Just as she did in her story collection, “Lips Touch: Three Times,” Taylor - who, like her protagonist, is an artist with an unnatural hair color, bright pink - tackles themes of longing and self-actualization with a sympathetic understanding of her audience. But she realizes the wishes he grants her are worth her troubles, allowing Karou to make her ex-boyfriend itch in unmentionable places, eradicate her own pimples and cause a rival’s eyebrows to grow unattractively bushy.
What Karou doesn’t know is why Brimstone, a stern, horned monster with the golden eyes of a crocodile who is a kind of father figure to her, needs the teeth. When Karou sees a crow with bat wings, she knows it is summoning her for yet another trip to collect animal and human teeth. They are real chimeras, demons, and they are the closest thing she has to family.
The monsters Karou draws - one woman who is serpent from the waist down, another with human eyes but a parrot’s beak - are not of her imagination.
That’s not the only thing setting her apart from her fellow students at the Art Lyceum of Bohemia in Prague. Starting with 17-year-old Karou, who is far from a typical teenager, with hair that grows in a bright ultramarine, no rebellious dye required. Taylor has taken elements of mythology, religion and her own imagination and pasted them into a believably fantastical collage. In this case, the story that follows, by Laini Taylor, a 2009 National Book Award finalist (“Lips Touch: Three Times”), is a breath-catching romantic fantasy about destiny, hope and the search for one’s true self that doesn’t let readers down. And it may be a cliché, but it’s not necessarily an unwelcome one. It’s a phrase that inevitably evokes fairy tales and leather-bound classics about epic adventures, setting up the anticipation that readers will discover worlds filled with magic. Any book that opens with “Once upon a time” is inviting high expectations.
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