Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a fantasy novel by the American writer Laini Taylor, published in September 2011. It is the first book of a trilogy.

Karou is seventeen and studies art in Prague, and the only family she has are chimaera, creatures with the attributes of different animals and humans, whom she draws in her sketchbook. They live apart from the human city and they trade in teeth: Karou is sent out to collect them, and in return she is granted wishes. She does not know what the teeth are eventually used for, and the rules she has been given about them, that baby teeth are not acceptable and that the teeth must not be rotting, are things nobody has explained to her. While she is on one of these errands she meets a seraph named Akiva, who finds something familiar in her. The novel follows Karou as she tries to establish what she is and where she came from, moving between present-day Europe and a past she has no memory of.

Taylor writes fantasy built on the imagery of myth rather than on an invented medieval world, and this book keeps its chimaera and seraphim at the edge of a modern city. The second book in the trilogy, Days of Blood and Starlight, followed in November 2012.