Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

Genre:  YA Paranormal Fantasy

Daughter of Smoke and Bone Series, Book 1

Laini Taylor's website

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Description (taken from Laini Taylor's website):

Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

Yes, I'm one of those people who hasn't picked up this series yet.  But I have an advantage: I don't have to wait a year for the next one to come out.  In fact, the trilogy has already been released and I have no waiting to be had...

Karou is a seventeen-year-old going to an art school in Prague.  She lives a fairly normal life until Broomstone routinely comes a-knocking.  Using certain doorways, Karou is able to enter Broomstone's world, it's more like an office, where he deals in wishes and teeth.  Karou has always wondered what those teeth are used for and how she ended up as his ward.  But when handprints show up and a mysterious creature attacks her, she realizes there's more to this other world than she ever thought possible.  And she's somehow involved in all of it.

In my opinion, this book is the perfect starter to a series.    It starts with the question of who am I?  And we get to follow an interesting character as she tries to figure all of this out.  And the world slowly gets introduced with flashbacks of another world's past.  And as we learn more, we start to see this other world mesh together with ours, and we watch Karou realize it all.  And within this story is an epic romance, an epic war, and an epic choice.  And once it's all revealed, everything ends.  And it's up to the reader to figure out if they want to know what happens next (any one who doesn't want to know has lost their mind).

While I'm definitely one of the latecomers to this series, I'm very happy that I have the whole series at my disposal to read right away.  Because I have a feeling this story is about to get addicting...