Review: Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor

Rereading the first two books in this series has been a very weird experience. I have such incredibly fond memories of my first read of these books. Though truly I remembered nothing of the last 100 pages of this book, though I hate to have read it because I gave this book five stars in 2015. This seems bananas because it took me eight months to read it; I am sure it was not a sustained eight months. Likely I read a chunk, put it down, picked it back up eight months later, and finished. But I have zero clue how that translated to a five-star experience, but I’ll just have to trust that little me did seriously enjoy that experience.

Current me has no idea how to feel about this book. It did work on my emotions at some times, and I genuinely enjoyed the writing at times, but overall I just kind of dreaded actually having to read this book; if it weren’t for audiobooks, I probably wouldn’t have.

I think my biggest issue with this book is that I truly do not understand Karou. I wanted more from her thought process, more character development. She does have an arc in this book; she goes from downtrodden and guilt-ridden to gaining back her confidence. But her personality is just protective; I wanted to see more of her grappling with the ways her two lives impacted her, to see any character flaws, to see something that’s made her feel real while I was reading. This is obviously highly subjective (as all reviews are), but I really saw Karou’s personality as incredibly blank. I want to feel that the main character has a rich inner life, has nuanced motivations, has flaws. And mostly, I just knew that Karou felt guilty due to the events of book one, and that guilt propelled her actions until she reverts back to protective. How interesting would it have been to see her be selfish? Or really anything other than helpless or analytical and competent. I did like the few times we got to see Karou realize she was in danger, the times that we saw her engaging in the politics of her situation. But I wanted so much more of that. I’ll say it again; I just don’t think I understand who Karou is. But she seems to not be confused about that; it would have also been fascinating to see her at war with herself about her two lives!

The plot is action-packed, violent, and full of incredibly high stakes. I weirdly cared the most about (or was the most interested in) the characters who only had a little bit of page time to show us what was happening in the world outside our main characters. I love a long book, but I felt every page of this book. A lot does happen, so that feels sort of unfair, Taylor does handle the constant build of tension very well, but at times I just felt more overwhelmed than interested.

I think the star crossed lovers aspect of the series isn’t working for me because I really don’t understand why they love each other except that it lets the story be built on star crossed lovers? The instalove was rampant in book one, and the two spend so little time together in this book you don’t get the opportunity to excuse that and see why they love each other. I do like that Akiva is shown taking steps to follow through with his new life philosophy, but it also is wild that we are to accept grief as a good enough reason for him to have thrown it away, and a mere few days of new love as a good enough reason for him to have embraced it again. Most of his actions don’t inherently seem tied to who he became after Madrigal. I guess the clout he gained within the ranks helped, but it seemed like he was respected intensely before as well. It just seems like he only waited because the plot needed him to wait. He clearly didn’t expect any Chimera allyship at this point; I just don’t think this moral justification really works for me currently.

Thiago is terrible, and at times, he is an excellent villain. There is a scene she Karou questions his motivations, which made me confront the idea that his actions seemed evil to be evil and not goal-oriented. I just am not sure that I could fully accept that he truly does not want to survive as a person or as a people. And that so many supported that when it was fully laid out as wanting to inflict pain even if it wasn’t going to allow a win. It just seemed weird. He can be fully an evil, terrible person who we all hate and still be trying to achieve winning this unwinnable war.

I clearly have a lot of emotions around this book, mostly frustration. I wanted to love it so badly, and there were parts I did enjoy, but I really had to absolutely slog through so much of this book. I gave this book 5 stars originally and would probably give this experience 2 or 3. Either way, I am going to stick with what I did for book one and average the ratings to get my Goodreads and The StoryGraph rating, something I am typically against for reasons laid out in that review. But I am still a firm believer in rounding up, so this book gets a 4 with either rating.