Review: Daughter of Smoke & Bone (Daughter of Smoke & Bone Trilogy #1) - Laini Taylor

This book was fantastic. The world building was amazing. I loved that it was set in Prague because I was already there and it's a perfect setting for fantasy books. I also really liked that it was urban fantasy and high fantasy in one. Because of the setting in the human world you could really put yourself into Karou. Most of the time she was just a normal girl going to school and hanging out with her best friend. But actually she came from another world and this world was very well built. I could imagine the world in my head in every detail.
The mysteries around Karou's life and all the other things in "Elsewhere" were kind of frustrating in the beginning and I could really emphasize with Karou for wanting to find out more about her life and where she came from. But really all this mysteries made this story so gripping and I could never have predicted how all the mysteries were cleared up.
I liked the characters. Karou was the kind of girl I always wanted to be: funny, self-conscious, strong and good at drawing ;). Also Akiva was a great main male character and the mystery around him made him even more compelling. And Zuzana was the kind of girl you want as your best friend because she was fierce and loyal. I wished that we learn more about Karou's "family" because with all the confusing names in this book it was kind of hard to keep track and I would have liked to get to know them better.
I really liked the flashbacks especially the ones about Karou's childhood and I would have liked to have more of them to understand her relationship to her so-called "family" more and what role each of them had in her life but the ones we had were mysterious and enlightening at the same time and that was very interesting.
The love story or actually love STORIES were epic. It was just this wonderful meant-to-be, world-shifting, forbidden love that you want to read about.
And all of this was described so beautiful and magnificently that you couldn't help yourself and had to fall in love with this book. I really liked the metaphors in this book. They made the writing very poetical. When we are first introduced to the different perspectives it was a little bit confusing - I think - because in the beginning it was just one point of view. But after getting into it I could see why the different perspectives were important and they made the story so much richer. The end was discouraging and heartbreaking but also a little bit hopeful and definitely motivating to read on with the series and discover what will happen in the next two books.
By the way I read this book also for the popsugar reading challenge 2016 for a book set in Europe because it is mainly set in Prague.