Fans of the “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” trilogy, the day that you have been waiting for has finally arrived: The final book, “Dreams of Gods and Monsters,” has hit the shelves, and to celebrate, MTV News chatted with Laini Taylor, compiling six essential facts to know about the author before diving in.
“Daughter of Smoke and Bone” tells the tale of Karou, a blue-haired teen who was raised by a passel of wish-granting Chimeras until a host of mysterious angels bent on war fractures her magic-soaked life — the host of angels, naturally, includes a handsome winged one named Akiva.
The final book promises to bring some kind of conclusion to the war between angels and beasts — notice I didn’t say good and evil.
I know you’re probably itching to crack the spine, but why not delay your gratification just a bit and savor those pages by reading up on Laini Taylor before. Be that cat, kids.
1. She Had To Learn To Let Go
“I had been knocking my head against a wall with this book I had been trying to write that refused to come alive and it was no fun at all. So one day I sort of — with very low morale — said, ‘I’m just going to write something for fun.’ I just need to have a fun day and I had no plan and this thing was sort of magic waiting to happen. This character just appeared, this blue-haired teenage girl, and she’s having this good-natured argument with her father who turned out to not be human. There were lots of sort of interesting things that happened and I wrote all day. So fun.”
2. She Knows Her Mythology
“A few years ago when I was writing my first couple of books — which were for younger readers — I did read a lot more mythology and folklore then. I would go and find weird, obscure folklore books and dictionaries and encyclopedias of monsters around the world and things like that — and just the weirdest stuff people believed over time, over the centuries in the world. And you could never make all that stuff up. So it was a really great source that was in my brain from having done that reading earlier and just loving those kinds of stories all my life.”
3. She’s Not About Black And White
“It was fun to make scenes about terrifying angels and sympathetic monsters and then just gradually the characters morph [so] you see that there really is no good or evil. There are just people. They all have their own point of view. It’s a really important thing as a writer that everybody’s actions speak for themselves. They all have their own emotions and it’s all understandable and reasonable from their point of view. To be able to see that is the most important [step] to achieve resolutions for conflict.”
4. She Just Went For It With Her Hair
“I dyed my hair [pink] when my first book was coming out in 2007. There was no connection to hair color in that book. After years of not spending money on my hair I’m certainly making up for it now.”
5. She Hopes YA Keeps Hitting The Screen
“[Young adult] books have to grab a reader and hold on. It has to be very tight. And so it’s great for a writer to learn how to constantly be holding your reader’s attention and to create a really tight story. And that goes well [when translating books] to film. So for so many reasons, I hope [YA adaptations] continue to happen.”
6. ‘Dreams Of Gods And Monsters’ Will Make Us Cry
“Well, I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I will say a reader just told me on Twitter that she cried at the end. So I won’t say whether they were happy tears or not. I’ll just leave it at that.”
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