WISHFUL THINKING

I heart the Curse Workers series by Holly Black.  Who wouldn't? Cassel Sharpe, the male protagonist, is an awesome character full of vulnerabilities and with a facade of bad-boy badassery, there is magic and lots of it, and then there are cigarillo smoking Godfather type men in suits and carrying guns. Come on.  Curses and con. Magic and the mob.  This series is just irresistible. There are different covers for the Curse Workers series- the publishers are really ripping through those alternate covers- and in my opinion, the newest batch is the best yet. (Although the first batch captures the mafia look much better) Here's what I call the "first batch": Then there are these, the UK covers, which look sort of Gaiman-ish and awesome (Black Heart reminds me of Rowling's illustration in Tales of Beedle the Bard for The Warlock's Hairy Heart) but had me thinking of fairy tales the first time I saw them:             ...

  T he Daughter of Smoke and Bone might be the best written paranormal romance I've read in a while. Let me put it like this: Laini Taylor's prose is magical. She can bring to life the twisting, tangled streets of Prague or the noisy hot squares of Morocco with about as much ease as most YA authors portray American high schools. To better get this review done, let me break it into segments. 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...