesting, and definitely engrossing--but the fact that there was an 80 page flashback near the end of the book was absolutely wild, and a little disorienting. But I'm a sucker for a love-story-throughout-several-lives trope, so I made it work.
As expected with a 2010s books, there was an element of fatphobia to the book that made me uncomfortable. There were few comments about skinniness and conventional attractiveness being extremely prized, as well as a few unnecessary comments about dieting.
Yet overall, this book was amazing. I loved the characters, the settings, the twists of the plot. The writing was hilarious, and the use of myths and imagery were incredible--I especially loved the description of the fallen angels, and the differences between angels and Chimera and humans. I very much look forward to finishing this series in the next few weeks.