Strange the Dreamer

Epic fantasy can be a hard sell for me, but Laini Taylor’s intricate worldbuilding sweeps me off my feet. There’s a love story at the center of this duology, characters from different and equally tragic worlds, but there’s also lots of magic: moths who carry dreams, orphaned half-gods, and floating palaces of magic metal. Oh, and there’s a robust cast of ghosts. Need I say more?

Lazlo Strange is a war orphan and junior librarian obsessed with the mythic lost city of Weep, a land of blue-skinned gods that was cut off from the rest of the world by the heroic Godslayer. But there seems to be more to the city of Weep as well as the people that remain. Utterly unique Laini Taylor crafts a world in glorious prose filled with subtleties and foreshadowing as she explores the aftermath of colonisation and freedom, magi, gods, and monsters, and what happens to those that fall through the cracks.

I think it’s actually this book’s sequel, Muse of Nightmares, that really captured me. While I love the magical world Laini Taylor creates and her hero, the dreamer Lazlo Strange, from the first book I really fell in love with this story when we begin to enter actual dreams. I think the idea of meeting your soulmate in a dream is a truly romantic notion and something my younger self might have believed possible.