The Days of Blood and Starlight is the sequel to the bestselling Daughter of Smoke and Bone. If you haven’t read Daughter of Smoke and Bone don’t read this review. While it contains no spoilers for Days of Blood and Starlight it will ruin some of the fun of Daughter of Smoke and Bone. Which is really fun and not something you want ruined.
Moving on.
Days of Blood and Starlight finds Akiva back with the Angels feeling wretched about his role in the total destruction of the chimaera. Karou is hiding out with the few remaining chimaera having formed a tentative truce with Thiago to resurect those chimaera whose souls have been saved, building them powerful and terrible monster bodies so they can wreak whatever revenge they can upon the Angels.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone was a delightful fantasy that unfolded in a delicate manner where the magic trickled into the story in a slow and satisfying way. Much of the dialogue was so quick and clever it would make you laugh while also feeling jealous in the knowledge that you would never be half so clever. The developing romance between Akiva and Karou felt tangible and also magical. It was light.
I can’t say that Days of Blood and Starlight is a bad book. It isn’t. It’s well written combining multiple compelling story-arcs across different worlds and characters. But all of the delightful magic and clever dialogue is gone. The first half of this book feels more like a dirge where the messages of “war is bad” and “violence doesn’t solve anything” just gets hammered repeatedly. It suffers from the classic middle book syndrome where little is happening through much of the story. Both protagonists are “stuck” in their current and unpleasant circumstances and neither are making any forward progress.
Until the last third where things pick up in a way that frankly salvages the dirge of the first two thirds. Mostly.
I hate to say anything negative about Laini Taylor. I love her, the pink hair, the fairies, the whole thing. I’ll be pre-ordering the final book in this series. If compared to many other authors I would rank this book a 4. But on the Laini Taylor scale of book quality it, sadly, is a 3.
Cannonball Read V 
I agree! Daughter of Smoke and Bone was amazing. I was so disappointed in this book. I may even say it was actually boring. Perhaps it had too much to live up to after the first. I am not sure that I will read the third book. I’ll see how good the sample is!
Thank you for saying so! Everybody on Amazon is giving it GLOWING reviews and I was left feeling like the 1 person in the universe who found it sort of dull. Apparently it’s not just me. It’s me and you 🙂
Okay, on this one… I’m not reading this review because I haven’t read book 1 and you both seem to love Daughter of Smoke and Bone. I’m happy to start a new series. While I have a long way to go on Dune, I’m almost done with The Inheritance Cycle, which I happen to love. I know not everyone loves it, but I love it so much, but I bought the box set to see on my shelf while I read the kindle copy, and I even finally bought myself a 10″ high pewter dragon statue with blue (Saphira) “gems”. I’ve wanted a dragon statue since probably junior high and was always too embarrassed to get one. Well, I’ve decided that I am now old enough to embrace my inner dragon-lover and theme-out my decor with dragons all around!! (Not sure what my husband might think of that…) I finally saw an episode of Game of Thrones with the baby dragons and I LOVE them!! To follow on the “stuck romance” theme of several books reviewed here, yeah, Eragon and Arya need to move it forward a little more enticingly.